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?
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-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
- 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)