1st Workshop on Well-founded Everyday Ontologies -– Design, Implementations & Applications (WEO-DIA)

Wrocław, Poland, September 9, 2012

Nowadays, computational ontologies are commonly used as conceptual models of information systems (IS) created in different domains, such as: engineering, law, social sciences, biomedicine, humanities, business enterprise, geography, library science etc. They are used both in the design and the exploitation phases of the IS’s life. However, what can be largely observed, the main drawback of the majority of such ontologies is their insufficient ontic expressiveness and lack of a good foundations. Thus, the question arises: is the ontological engineering mature enough to apply the sophisticated theoretical solutions and propose methodologies and tools enabling to create both practical and expressive ontologies for everyday use? We call such ontologies shortly: “well-founded”.

The aim of the workshop is to gather researchers and practitioners interested in answering the posed question. Particularly, we single out three main scientific areas, for which research feedback is expected.

The first domain of interest addresses the design and implementation of ontological structures that are strongly influenced by philosophy, but are still reasonably applicable. The area includes foundational approach driven ontology creation strategies for concrete domains and applications.

The linguistic investigations concerning national and multi-language semantic lexicons provide, among other resources, also the top-level ontologies. The second considered research area addresses the problem of using such ontologies (possibly accompanied by other linguistic resources) to build well-founded and tractable domain conceptual models.

Most ontology-building approaches proposed by computer engineers employ algorithimcs (i.e. data mining, machine learning etc.). Even though they benefit from the automation at the same time they suffer from the bad (ontic) quality of obtained ontologies. Thus, issues concerned with bridging the gap between bottom-up automatically engineered ontologies and foundational/top-level manually created ones, constitute the third scientific area we are strongly interested in. 

Topics

These topics are strongly recommended but are not limited to:

• Foundational approach-driven practical ontologies
• Foundational issues of ontologies: identity, change, vagueness, granularity, kinds of entities, basic relations in the context of applications
• Linguistic top-level ontologies in practice
• Relations between computational lexicons and thesauri and ontologies
• Bridging the gap between bottom-up automatically engineered ontologies and foundational/top-level ones
• Ontology integration and comparison
• Experiments with well-founded ontologies in different application areas, among others:
  • law,
  • biomedicine,
  • engineering,
  • humanities,
  • business enterprise,
  • geography,
  • library science,
  • social interactions,
  • dialogue and argumentation,
  • semantic wiki

Paper Submission and Publication

• Papers will be refereed and accepted on the basis of their scientific merit and relevance to the workshop.
• Only papers presented at the conference will be included in the IEEE Xplore® database and submitted for indexation in: DBLP Computer Science Bibliography, Google Scholar, Inspec, Scirus, SciVerse Scopus and Thomson Reuters - Conference Proceedings Citation Index
• Authors should submit draft papers (as Postscript, PDF of MSWord file)
• The total length of a paper should not exceed 8 pages (IEEE style). IEEE style templates are available here.
• Extended versions of selected papers presented during the conference will be published as a Special Issue of LNCS Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence journal.
• Organizers reserve right to move accepted papers between FedCSIS events.

All papers submitted to the WCO workshop will be considred for the Zdzislaw Pawlak Award for the Best Paper and the Best Student Paper. Furthermore, papers matching the focus of the award wil be considered for the International Fuzzy Systems Association Award for Young Scientist.

Important Dates

• Paper submission: May 14, 2012
• Author notification: June 17, 2012
• Final submission and registration opening: July 8, 2012
• Conference date: September 9-12, 2012