SYMPOSIUM ON ONTOLOGICAL ENGINEERING
AAAI 1997 Spring Symposium Series
March 24 - 26, 1997
Stanford University, California
The last few years have seen a growing interest in the design, use, and
sharing of ontologies. Work in this area naturally incorporates formal
knowledge representation with practical implemented systems.
Recently, there have been workshops on ontologies at ECAI (August 1996),
IJCAI (August 1995), LaJolla (November 1994), on implemented ontologies at
ECAI in Amsterdam (August 1994), on knowledge sharing and information
interchange at IJCAI in Chambery (August 1993), and the workshop on formal
ontology in Padova, Italy (March 1993).
This symposium will contribute to the continuum of current research, by
focusing on the practical aspects of ontology development and use including
tools, methodologies, and engineering practice. This is a symposium rather
than a mini-conference. We solicit papers (see below), but at the symposium
itself the emphasis will be on sharing experiences with ample time for all
participants to contribute to the discussion.
This symposium will focus on practical experience in the design and
construction of ontologies in a variety of different domains. Domains of
interest include, but are not restricted to, the following:
* Medicine
* Natural Language
* Materials Science and Engineering
* Enterprise Modeling (including process, product, and organization
modeling).
The goals of the symposium will be to achieve greater understanding of the
following issues:
* What are the roles that implemented ontologies play. Do they support
automated reasoning and problem-solving? Are they used as an
interlingua to achieve interoperabilty, reuse, or sharing? Are they
used 'merely' to ensure communication of a shared understanding between
people?
* What methodologies can we use to design and evaluate ontologies? Will
these methodologies differ according to the different intended uses?
* How can tools best provide assistance for the design and implementation
of ontologies?
* To what extent are the ontologies designed in different domains
shareable and reusable? How can we structure ontologies to support
sharing and reuse?
* Do we require a suite of generic ontologies to support the more
domain-specific ones? If so, what are these generic ontologies? How can
they be related to existing standards?
* What are the obstacles to the integration of different ontologies?
* What lessons have people learned from the implementation of their
ontologies?
SUBMISSION INFORMATION
Persons interested in participating should, by October 25, submit either (1)
a technical paper (max. 12 pages, excluding bibliography), (2) a position
paper addressing the issues above, or (3) a title and abstract together with
a request for an extension of the deadline. Submit electronically as
specified on the WWW site listed below, or send three hard-copies of your
submission to the contact address. Authors will be notified of acceptance
via email.
Additional information including final instructions on format and
submissions will be posted at:
http://ksl-web.stanford.edu/projects/htw/sss97/
General information on the AAAI Spring Symposium Series is posted at:
http://www.aaai.org/
Please address correspondence to:
1997 Spring Symposium on Ontological Engineering
Adam Farquhar
Gates Building 2A, MC 9020
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305, USA
Phone: 001-415-723-9770
Fax: 001-415-725-5850
Email: afarquhar@ksl.stanford.edu, gruninger@ie.utoronto.ca
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Adam Farquhar (co-chair, Stanford University, USA)
Michael Gruninger (co-chair, University of Toronto, Canada)
Asuncion Gomez-Perez (Technical University of Madrid, Spain)
Mike Uschold (Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute, Edinburgh, UK)
Paul van der Vet (University of Twente, the Netherlands)
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