SWeCKa 2007  

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Workshop Description

Recent advances in computing and communications together with the rapid proliferation of information sources and services present unprecedented opportunities in integrative and collaborative analysis and interpretation of distributed, autonomous (and hence, inevitably semantically heterogeneous) data and knowledge sources and services in virtually every area of human activity. Fundamental advances in collaborative approaches to knowledge acquisition and data-driven decision making from distributed, autonomous, semantically heterogeneous data and knowledge sources require synergistic synthesis of research advances, insights, algorithms, and results in multiple areas of:

Artificial Intelligence - especially machine learning, data mining, knowledge representation and inference, intelligent agents and multi-agent systems;
Information Systems - especially databases, information integration, semantic web; and
Distributed computing and software engineering (e.g., service-oriented computing).
The workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners in the relevant areas of artificial intelligence, databases, knowledge bases, machine learning, information integration, ontologies, semantic web, web services, and relevant application areas (e.g., bioinformatics, environmental informatics, enterprise informatics e-science, e-government, medical informatics, security informatics, social informatics, among others). 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.

Workshop Topics

Cyber-infrastructure and semantic web technologies for collaborative knowledge acquisition
Modeling semantically heterogeneous data and knowledge sources and services
Collaboratively developing and sharing ontologies and inter-ontology mappings
Representing and reasoning with ontologies and mappings between ontologies
Discovering mappings between data source schema and between ontologies
Reasoning with distributed modular ontologies
Integrating modular ontologies
Visualizing large distributed ontologies
Semantically annotating information sources
Querying distributed, semantically heterogeneous information sources
Acquiring knowledge from distributed data sources /span>
Acquiring knowledge from semantically heterogeneous data sources
Extracting knowledge and facts from distributed text and multimedia data
Exploiting distributed knowledge and data in dynamic data-driven applications
Finding, composing, and using semantically heterogeneous services
Modeling, tracking, and using information provenance
Modeling, and reasoning about trust of information sources and services
Preserving privacy, selectively sharing information and knowledge
Applications in bioinformatics, security informatics, enterprise informatics, social informatics, engineering informatics, health informatics, environmental informatics, and related areas
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.
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).

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 program committee. The contributions should be submitted in the form of PDF documents using the templates provided for WORD and LaTeX.

Submissions should be limited to a maximum of 6 pages for short papers, and 10 pages for long papers. PDF versions of the papers should be submitted through the SWeCKa 2007 paper submission web site no later than September 30, 2006.

Extended versions of selected papers may be published in a special issue of a journal or an edited book.

Important Dates

Submissions Due: September 30, 2006
Notification of Acceptance: October 23, 2006
Camera-ready versions due: November 1, 2006
Workshop: January 6, 7, or 8, 2007

Organizers

Dr. Vasant Honavar (Workshop Chair)
Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA.

Dr. Tim Finin, (Workshop Co-Chair)
Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA.

Dr. Doina Caragea
Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, USA.

Dr. Dunja Mladenic
Department of Knowledge Technologies, J. Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Dr. York Sure
Institut AIFB, Universitat Karlsruhe, Germany.

Program Committee

To be announced