International Conferences
On Conceptual Structures

The International Conferences on Conceptual Structures (ICCS) have been held annually in Europe, Australia, and North America since 1993. Their focus is on the formal analysis and representation of conceptual knowledge with applications to artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, and related areas of computer science.

The ICCS conferences evolved from a series of seven annual workshops on conceptual graphs, starting with an informal gathering hosted by John Sowa in 1986. For the seventh CG workshop in 1992, the informal workshop notes were upgraded to reviewed and edited proceedings published in the Springer-Verlag series of Lecture notes in Artificial Intelligence.

In 1993, Bernard Moulin and Guy Mineau upgraded the workshops to more formally organized conferences. The program committee also decided to broaden the scope to include related methods of knowledge representation and their applications to artificial intelligence and natural language semantics. During the 1990s, the CG core group was joined by a group doing research on formal concept analysis, based on the work of Rudolf Wille, Bernhard Ganter, and their colleagues. With a variety of invited talks and contributed papers, the ICCS organizers have included related logic-based approaches, such as description logics, situation theory, discourse representation theory, and SNePS.

ICCS Proceedings

Guy W. Mineau, Bernard Moulin, and John F. Sowa, eds. (1993) Conceptual Graphs for Knowledge Representation, Lecture Notes in AI 699, Springer-Verlag, Berlin.

William M. Tepfenhart, Judith P. Dick, and John F. Sowa, eds. (1994) Conceptual Structures: Current Practice, Lecture Notes in AI 835, Springer-Verlag, Berlin.

Gerard Ellis, Robert A. Levinson, William Rich, and John F. Sowa, eds. (1995) Conceptual Structures: Applications, Implementation, and Theory, Lecture Notes in AI 954, Springer-Verlag, Berlin.

Peter W. Eklund, Gerard Ellis, and Graham Mann, eds. (1996) Conceptual Structures: Knowledge Representation as Interlingua, Lecture Notes in AI 1115, Springer-Verlag, Berlin.

Dickson Lukose, Harry Delugach, Mary Keeler, Leroy Searle, and John Sowa, eds. (1997) Conceptual Structures: Fulfilling Peirce's Dream, Lecture Notes in AI 1257, Springer-Verlag, Berlin.

Marie-Laure Mugnier and Michel Chein, eds. (1998) Conceptual Structures: Theory, Tools, and Applications, Lecture Notes in AI 1453, Springer-Verlag, Berlin.

William Tepfenhart and Walling Cyre, eds. (1999) Conceptual Structures: Standards and Practices, Lecture Notes in AI 1640, Springer-Verlag, Berlin.

Bernhard Ganter and Guy W. Mineau, eds. (2000) Conceptual Structures: Logical, Linguistic, and Computational Issues, Lecture Notes in AI 1867, Springer-Verlag, Berlin.

Publications Based on the CG Workshops

T. E. Nagle, J. A. Nagle, L. L. Gerholz, and P. W. Eklund, eds. (1992) Conceptual Structures: Current Research and Practice, Ellis Horwood, New York.

John F. Sowa, ed. (1992) Knowledge-Based Systems, Special Issue on Conceptual Graphs, vol. 5, no. 3, September 1992.

Eileen C. Way, ed. (1992) Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence (JETAI), Special Issue on Conceptual Graphs, vol. 4, no. 2.

Heather D. Pfeiffer and Timothy E. Nagle, eds. (1993) Conceptual Structures: Theory and Implementation, Lecture Notes in AI 754, Springer-Verlag, Berlin.

Related Publications

The following books and journal issues were not published as ICCS proceedings, but they were written by people who actively participated in ICCS conferences and CG workshops and presented related material at one or more of the sessions. The 1984 book by John Sowa was the foundation for the CG workshops, and the 1996 book by Ganter and Wille was the foundation for formal concept analysis.

John F. Sowa (1984) Conceptual Structures: Information Processing in Mind and Machine, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA.

Eileen C. Way (1991) Knowledge Representation and Metaphor, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht.

Jean-François Nogier (1991) Génération automatique de langage et graphes conceptuels, Hermès, Paris.

John F. Sowa, ed. (1991) Principles of Semantic Networks: Explorations in the Representation of Knowledge, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Mateo, CA.

Fritz Lehmann, ed. (1992) Semantic Networks in Artificial Intelligence, Pergamon Press, Oxford.

Hans Robert Hansen, Robert Mühlbacher, and Gustaf Neumann (1992) Begriffsbasierte Integration von Systemanalysemethoden, Physica-Verlag, Heidelberg. Distributed by Springer-Verlag.

Anne-Marie Rassinoux (1994) Extraction et Représentation de la Connaissance tirée de Textes Médicaux, Éditions Systèmes et Information, Geneva.

Martin Schröder (1994) Erwartungsgestützte Analyse medizinischer Befundungstexte: Ein wissensbasiertes Modell zur Sprachverarbeitung, Infix-Verlag, Sankt Augustin.

Michel Chein, ed. (1996) Revue d'Intelligence artificielle, Special Issue on Conceptual Graphs, vol. 10, no. 1.

Bernhard Ganter and Rudolf Wille (1996) Formale Begriffsanalyze: Mathematische Grundlagen, Springer-Verlag, Berlin. Translated as Formal Concept Analysis: Mathematical Foundations, Springer-Verlag, 1999.

John F. Sowa (2000) Knowledge Representation: Logical, Philosophical, and Computational Foundations, Brooks Cole Publishing Co., Pacific Grove, CA.

Gerd Stumme, ed. (2000) Working with Conceptual Structures: Contributions to ICCS'2000, Shaker-Verlag, Aachen.