ISDA 2011 Special session on "Ontologies: from theory to applications"

A special session dedicated to "Ontologies: from theory to applications" will be celebrated in the 11th International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications (ISDA 2011), to be held at Córdoba (Spain) on November 22-24, 2011.

Description

The term Ontology comes from Philosophy, which defines it as the study of part-of relationships and entity dependencies. Ontology as a science analyzes the features of possible things, and the categories in which they can be included. In the Knowledge Engineering research area, there is now a consensus of opinion that an ontology is a rigorous and exhaustive conceptual schema focused on a certain domain, represented in a logic-based language, and designed to facilitate information communication and reuse among different computational systems and organizations.

In the last decade, ontologies have been raised to become one of the most used formalisms for the representation of knowledge in modern Intelligent Systems, and have been proposed for the support of metadata management in the Semantic Web. The current standard language for ontology representation is OWL 2, which has strong underpinnings in Description Logics (DLs), a family of logics to represent structured knowledge. Currently, research on ontologies is focused on:

• Studying the theoretical foundations of ontologies, their limitations, and prospective extensions, with a particular focus on their semantics, reasoning procedures, and complexity.
• Developing knowledge management frameworks to support ontology-based systems: representation languages, inference engines, software tools, etc.
• Implementing practical applications that rely on them.

The objective of this special session is to bring together international researchers interested in the theoretical and practical aspects of ontologies, and to encourage discussions aimed to bring the gap between fundamental and applied research. The session is open to contributions generated by researchers from different areas in order to promote interdisciplinary collaborations and cross-fertilization. It will also serve as a forum to exchange research experiences and foster future collaboration between the groups.

Topics

Theory. Fundamentals of ontology-based knowledge representations and their relation with other formalisms, including:

• Representation Languages: OWL 2, RDF(S), etc.
• Query Languages
• Rules & Rule Languages
• Reasoning: Algorithms, Complexity and Tools
• Contextualization, Summarization and Ranking
• Uncertainty and Imprecision in Ontologies
• Data Visualization
• Best Practices and Modeling Patterns
• Relational Models and Ontologies
• Linked Data, Web 2.0 and Folksonomies
• Ontology Learning

Technologies. General technologies and tools aimed at supporting the development of ontology-based intelligent systems, including:

• Ontology-based Frameworks and Platforms
• Multi-Agent Systems and Ontologies
• Semantic Web Services
• Large Systems Performance and Scalability
• APIs, Plug-ins and Development Tools
• Mash-ups and Semantically-Enriched Applications
• Multilingual Ontologies and Localization

Applications: Experiences in the development and use of ontologies in specific application domains, including:

• Domain-Specific Ontologies: Environmental, Medical, Legal, etc.
• Ontology-based Systems in:
  • Ambient Intelligence
  • Health Care
  • Environment
  • Natural Language Processing & Text Processing
  • Information Fusion
  • etc.

Submission

The paper submission deadline is June 15, 2011. The notification of paper acceptance is July 28, 2011. See Important dates for more information.

All papers are to be submitted electronically through the ISDA 2011 website. Please use the track "SS25 - Ontologies: From Theory to Applications" when submitting your papers. Authors should carefully follow the instructions given there.

Submitted papers will be peer reviewed by at least two anonymous reviewers.

Accepted papers

• C. Martinez-Cruz, I. Blanco, M. A. Vila. An Ontology to represent Queries in Fuzzy Relational Databases
• J. Iglesias, J. Lehmann. Towards Integrating Fuzzy Logic Capabilities into an Ontology-based Inductive Logic Programming Framework
• F. Bobillo, U. Straccia. Fuzzy Ontologies and Fuzzy Integrals
• M. A. Serrano, J. Gómez-Romero, M. A. Patricio, J. García, J. M. Molina. Topological properties in ontology-based applications

Organizers

• Fernando Bobillo, University of Zaragoza, Spain
• Juan Gómez-Romero, University Carlos III, Madrid, Spain