After a successful OntoContent 2007 workshop, we are now preparing a next instance of the OntoContent workshop series. This year will will concentrate on user-centered semantics (under the theme of Web 3.0) and on collecting experiences on ontology engineering and maintenance from the fields of Human Resources, and e-health/life sciences/ambient assisted living.
Ontology Content and Evaluation in Enterprise
with two Special Tracks on Human Resources and E-Health/AAL
in conjunction with OnTheMove Federated Conferences 2008, Monterrey, Mexico
http://ontocontent2008.mature-ip.eu
Under the buzz word Semantic Web a lot of research has been going on in recent years, exploring formalisms for expressing ontologies, reasoning algorithms for inferencing hidden knowledge in an open world, but also on “semantifying” different types of problems. But outside the Semantic Web research community, there has been little uptake so far. This is also due to the fact that the concept of ontology is more about content than formalism, and we are in dire need for content-related research and experiences. As Braun et al. 2007 stated, a “good” ontology is a balance of the degree of social agreement, the level of formality, and the appropriateness for the problem at hand that is supposed to be solved with ontologies. In line with this view, the workshop is looking for experiences and empirical results on which formalism is better suited, how to achieve or measure social agreement, and how to judge whether an ontology is appropriate. It is the mission of this workshop to report on these experiences and to reflect them back to the Semantic Web community.
In the area of system design, there is currently a major shift taking place towards user-centered design, and the workshop aims to foster use-centered ontology-based system design. Therefore, we also welcome research and experiences on participatory and evolutionary approaches (i.e., with a continuously high degree of involvement of the actual users) to building and maintaining ontologies that pave the way towards a Web 3.0, bringing together users and semantics.
We also strongly encourage to submit critical papers deriving lessons from failures with “ontologies in the wild”, not only stereotypical success reports!
Workshop Structure and Topics
The workshop will consists of three main parts: a general part on experiences with real-world ontology engineering and approaches to assessment of ontologies, a special track on ontologies in Human Resources and a special track on ontologies in e-health and ambient-assisted living.
- Towards Web 3.0: a user-centered semantic web
- lessons from Web 2.0 for ontology engineering
- experiences with participatory and evolutionary approaches to ontology engineering (e.g., based on social software)
- lightweight ontology formalisms (e.g., SKOS) and microformats
- experiences/empirical results on lightweight vs. heavy-weight ontologies
- experiences/empirical results on graphical modeling of ontologies
- experimental evidence (e.g., from cognitive science) on conceptual modeling
- challenges/requirements for maintenance and evolution of ontologies
- good, best, and bad practices
- Methods for assessing ontologies
- Ontology evaluation
- Quality measures for ontologies
- assessment of ontologies with regard to social agreement, formality, and appropriateness
- experiences with assessment and evaluations methods
- Ontologies in Human Resources (Recruiting, Development, Employability)
- modeling and representation of: Jobs, CVs, Competencies, Skills, Employees, People, Organizations, Social Events, etc.
- HR upper level concepts
- E-Portfolio (standards) and ontologies
- Semantics of HR-XML
- Semantic metadata for HR applications
- Semantics in job matching
- Semantics in learning technologies
- Good/Best practices for semantics in HR
- Maintenance of ontologies in HR
- Ontologies in E-Health and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL)
- Upper level concepts of healthcare and life sciences ontologies.
- Ontologies of diseases, nursing, therapeutics, drug, etc.
- Ontologies and ontology-driven approaches in Ambient-Assisted Living
- Maintenance of ontologies in e-health and AAL
If you feel that something fits into the theme of the workshop, but is not listed here, just contact the organizers.
Submissions
Types of papers include:
- research papers (max. 10 pages)
- case studies experience reports (preferrably from industry) (max 10 pages)
- position papers, clearly analyzing current state of practice for future challenges of research (max. 6 pages)
Papers submitted to OntoContent 2008 must not have been accepted for publication elsewhere or be under review for another workshop or conference. All submitted papers will be evaluated by at least three members of the program committee, based on originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of expression.
Papers will be published in an LNCS volume by Springer as part of OTM 2008 proceedings. Excellent papers will be considered for a journal publication or as book chapters
Important Dates
Abstract Submission Deadline: June 15, 2008
Paper Submission Deadline: June 30, 2008
Acceptance Notification : August 15, 2008
Camera Ready Due: August 25, 2008
Registration Due: August 25, 2008
OTM Conferences: November 9 – 14, 2008
Organizers
Andreas Schmidt, FZI Research Center for Information Technologies, Karlsruhe, Germany [main contact]
andreas.schmidt@fzi.de
Mustafa Jarrar, University of Cyprus
mustafa@jarrar.info
Werner Ceusters, University of Buffalo, USA
Program Committee (partially to be confirmed and to be completed)
Bill Andersen, Ontology Works, USA
Keith Baker, University of Reading, UK
Ernst Biesalski, EnBW AG, Germany
Paolo Bouquet, University of Trento, Italy,
Simone Braun, FZI Research Center for Information Technologies, Germany
Christopher Brewster, University of Sheffield, UK
Michael Brown, Skillsnet.Com
Yannis Charalabidis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Ernesto Damiani, Computer Science Department, Milan University, Italy
Aldo Gangemi, Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Rome, Italy
Fausto Giunchiglia, University of Trento, Italy
Giancarlo Guizzardi, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Mohand-Said Hacid, University Claude Bernard Lyon 1 LIRIS – Villeurbanne, France
Martin Hepp, DERI Innsbruck, Austria
Stijn Heymans, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Christine Kunzmann, Kompetenzorientierte Personalentwicklung, Germany
Jens Lemcke, SAP AG, Germany
Tobias Ley, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Stefanie Lindstaedt, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Alessandro Oltramari, Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy
Viktoria Pammer, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Jeff Pan, University of Aberdeen, UK
Paul Piwek, Open University, UK
Christophe Roche, Université de Savoie, France
Peter Scheir, Know-Center Graz, Austria
Pavel Shvaiko, University of Trento, Italy
Miguel-Angel Sicilia, University of Alcalá, Spain
Barry Smith, State University of New York at Buffalo, USA
Silvie Spreeuwenberg, LibRT, The Netherlands
Armando Stellato, University of Roma, Italy
Andrew Stranieri, JUSTSYS, Ballarat, Australia
Karl Stroetmann, Empirica, Germany
Sergio Tessaris, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
Robert Tolksdorf, Free University of Berlin, Germany
Francky Trichet, University of Nantes, France
Luk Vervenne, Synergetics, Belgium
Sponsoring institutions/projects
This workshop is organized in a joint effort by the Ontology Outreach Advisory (OOA), the MATURE IP, and the SOPRANO IP.
- The OOA is an international not-for-profit association that consists of industry, government, and research leaders and innovators with respect to ontology development, use, or education. The general mission of the OOA is to develop strategies for ontology recommendation and standardization, and promote the ontology technology to industry.
- The MATURE IP is a large-scale integrating European project (FP7) in the field of technology-enhanced learning aiming at support of knowledge maturing processes within and across companies, including in particular ontology maturing.
- The SOPRANO IP is an integrated European project (FP6) in the field of ambient-assisted living and follows an ontology-driven service-oriented approach to construct a flexible and affordable platform for in-house ambient-assisted living solutions.
Beginning of this week, I was together with two of my colleagues at the kick-off of the universAAL project, which is an integrated project in the field of ambient assisted living. It aims at consolidating a common infrastructure for AAL systems based on the results of the FP6 projects SOPRANO, PERSONA, mPOWER, GENESYS, among others. The meeting was very well organized, and the motivation and commitment of the team (among them SINTEF, Fraunhofer IGD, ITACA, Ericsson Nikola Tesla, IBM Research Haifa, ProSyst Software) was very promising. We bring in our recently lauched openAAL platform, an open source middleware for ambient assisted living.
Both proposals provide the opportunity to explore new paths in my second main stream of research: context-awareness. While I have started in the domain of technology-enhanced learning, the ambient-assisted living project 
From Jan 30 to Feb 2 I was at the kick-off meeting of the 