Second International Workshop on New forms of reasoning for the
Semantic Web: scaleable, tolerant and dynamic

http://nefors08.larkc.eu

Co-located with the 3rd Asian Semantic Web Conference (ASWC 2008)
http://www.aswc2008.org/

Pathumthani, Thailand, 8th-11th December 2008

===================================================================

Workshop Objectives
===================

The Semantic Web is the vision of a Web of data usable for both humans
but also machines. This web, consists of inter-connected instance data
annotated with possibly expressive ontologies. Therefore a tremendous
amount of information becomes available that should be processed based
on formal semantics attached to it. The Semantic Web community has
developed a number of languages (such as RDF, RDF Schema, OWL) that
deploy logic for this purpose. Impressive progress has been made on
scalable storage, querying and inference for these languages, and they
are successfully being deployed on large intranets and medium-scale
web-applications.

However existing reasoning techniques often fail to live up to the
expectations put into them in this context. They can often neither
deal with high number of instances, the expressiveness of the
ontologies describing them or the inherent inconsistency and
incompleteness of data on the Web.

This workshop is intended to focus on these problems of scalability
and robustness of reasoning on the Web, and furthermore to investigate
alternative reasoning methods, which take incompleteness and
distribution of data and knowledge as inherent properties into
account.

NeForS08 is the follow-up of the first international workshop on
"New forms of reasoning for the Semantic Web: scalable, tolerant and
dynamic", which took place in Busan, Korea in November 2007 and was
co-located with the 6th International Semantic Web Conference
(ISWC 2007) and 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference (ASWC 2007).


Topics of Interest
==================

We welcome all research contributions that address one or more of the
following topics:

* Reasoning for the Web
* Querying and searching
* Scalability to the Web level
* Efficient storage of structured data that scale to a very large size

We also aim to attract participants from scientific fields not
typically seen at Semantic Web events:

* Economics can tell us about cost-benefit trade-off models, sunk-cost
theory and the role of negotiation in obtaining near-optimal results
under bounded resources

* Cognitive Science can tell us about strategies of human memory and
human reasoning which is so succesful in reaching good enough
conclusion in limited time-spans, using methods such as priming,
attention scoping, recency-based self-optimising memory, etc.

* Computational Learning Theory has contributions to make with their
notions of Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) computing, and
strategies for abstraction and compression of information.

* Combinatorial Search has made recent breakthroughs in handling
massive search-spaces with heuristics based on Monte Carlo
simulations.


Event Information
=================

The workshop will take place during the 3rd Asian Semantic Web
Conference (ASWC2008) as a full-day event. It will be organized as a
full day event and include an invited talk by Kyung-il Tony Lee,
president and CEO of Saltlux Inc. on the industrial view on semantic
technologies and the need for large-scale reasoning.

Please note that for every accepted paper at least one of the authors
must attend the workshop and must register for the workshop and the
main conference. Submission of a paper is not required for attendance
at the workshop. However, in the event that the workshop cannot
accommodate all who would like to participate, those who have
submitted a paper will be given priority.


Submissions
===========

The workshop invites full papers (up to 15 pages) as well as short
papers (up to 5 pages). All contributions will be peer reviewed by the
program commitee (see http://nefors08.larkc.eu) and accepted
submissions will be published in a dedicated book. The number of
accepted papers will be kept deliberately low in order to leave
sufficient time for discussion after presentations. Additionally we
are considering a special issue in a journal on semantic computing for
extended versions of selected, high quality submissions.

Submitted papers must be written in English and one of the following
format must be used for the first submission: PDF, PS, DOC. For
submissions please follow LNCS formatting instructions (see
http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-2-72376-0 for
details) to prepare your paper and consider using the camera ready
format even for the first submission.

Furthermore papers need to be submitted electronically through the
EasyChair using the following link:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences?conf=nefors08


Important Dates
===============

* September 15, 2008: Submission of papers
* September 30, 2008: Notification of acceptance
* October 15, 2008: Camera-ready version due
* December 8, 2008: Workshop


Organizers
==========

Zhisheng Huang, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Uwe Keller, Semantic Technology Institute, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Ning Zhong, Maebashi Institute of Technology, Japan and
The International WIC Institute/BJUT, China

Program Committee
=================

Ruzica Piskac, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
Stefan Schlobach, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Lael Schooler, MPI for Human Development, Berlin, Germany
Pascal Hitzler, Institut for Angewandte Informatik und Formale
Beschreibungsverfahren (AIFB), Karlsruhe, Germany
Jia Hu, The International WIC Institute/BJUT, Beijing, China
Yue Pan, IBM Research Laboratory, Beijing, China
Xiaoping Chen, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China
Emanuele Della Valle, CEFRIEL, Milano, Italy
Stefania Galizia, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University,
Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
Guilin Qi, Institut for Angewandte Informatik und Formale
Beschreibungsverfahren (AIFB), Karlsruhe, Germany
Michael Witbrock, Cycorp, Austin, Texas, USA
Juanzi Li, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Ilya Zaihrayeu, University of Trento, Trento, Italy


Steering Committee
===================
Dieter Fensel, Semantic Technology Institute, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Frank van Harmelen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Contact
=======
Florian Fischer
Semantic Technology Institute, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Technikerstr. 21a, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria
Email: florian.fischer@sti2.at