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CALL FOR PAPERS

ARCOE-11 at IJCAI-11

Date: July 17-18 2011
Barcelona, Spain
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The IJCAI-11 Workshop on

Automated Reasoning about Context and Ontology Evolution (ARCOE-11)
http://www.arcoe.org/2011

held on 17 and 18 July 2011

at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-11)

-- Description of the workshop --

Methods of automated reasoning have solved a large number of problems
in Computer Science by using formal ontologies expressed in logic-based
languages. Over the years, though, each problem or class of problems has
required a different ontology, and sometimes a different version of logic.
Moreover, the processes of designing, controlling and maintaining an
ontology as well as its different versions have turned out to be inherently
complex. All this has motivated much investigation in a wide range of
disparate disciplines -- from logic-based Knowledge Representation and
Reasoning to Software Engineering, from Databases to Multimedia -- about
how to relate ontologies to one another.

ARCOE-11 aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners from
core areas of Artificial Intelligence (Knowledge Representation and
Reasoning, Contexts, and Ontologies) and related disciplines to discuss
these kinds of problems and relevant results. Historically, there have
been at least three different, yet interdependent motivations behind this
type of research: defining the relationship between an ontology and its
context; providing support to ontology engineers; enhancing problem solving
and communication for software agents.

Ontology and Context. Most application areas have recognised the need
for representing and reasoning about knowledge that is distributed over many
resources. Such knowledge, as well as its intrinsic relevance and usability,
depends on its context. The latter is determined by the syntactic and/or
semantic structure of the resources, the scope of the underlying language,
among other things. Research on information integration, distributed
knowledge management, the semantic web, multi-agent and distributed
reasoning have pinned down different aspects of how ontologies relate to
and/or develop within their context.

Ontology Engineering. Ontology engineers are not supposed to succeed
right from the beginning when (individually or collaboratively)
developing and maintaining an ontology. Despite their expertise and any
assistance from domain experts, revision cycles are the rule. Moreover
quite often different ontologies have to be integrated in such a way for
them to be operable together (merging). Research on the automation of the
process of engineering an ontology has improved efficiency and reduced the
introduction of unintended meanings by means of interactive ontology
editors that provide support for ontology change (debugging, updates and
repair), maintenance (versioning) and integration (merging). Moreover,
ontology matching has studied the process of manual, off-line alignment
of two or more known ontologies.

Problem Solving and Communication for Agents. Agents that communicate
with one another without having full access to their respective ontologies
or that are programmed to face new non-classifiable situations must change
their own ontology dynamically at run-time -- they cannot rely solely on
human intervention. Research on this problem has either concentrated on
techniques borrowed from the non-monotonic reasoning and belief revision
communities or on changes of signature, i.e., of the grammar of the
ontology's language, with a minimal disruption to the original theory. This
is also an important issue in the emerging area of General Game Playing.

ARCOE-11 will provide a multi-disciplinary forum, where differences in
methodologies, representation languages and techniques are over-arched and
hopefully overcome. Accordingly, the workshop will be structured into four
tracks: three of them will focus on specific areas, the fourth one will
foster links and integration.

Track 1: Context and Ontology
This track will consist of presentations and discussions around the theme
of Context and Ontology, a well-established research area that has mainly
concentrated on the relationship between contexts and ontologies for
distributed information and for the enhancement of software agents.

Track 2: Common Sense and Non-Monotonic Reasoning for Ontologies
This track will consist of presentations and discussions around the theme
of Common Sense and Non-Monotonic Reasoning in logic-based Knowledge
Representation and Reasoning for ontologies. These are classic areas of AI,
which since their origins have produced remarkable results on logic-based
methods for supporting knowledge engineers and for enhancing software agents.

Track 3: Automated Ontology Evolution
This track will consist of presentations and discussions around the theme
of Automated Ontology Evolution for agents and general problem solving, an
area which in recent years has been drawing the attention of Artificial
Intelligence and Knowledge Representation and Reasoning on the assessment
of change impact and the automation of ontology evolution.

Track 4: Links and integration
This track will foster links and integration by means of invited talks
and (panel) discussions. Topics that are likely to be covered are: the
formalisation of software engineering concepts for ontology development;
the relationship between automated reasoning and information retrieval;
relationships between representation languages; relationships between
canonical domains; relationships between contexts and ontology evolution
and between non-monotonic reasoning and ontology evolution.

ARCOE-11 will bring the participants to position the various approaches
with respect to one another. Hopefully, though, the workshop will also
start a process of cross-pollination and set out the constitution of a
truly interdisciplinary research community dedicated to automated
reasoning about contexts and ontology evolution.

-- Topics --

ARCOE-11 welcomes submissions on the tracks below as well on their
intersection. (The division in tracks is only for organizational purposes
during the workshop. Authors are not required to assign themselves to a
specific track at the time of submission.)

