Ontologies are seen as the key technology used to describe the semantics of information, overcoming the problem of implicit and hidden knowledge and thus enabling exchange of semantic content. As such, they find a wide application in key growth areas, such as e-Commerce, e-Government, Bioinformatics, Grid computing, and the Semantic Web. The increased demand for large-scale and complex ontologies poses novel challenges on tasks related to ontology engineering and operation. Ontology engineering deals with aspects of design, maintenance and evolution of complex ontologies, with a special attention to theories and tools for structuring ontologies in reusable modules, integration of autonomously developed ontologies, and managing updates of structured ontologies. The operating with ontologies includes the access to ontologies both by human users and by software agents , e.g., for query answering. In such tasks, availability of powerful services for reasoning about ontologies and techniques for supporting ontology modularization is of crucial importance for coping with size and complexity of modern ontologies.

In this context, the aim of the workshop is to create a forum for discussing and exchanging latest advances and practical experiences on reasoning and modularization of ontologies, their usefulness for various ontology engineering and operating tasks, discussing theoretical and practical frameworks, system implementations. The ultimate goal is to highlight the relevance of ontology reasoning services and ontology modularization methods to usage of large-scale and complex ontologies.

In order to meet the above aims, the workshop addresses three communities to bring them closer together:

* users who engineer or operate ontologies and who are interested in novel representation and reasoning techniques available and in discussing their requirements with developers and researchers,
* developers of tools supporting ontology engineering and operation tasks such as ontology editors, browsers, storages,
* researchers in description logics, information extraction and integration, automated reasoning who have developed techniques and/or implemented tools to support ontology engineering and operation tasks.

Topics

Workshop welcomes various kinds of contributions:

* presentations of novel reasoning problems/algorithms and how they link to ontology engineering and operation tasks,
* presentations of novel formalisms/languages/algorithms/methodologies for working with modular ontologies, their advantages and disadvantages for ontology engineering and operation tasks
* descriptions of reasoning tools for ontologies, their properties and strengths, and how they relate to existing such tools,
* description of tools to support ontology engineering and operation such as ontology editors, browsers, repositories, their properties and strengths, and how they relate to existing such tools, and
* applications of (modular) ontologies and their requirements regarding reasoning support, experiences and case studies, including reports of unorthodox yet fruitful applications of ontologies.

The particular workshop topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* standard and non-standard reasoning services
* novel reasoning problems and algorithms
* sharing and reuse of ontological modules
* efficiency versus (in)completeness of ontology reasoning
* logical formalisms for modular ontologies
* requirements for ontology modularity
* composing and decomposing modular ontologies
* ontologies update
* reasoning with modular ontologies
* inference explanations and debugging of ontologies
* collaborative and modular ontology engineering
* ontologies plus databases - reasoning and querying
* use cases and applications
* systems and tools demonstrations

Program

* To be announced

Submissions

The workshop welcomes submission of high quality original papers that describe research results on tasks related to ontology reasoning and modularity, presentations of user requirements and application scenarios, descriptions and demonstrations of systems and tools. Contributions should not exceed twelve (12) pages in length and must be formatted according to the Information for LNCS Authors (http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html). All contributions should be prepared in PDF format and submitted not later than March 7, 2008 through the WORM 08 EasyChair Submission System.

Submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by members of the program committee. Accepted papers will be published as a volume of CEUR-WS online proceedings.

PC Members

* Jie Bao, Iowa State University, USA
* Alex Borgida, Rutgers University, USA
* Gerhard Brewka, University of Leipzig, Germany
* Diego Calvanese, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
* Bernardo Cuenca Grau, University of Oxford, UK
* Mathieu d'Aquin, Open University, UK
* Giuseppe De Giacomo, University of Rome, Italy
* Chiara Ghidini, FBK-IRST, Italy
* John Goodwin, Ordnance Survey, UK
* Peter Haase, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
* Pascal Hitzler, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
* Vasant Honavar, Iowa State University, USA
* Ian Horrocks, Oxford University, UK
* Oliver Kutz, University of Bremen, Germany
* Carsten Lutz, Dresden University of Technology, Germany
* Christine Parent, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
* Alan Rector, University of Manchester , UK
* Marie-Christine Rousset, University of Grenoble, France
* Ulrike Sattler, University of Manchester, UK
* Anne Schlicht, University of Mannheim, Germany
* Marco Schorlemmer, IIIA-CSIC, Spain
* Luciano Serafini, FBK-IRST, Italy
* Andrei Tamilin, FBK-IRST, Italy
* Sergio Tessaris, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
* Anni-Yasmin Turhan, Dresden University of Technology, Germany
* Guido Vetere, IBM Italia
* Holger Wache, FHNW, Switzerland
* Michael Wessel, Racer Systems GmbH, Germany
* Antoine Zimmermann, INRIA Rhone-Alpes, France

Organizers

* Diego Calvanese, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
* Bernardo Cuenca Grau, University of Oxford, UK
* Ulrike Sattler, University of Manchester, UK
* Luciano Serafini, FBK-IRST, Italy
* Evren Sirin, Clark & Parsia LLC, USA
* Andrei Tamilin, FBK-IRST, Italy
* Michael Wessel, Racer Systems GmbH, Germany
* Frank Wolter, University of Liverpool, UK