Second International Workshop on Modular Ontologies

October 28, 2007
Whistler, British Columbia, Canada

Workshop Description

Realizing the full potential of the Semantic web requires the large-scale adoption and use of ontology-based approaches to sharing of information and resources. Constructing large ontologies typically requires collaboration among multiple individuals or groups with expertise in specific areas, with each participant contributing only a part of the ontology. Therefore, instead of a single, centralized ontology, in most domains, there are multiple distributed ontologies covering parts of the domain. Because no single ontology can meet the needs of all users under every conceivable scenario, the ontology that meets the needs of a user or a group of users needs to be assembled from several independently developed ontology modules. Thus, in realistic applications, it is often desirable to logically integrate different ontologies, wholly or in part, into a single, reconciled ontology. Ideally, one would expect the individual ontologies to be developed as independently as possible from the rest, and the final reconciliation to be seamless and free from unexpected results. This would allow for the modular design of large ontologies and would facilitate knowledge reuse. Few ontology development tools, however, provide any support for integration, and there has been relatively little study of the problem at a fundamental level.

Workshop Topics

The proposed workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss the current state of the art and open research problems in ontology modularization and integration. A secondary goal of the workshop is to facilitate collaborations between different research groups. Specific topics of interest include:

• Logical formalisms for Modular Ontologies
• Sharing and reuse of ontology modules - linking and importing approaches
• Identification and analysis of common scenarios for ontology integration or modularization
• Methodologies for providing semantic guarantees on merged ontologies
• Methodologies for extracting semantically meaningful modules from large ontologies
• Selective information sharing between ontology modules
• Requirements of modular ontology languages
• Reconciling inconsistent ontology modules
• Ontology language extensions to support modularity
• Modular ontology tools for collaborative ontology development
• Case studies, software tools, use cases, and application
• Open problems

Workshop Format

The workshop will consist of:

• An opening session for introducing the workshop topics, goals, participants, and expected outcomes
• A small number of invited talks carefully intermixed with presentation of contributed papers. The invited talks will give overviews of the main modular ontology language proposals, and of logical approaches to ontology modularization/integration.
• Breaks between sessions, meant to encourage informal discussions related to the topics discussed in the sessions and to create opportunities for collaborations.
• Discussion of open problems and future research directions
• A wrap-up session summarizing the workshop (including formal or informal discussions).

The workshop will allow enough time for presentations as well as focused discussions among workshop participants.

Paper Submissions

We invite papers that report on completed or work in progress on relevant topic areas. All papers will be peer-reviewed by members of the WoMO-2006 program committee. The contributions should be prepared in PDF format according to the official formatting guidelines for Springer-Verlag LNCS (http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html). Please submit a maximum of 6 pages for short papers, and 14 pages for full papers to anne@informatik.uni-mannheim.de.

Important Dates

On demand of some participants the submission deadline (as well as the notification date) has been changed.

Submission due: August 14, 2007

Notification of acceptance: September 8, 2007

Camera-ready versions due: September 20, 2007

Workshop: October 28, 2007

Schedule

Organizers

Bernardo Cuenca-Grau, University of Manchester, UK, bcgcs.man.ac.uk

Vasant Honavar, Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University, honavarcs.iastate.edu

Anne Schlicht, University of Mannheim, Germany, anneinformatik.uni-mannheim.de (main contact)

Frank Wolter, University of Liverpool, UK, frankcsc.liv.ac.uk

Program Committee

Andrei Tamilin, University of Trento, Italy

Carsten Lutz, Dresden University of Technology, Germany

Chiara Ghidini, ITC-irst, Trento, Italy

Christine Parent, University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Diego Calvanese, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

Djamal Benslimane, Université Claude Bernard Lyon

Frank Loebe, University of Leipzig, Germany

Heiner Stuckenschmidt, University of Mannheim, Germany

Jerome Euzenat, INRIA Rhône-Alpes, France

Jie Bao, Iowa State University, USA

Klaus Luettich, University of Bremen, Germany

Luciano Serafini, ITC-irst, Italy

Marie-Christine Rousset, Laboratoire d'Informatique de Grenoble, France

Marta Sabou, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Mathieu D'Aquin, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Michael Sintek, DFKI Kaiserslautern, Germany

Michel Klein, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands

Oliver Kutz, University of Manchester, UK

Oscar Corcho, University of Manchester, UK

Pascal Hitzler, University of Karlsruhe, Germany

Peter Haase, University of Karlsruhe, Germany

Riichiro Mizoguchi, Osaka University, Japan

Stefano Spaccapietra, EPFL Lausanne, Switzerland

Stefano Borgo, ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy

Till Mossakowski, DFKI, Bremen, Germany