Track 1: Context and Ontology
Submissions are welcome on the role of context and ontology in areas that
include but are not limited to the following ones:

- Information integration
- The role of context and ontology in distributed reasoning and knowledge
management
- The role of context and ontology in the Semantic Web
- Multi-agent systems
- Data grid and grid computing
- Pervasive computing and ambient intelligence
- Peer-to-peer information systems
- Comparison of uses of contexts and ontologies

Track 2: Common Sense and Non-Monotonic Reasoning
Submissions are welcome on the role of common sense and non-monotonic
reasoning for ontologies in areas that include but are not limited to
the following ones:

- Ontology debugging, update and merging
- Non-classical belief revision
- Inconsistency handling, belief revision and theory change for DL ontologies
- Uncertainty handling, defeasible reasoning and argumentation in ontologies
- Heuristic and approximate reasoning
- Planning and reasoning about action and change on the Semantic Web
- Rules and ontologies
- Temporal and spatial reasoning

Track 3: Automated Ontology Evolution
Submissions are welcome on the role of automated ontology evolution in
areas that include but are not limited to the following ones:

- Ontology fault diagnosis and repair
- Ontology versioning
- Adaptive systems and reconfiguration
- General problem solving
- Agent communication
- Persistent agents in changing environment
- Multimedia on the Web
- IT and automated reasoning

-- Attendance --

Authors and submissions will be selected on the significance of the
contribution, on how the work positions itself with respect to Tracks 1-3
above, and on the submission's potential to foster discussions and
integration. Also, authors will be preferred to simple attendees. Attendees
are welcome, but will be selected on a first-come-first-served basis.
Please check the IJCAI-11 website for registration procedure, fees as well
as cancellation policies.

-- Submission Requirements and Dates --

ARCOE-11 will accept submissions of long abstracts, for both long
presentations and poster presentations. The distinction during the
selection-phase will be based on

1) Relevance, significance and quality of the submission;

2) Degree of interdisciplinarity of the contribution with respect to Tracks
1-3 above, i.e., the contribution's potential to foster cross-pollination
and discussions on ARCOE main themes during the event.

In an effort to integrate this relatively new research area, submissions to
ARCOE-11 should be able to explicitly and uniformly introduce their work
relative to the call for papers and to other approaches. For instance, given
specific approaches such as DL-based belief revision, or Context Logic
integrated by Natural Language Processing (NLP), or Higher-Order Logic
(HOL) or Machine Learning (ML), the authors are expected to introduce their
proposals by clearly positioning themselves relative to:

1) Specific canonical problems in their respective area;
2) Paradigms, tools and applications within their own approach;
3) ARCOE's list of canonical problems in Tracks 1-3, i.e., the contribution
should be able to make clear how it is positioned relative to ontology and
context, ontology engineering and/or general problem solving and
communication for agents.

All selected abstracts will be included in the Working Notes. Authors are
kindly requested to provide keywords upon submission. The format for
submissions is the same as that of IJCAI-11. Please check the IJCAI author
instructions website for the style files. Submissions should be no longer
than 5 pages and in PDF format. The possibility is being considered of
publishing extended versions of the best works from the workshop in a
special issue of a peer-reviewed journal.

Submission deadline: March 14, 2011
Notification: April 25, 2011
Camera ready: May 16, 2011
Early registration: [TBA]
Late registration: [TBA]
Workshop dates: 17 and 18 July 2011

-- Submit to --

Please submit to http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=arcoe11

-- Workshop Co-Chairs --

Alan Bundy - http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/bundy
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, UK.
Tel: +44-131-650-2716, Fax: +44-131-650-6899

Jos Lehmann - http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/people/staff/Jos_Lehmann.html
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh
Informatics Forum, 10 Crichton Street, Edinburgh EH8 9AB, UK.
Tel: +44-131-650-2725, Fax: +44-131-650-6899

Ivan Varzinczak (primary contact) - http://en.varzinczak.net16.net
CSIR Meraka Institute
Meiring Naude Road, CSIR, 0001 Pretoria, South Africa.
Tel: +27-12-841-2594, Fax: +27-12-841-4720

-- Program Committee --

- Franz Baader (TU Dresden, Germany)
- Christoph Benzmueller (Articulate Software, USA)
- Richard Booth (University of Luxembourg and Mahasarakham University, Thailand)
- Paolo Bouquet (University of Trento, Italy)
- Jim Delgrande (Simon Fraser University, Canada)
- Jerome Euzenat (INRIA & LIG, France)
- Nicola Fanizzi (University of Bari, Italy)
- Giorgos Flouris (FORTH, Greece)
- Chiara Ghidini (FBK Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy)
- Fausto Giunchiglia (University of Trento, Italy)
- Deborah McGuinness (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA)
- Thomas Meyer (Meraka Institute, South Africa)
- Alessandra Mileo (Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Ireland)
- Amedeo Napoli (LORIA CNRS, France)
- Maurice Pagnucco (The University of New South Wales, Australia)
- Valeria de Paiva (Cuil Inc., USA)
- Jeff Pan (University of Aberdeen, UK)
- Dimitris Plexousakis (FORTH, Greece)
- Guilin Qi (Southeast University, China)
- Marcio Ribeiro (University of Sao Paulo, Brazil)
- Luciano Serafini (FBK Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy)
- Renata Wassermann (University of Sao Paulo, Brazil)