Contexts and Ontologies (C&O-2008)

MOTIVATION

Contexts and ontologies play a crucial role in knowledge representation and reasoning. Computer systems which act intelligently need the ability to represent, utilize and reason about contexts and ontologies. There were a number of projects devoted to the definition and usage of contexts as well as ontologies in intelligent KR systems. With the advent of the web and the ubiquitous connectivity, contexts and ontologies have become a relevant notion also in other, more recent, disciplines. Many application areas such as, information integration, distributed knowledge management, semantic web, multi-agent systems, distributed reasoning, data grid and grid computing, pervasive computing and ambient intelligence as well as peer-to-peer information management systems, have acknowledged the need of methods to represent and reason about knowledge which is scattered in a large set of contexts and ontologies.

During the last decade, there has been a line of successful series of workshops and conferences on the development and application of contexts and ontologies. Three successful workshops have focused on combining the themes of ontologies and contexts, and have discussed them as complementary disciplines. The first two are "Contexts and Ontologies: Theory, Practice and Applications (C&O)" and "Context Representation and Reasoning (CRR)". These two previous series of workshops was merged into the "Contexts and Ontologies: Representation and Reasoning (C&O:RR)" workshop. The C&O:RR workshop aims at keeping the focus on combination of contexts and ontologies and at emphasizing the representation and reasoning aspects of research in the field of context and ontology that was the peculiarity of the CRR workshop. This workshop is the continuation of the C&O:RR 2007 under a broader title.

The goal of this workshop is to bring people from the context and ontology communities together to discuss the approaches they use for information integration from the knowledge representation and reasoning perspective. In recent years, a number of different aspects of contexts and ontologies have been studied and a number of approaches have been proposed. One perspective views an ontology as an explicit encoding of a domain model that may be shared and reused, while a context may be viewed as an explicit encoding of a domain model that is expected to be local and may contain one party's subjective view of the domain. This workshop will further explore this perspective as well as other perspectives and aims to make more progress in leveraging increased communication between the context and ontology communities.

The C&O:RR workshop is open to technical areas of interest between contexts and ontologies, with anticipated focus on:

1. approaches to semantic heterogeneity that utilize multiple contexts and ontologies;
2. analysis and understanding of technical problems related to combination of contexts and ontologies from the knowledge representation and reasoning perspective.

Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Information interoperability and reuse via multiple contexts and ontologies.
• Coordination of multiple contexts and ontologies.
• Modular ontologies.
• Ontology matching
• Scalability of techniques for combination of contexts and ontologies
• Logical formalisms for contexts and ontologies.
• Distributed reasoning algorithms for contexts and ontologies.
• Complexity of distributed reasoning for contexts and ontologies
• Comparison of uses of contexts and ontologies.
• Applications of reasoning with contexts and ontologies in the areas of semantic web, information retrieval, e-commerce, telecommunications, multimedia, content indexing, grid and peer-to-peer, pervasive computing and ambient intelligence.