SERES 2010 - Call for papers and demos
1st International Workshop on Semantic Repositories for the Web (SERES 2010) at the 9th International Semantic Web Conference http://iswc2010.semanticweb.org
November 8, 2010, in Shanghai, China

Ontologies and Linked Data vocabularies are being actively developed and used by numerous applications. Several domains are making their vocabularies available for others to reuse. In addition, good practices when developing ontologies are often followed, particularly for producing reusable modules. The Semantic Web is a modular and highly federated environment of reusable knowledge sources; these provide the meaning so that SW applications change our experience of the web. Within this context, the need for repositories delivering the added value that makes the SW a concrete step beyond our current experience of the web is palpable. SERES addresses issues around semantic repositories within the context of the SW.

The number of ontologies being built and made available for reuse has increased steadily in the last few years. Semantic Web search engines such as Swoogle and Watson currently index several tens of thousands of them; there are also systems specifically designed to support the publication of ontologies, e.g. Cupboard, NCBO Bioportal, and ONKI. Some tools also support editing features, e.g. Neologism, Knoodl. While being a foundation for the Semantic Web, this new environment where ontologies are shared and interlinked online also poses new challenges; fostering thus a number of research projects aiming to understand, amongst others, ontology reuse, storage, publication, versioning, quality control, evaluation, retrieval and modularization. For instance, as part of the EU NeOn project new tools supporting Knowledge Engineering in the age of “networked ontologies” have been developed, while in the EU OASIS project approaches from software engineering and formalization are now also being applied to inter-connect ontologies. Moreover, despite initial efforts, ontology repositories are hardly interoperable amongst themselves. Although sharing similar aims (providing easy access to Semantic Web resources), they diverge in the methods and techniques employed for gathering these documents and making them available; each interprets and uses metadata in a different manner. Furthermore, many features are still poorly supported; for instance, modularization, versioning, and the relationship between ontology repositories and ontology engineering environments (editors) to support the entire ontology lifecycle.

By the same token, there are several domains making available knowledge resources; for instance, digital libraries such as Pubmed Central offer a large collection of biomedical abstracts and, in some cases, open access to the full document. Some researchers are starting to bridge the gap between clinical and experimental data and literature; such connection is being built via ontologies, some approaches have had BioPortal as their ontology repository. Linked Data is also being explored as a means for publishers to expose their content. Knowledge management over documents is actively aiming to make real the notion of self-descriptiveness; being this intrinsically related to various resources over the web providing meaning for atomic component in documents –words, tables, figures, maps, etc. In order for these systems to be successful, it is necessary to provide a forum for researchers and developers to discuss features and exchange ideas on the realization of repositories providing semantics. In addition, it is now critical to achieve interoperability between these repositories, through common interfaces, standard metadata formats, etc. SERES10 intends to provide such a forum.

Questions addressed by SERES 2010:

* How can semantic repositories support the realization of the SW?
* Semantic repositories, ontology repositories, knowledge repositories, where are the boundaries? How are they interacting? Are they changing our experience of the web?
* How are domain specific knowledge repositories, such as biomedical digital libraries, interconnecting knowledge in meaningful manners?
* How are e-government initiatives using and delivering semantics and knowledge repositories?
* How can ontology repositories support novel semantic applications?
* How can ontology repositories encourage the development of high quality ontologies that are used routinely by relevant communities?
* How can ontology repositories provide semantics for applications?
* How can ontology repositories contribute to the reuse of ontologies across different domains and applications?
* How can ontology repositories interoperate with one another to support scalability, availability and distributed reasoning?
* How can provenance and intellectual property information be managed in and across ontology repositories?
* How can the abundant and complex knowledge contained in relevant ontology repositories be made comprehensible for users?
* How can branching, versioning, mappings, dependencies and configurations/compositions be managed in and across ontology repositories?
* How can ontology repositories interoperate with related applications such as ontology editors, automated reasoners, and rule engines?
* How can modularity be better supported in and across ontology repositories; similarly, how could modularization be formalized?
* How can ontology repositories support distributed reasoning?
* How can ontology repositories support corporate, national and domain specific metadata/semantic infrastructures?
* What measurements for describing and comparing ontologies can we use? How could ontology repositories use these?

Workshop Audience

We want to bring together researchers and practitioners active in the design, development and application of semantic web technology, semantic registries and repositories, repository editors, modularization techniques, versioning systems and issues around federated ontology systems. As some repository-related tools are already under development, and repositories are a crucial part of business infrastructure, we also address progressive Chief Technology Officers interested in using these technologies.

Important Dates

Paper Submission Deadline: August 27, 2010, 23.50 Hawaii time
Acceptance Notification: September 17, 2010
Camera Ready: October 7, 2010
SERES Workshop: November 7, 2010

Submission and Proceedings

Research papers are limited to 12 pages and position papers to 5 pages. For
system descriptions, a 5 page paper should be submitted. All papers and system
descriptions should be formatted according to the LNCS format

http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0

Proceedings of the workshop will be published online. Depending on the number and quality of
the submissions, authors might be invited to present their papers during a poster session.

Please submit your paper via EasyChair at
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=seres10

Submissions that do not comply with the formatting of LNCS or that exceed the 12 page limit will be rejected without review.

We note that the author list does not need to be anonymized, as we do not have a double-blind review process in place.

Submissions will be peer reviewed by three independent reviewers. Accepted papers have to be presented at the workshop and they will be included in the workshop proceedings that are published online at CEUR-WS.

Program Committee

* Natasha Noy, Stanford University, USA.
* Li Ding, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA.
* John Bateman, Universität Bremen, Germany.
* Michael Kohlhase, Jacobs University, Germany.
* Raul Palma, Poznan University, Poland.
* Oscar Corcho, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain.
* Fabian Neuhaus, University of Maryland, USA.
* Aleman-Bonarges Meza, Universidad Politecnica de Victoria, Mexico
* Christoph Lange, Jacobs University, Germany.
* Sandro Hawke, W3C.
* Christopher Baker, University of New Brunswick, Canada.
* Nigam Shah, Stanford University, USA.
* Peter Haase, Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods, Germany.
* Michael Gruninger, University of Toronto, Canada
* Leyla Garcia, Bundeswehr University, Germany.
* Benjamin Good, USA
* Matthew Horridge, University of Manchester, UK