[Message with no subject]

Doug Skuce <doug@csi.uottawa.ca>
Date: Mon, 19 Dec 1994 11:04:52 -0500
From: Doug Skuce <doug@csi.uottawa.ca>
Message-id: <199412191604.LAA08800@mail.csi.UOttawa.CA>
To: srkb@cs.umbc.edu
Sender: owner-srkb@cs.umbc.edu
Precedence: bulk

 
  
			CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

   Workshop on Basic Ontological Issues in Knowledge Sharing
    
             To be held in conjunction with IJCAI95

                      Aug 19-21, 1995 
		(probably 19-20, to be confirmed)
                     Montreal, Canada

There is rapidly growing interest in ontologies. Recently there have
been workshops on ontologies at LaJolla, (Nov 1994), on implemented
ontologies, ECAI-94 in Amsterdam  (August 1994), on knowledge sharing
and information interchange at IJCAI-93 in Chambery (August 1993), and
the workshop on formal ontology in Padova Italy (March 1993). This
workshop will thereby contribute to the continuum of current research
on knowledge sharing, particularly to the development of generic and
shareable ontologies.

Consequently, it will cover a wide range of research topics ranging
from knowledge modeling to knowledge sharing, including philosophical
issues about the fundamentals of ontological representations. Thus, it
should be of interest to all researchers working in knowledge
representation, engineering, theory, philosophy and AI, etc

The workshop will be held during IJCAI95 at at time and place to be
determined. Attendees are expected to register for IJCAI and will be
charged an additional $50US for the workshop.
  
Organizing Committee:

Doug Skuce (chair) University of Ottawa, Ottawa.(doug@csi.uottawa.ca)

Nicola Guarino LADSEB-CNR, National Research Council, Padova, Italy
(guarino@ladseb.pd.cnr.it)

Lorne Bouchard Universite du Quebec a Montreal (lhb@info.uquam.ca)

Program Committee:

John Bateman 	 (bateman@gmd.de)
Institut fur Integrierte Publikations und
InformationSsystems, Darmstadt

Jeff Bradshaw 	(jbrad@grace.rt.cs.boeing.com)
Boeing Corp. Seattle

Lorne Bouchard	(lhb@info.uquam.ca)
University de Quebec a Montreal, Montreal

Brian Gaines	(gaines@cpsc.ucalgary.ca)
University of Calgary

Nicola Guarino 	(guarino@ladseb.pd.cnr.it)
LADSEB-CNR, National Research Council, Padova, Italy

Tom Gruber	(gruber@eit.com)
(Enterprise Integration Technologies)
Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA.

Pat Hayes	(phayes@cs.uiuc.edu)
Beckman Institute, Urbana, IL.

Graeme Hirst	(gh@ai.toronto.edu)
University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

Ed Hovy		(hovy@venera.isi.edu)
Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California

Fritz Lehmann	(fritz@rodin.wustl.ed)
GRANDAI Software, Irvine, CA

Nicholaas Mars 	(mars@cs.utwente.nl)
University of Twente, Twente, NL

Guy Mineau 	(mineau@ift.ulaval.ca)
University of Laval, Quebec, Canada

Tony Sarris	(tony@ontek.com)
Ontek Corp, Laguna Hills, CA

Doug Skuce	(doug@csi.uottawa.ca)
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada

John Sowa	(sowa@ranch.poly.edu)
State University of New York at Binghamton


Following is a list of possible topics in the form of questions. Any
other topics of related interest will be considered:

    What "ontologies" are available that others might want to use,  i.e
    that are either sharable now or could be with some effort?
    
    What research groups (or individuals?) are currently "developing" 
    ontologies?(e.g. Cyc, Pangloss, Japanese ED Project, Lilog, Ontek)

    What ontologies are available online for browsing? Or in any other
    form so that people can start sharing and comparing them.
    
    What should we do with these at this time? 
    Can they be "studied" somehow? Is it possible to draw any
    conclusions yet from any existing ontologies??
    
    Is there any "methodolog for "building" ontologies, or is it
    just informal at present? Can there be such a methodology?

    What tools exist to aid in ontology construction and comparison?
    Who is using these and for what?
    
    How can such ontologies be 
    	shared?
    	compared?
    	integrated?
    	agreed upon?

    Is anyone doing any of these yet? Do we need some kind of
    standardized format, apart from formal languages like KIF?
    
    Can we hope to exchange kbs without agreed upon ontologies? 
    How far must such agreement go? Must it be formal?
    
    Should standards committees be formed to work toward proposing certain
    ontologies as standards? Or is this premature?
   
    Is there such a thing as a truly "general" ontology? Particularly,
    one that "works" in all the major natural languages?

    Do we have any useful theories as yet? What is the role of"formal"
    ontologies? Is metaphysics useful, e.g. are ontologies such as 
    Bunge's relevant?
    
    What if many "ontologies" emerge (like programming languages) because of
    cultural or other differences? Will we need "translators"?
    Will this become another kind of MT problem, or is it in fact part of
    the MT problem?
    
    Can ontologies be "automatically" discovered by some kind of learning
    from texts? If so, what corpora should be used?  
   
    What is the relation between ontologies and linguistics?
    Are top-level concepts and properties just semantic primitives?
    Are Wordnet or Roget useful?
    
    What is the role of terminology, or terminography, as it is
    now starting to be called?  (e.g. ISO committees that are
    working toward the standardization of terms, in particular the
    terminology of terminology itself.)
    
    How is an "ontology" different from a list of well-defined terms?
    What is the relevance of semi-formal definition methodologies like 
    Mel'cuks ECD?
    
    How would standardized ontologies differ from other standards such
    as product definition standards or database standards?

    What is the role of KIF? Other "exchange" formats? The WWW?


Workshop Format:

The workshop will be 2 days in length, 9-12 and 1:30-5 each day.  It
will be limited in attendance to 30 people, to permit informal
discussion. 20 papers will be accepted for discussion. All papers must
be submitted electronically; no paper copies will be available. Hence
it will be assumed that attendees have read those papers of interest
to them in advance, and are ready to discuss them.

The presentations therefore should be short summaries, 10 minutes maximum.
Following each presentation up to 20 minutes will be allowed for
discussion. Thus discussion will be the most important activity.


Submission and Refereeing:

Papers must be submitted electronically to D. Skuce as Latex, RTF (to
be loaded into Word) or Postscript by April 15. Papers which do not
print on a Laserjet 4M will be returned with the error message so that
the author may fix the problem (hence submit early).  Length must not
exceed 10 printed pages. The committee will have the results of
refereeing by June 1. All papers submitted will be accessible via a
WWW site.

A timetable for presentations will be available about one
month before the workshop.

The IJCAI95 home page is:

http://ijcai.org/

For further information contact: