EON2006

Evaluation of Ontologies for the Web

4th International EON Workshop

located at the 15th International World Wide Web Conference WWW 2006
May 22nd, 2006 (Workshop day)
Edinburgh International Conference Center, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Supported by KnowledgeWeb and SEKT

Programme Evaluation Topics Previous Workshops Organization Committee Program Committee Submission Dates

Not what you were looking for? Maybe you have been searching for Stanford's EON project, which creates components for medical decision support systems.

Here you will find the other EON workshops: EON2004, EON2003, and EON2002


Objectives Top

In the successful series of EON workshops we intend to bring together researchers and practitioners from the quickly developing research areas Ontologies and Semantic Web. Former EON workshops aimed at evaluating ontology-based tools, the this year's workshop focuses on the Evaluation of Ontologies (content, usability, etc.) themselves. Whereas some effort already was invested in reusing work from related research areas towards the end of Ontology Evaluation, often the basic premises of the web-like environment are forgotten or disregarded. Thus the main goal of this workshop is to lay the foundations for Web Ontology Evaluation.

Ontologies now play an important role for many knowledge-intensive applications for which they provide a source of formally defined terms. They aim at capturing domain knowledge in a generic way and provide a commonly agreed understanding of a domain, which may be reused, shared, and operationalized across applications and groups. Numerous ontologies are already available and the number is growing rapidly. Still a well understood definition or even intuition about qualities that apply to ontologies is lacking. The large visibility of the Semantic Web already attracts industrial partners. Ontology-based tools depend more and more on the explicit knowledge captured in ontologies. A well-understood notion of Ontology Evaluation might lead to a consistent level of quality and thus acceptance by industry. For the future this might lead to certification efforts for such ontologies.

The aim of this workshop is to ground Ontology Evaluation firmly on the needs of the Semantic Web, especially regarding its web-like characteristics like high interconnectivity, constant change and incompleteness. We will focus on the Semantic Web languages as standardized or proposed by the W3C: RDF(S), OWL and the rule language. We want to encourage and stimulate discussion about the current state of the art in Ontology Evaluation and its future direction. Currently, ontologies and the Semantic Web attract researchers from all around the world and from various disciplines, sometimes forgetful of the new needs and conditions arising from the Semantic Web’s requirements.

This event is supported by KnowledgeWeb SEKT


ProgrammeTop

To ensure a creative atmosphere during the workshop, the participants will be selected based on their submitted papers, posing important issues to be presented and discussed at the workshop. The workshop will consist of short presentations followed by discussions about the goals of the workshop: the state of the art in Ontology Evaluation with regards to the needs of the Semantic Web and outlining a plan for future research. Also there will be a practical session, where three ontologies are to be evaluated by the participants beforehand and the results being discussed at the workshop. In order to obtain an intensive exchange of ideas between the participants, there will be left extensive time for discussion.

The previous workshops (EON2002, EON2003 and EON2004) proposed a series of experiments for evaluating different aspects of ontology tools, e.g. their expressiveness and interoperability capabilities. The aim of the EON series is to attract attention to a number of evaluation topics since we believe this to be a highly relevant issue for the adaptation of Semantic Web technologies by partners outside the Semantic Web community.

This year we focus on ontologies themselves. Taking into account the success of the former workshops in this series, we will not only expect regular contributions on any of the topics addressed in this CFP, but we will also look forward to receiving submissions based on experimental results, surveys and tools for Ontology Evaluation. The EON2006 workshop is intended to be a platform to discuss results and further steps with interested parties. Along with these experimental contributions, we explicitly encourage people to make demos of their tools.

Schedule of the workshop:

Session 1 - General issues (9:00-10:30) Session 2 - Metrics (11:00-12:30) Session 3 - Approaches (14:00-15:30) Session 4 - Community (16:00-17:30)

Evaluation and DemosTop

At the EON workshop there will be a practical session, where a number of ontologies are to be evaluated by the participants beforehand and the results being discussed at the workshop. We ask all participants to evaluate a number of ontologies according to their approaches. The workshop will facilitate discussion by comparing the results of the participants. This is not meant as a test or as homework, because we also don’t know the correct results, if there are any – it is the goal of this workshop to move towards an answer for this very question.

The ontologies can be downloaded at http://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/ws/eon2006/ontoeval.zip

Here we describe the ontologies shortly. We ask you to evaluate each of the four ontologies, so that we can discuss our findings and compare the evaluation approaches.

  • oe1: This is a single file with metadata about Elvis impersonators. It was developed by a single person.
  • oe2: The ROVE ontology describes the Summer School for Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web 2005. It was developed by a small team.
  • oe3: This is the metadata about the AIFB institute. The SWRC ontology provides the vocabulary. The instance data, although offered in one file, is being editet by all members of the AIFB institute, not all of them knowledgeable in the Semantic Web domain.
  • oe4: This is a collection of more than a hundred FOAF-files taken from the web. The source URIs are included. We regard this collection as a standard situation on the Semantic Web, where information will be compiled from several, decentralized sources. We regard this collection as one ontology.

Topics of Interest Top

Main topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Web Ontology Evaluation
  • Ontology Evaluation Methodologies
  • Tools for Ontology Evaluation
  • Ontology Content Evaluation
  • Task-oriented Evaluation / Task-independent Evaluation
  • Criteria for Ontology Content Evaluation
  • Formal/Informal Ontology Evaluation
  • Evaluation of Heavily Interconnected Ontologies / Networks of Ontologies
  • Ontology Metric-based Evaluation
  • Evaluation-guided revision of Ontologies
  • Certification of Ontologies

Previous Workshops Top

The third workshop on Evaluation of Ontology-based Tools (EON2004) was celebrated in conjunction with the 3rd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2004) on November 8th 2004 in Hiroshima, Japan.

The second workshop on Evaluation of Ontology-based Tools (EON2003) was celebrated in conjunction with the 2nd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2003) on October 20th 2003 in Sanibel Island, Florida, US.

The first workshop on Evaluation of Ontology-based Tools (EON2002) was celebrated in conjunction with the 13th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW2002), in September 30th, 2002.

All three workshops attracted a large number of researchers and practitioners of ontology-based tools (each time over 25 participants).


Workshop Organising Committee Top


Program Committee Top

  • Sean Bechhofer, University of Manchester (UK)
  • Christopher Brewster, University of Sheffield (UK)
  • Dan Brickley, Semantic Web Vapourware Ltd and ILRT, University of Bristol (UK)
  • Oscar Corcho, University of Manchester (UK)
  • Roberta Cuel, University of Trento (IT)
  • Mariano Fernández-López, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (ES)
  • Asunción Gómez-Pérez, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (ES)
  • Marko Grobelnik, Jozef Stefan Institute (SI)
  • Nicola Guarino, Laboratory for Applied Ontology (IT)
  • Kouji Kozaki, Osaka University (JP)
  • Deborah McGuinness, Stanford University (US)
  • Libby Miller, Asemantics (IT)
  • Enrico Motta, Open University (UK)
  • Elena Paslaru Bontas, Freie Universität Berlin (DE)
  • Sofia Pinto, Technical University of Lisbon (PT)
  • Robert Porzel, European Media Laboratory (DE)
  • Steffen Staab, Universität Koblenz (DE)
  • Rudi Studer, University of Karlsruhe (DE)
  • Chris Welty, IBM (US)
Many thanks to the additional reviewers Janez Brank, Peter Haase, Marta Sabou, Julien Tane, and Christoph Tempich.

Submission and Proceedings Top

Submissions of paper

Interested authors should submit an electronic PDF and source version of their papers to eon2006@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de prior to the paper submission deadline. The first page of submitted papers should include (as in the format): title, author names, affiliations, postal addresses and email addresses for all authors, and a brief abstract. All correspondence will be sent to the author mentioned as contact person in the electronic title page (by default, the first author). Submissions should not exceed 8 pages and should be formatted according to the guidelines of the WWW conference. We also welcome position papers no longer than 4 pages.

Submission of demo proposals

Interested presenters should submit an electronic PDF of their demo proposal to eon2006@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de prior to the deadline. The proposal should include include: title, author names, affiliations, and electronic mail addresses for all authors, a brief abstract, a screenshot, and a short description of what will be shown in the demo. All correspondence will be sent to the author mentioned as contact person in the electronic title page (by default, the first author). Demo proposals should not exceed 2 pages and should be formatted according to the guidelines of the WWW conference.

Submission of ontology evaluation results

Interested authors should submit an electronic PDF and source version of their evaluation results to eon2006@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de prior to the deadline. Evaluation results should be formatted according to the guidelines of the WWW conference. All correspondence will be sent to the author mentioned as contact person in the electronic title page (by default, the first author).

Evaluations need to include the following: title, author names, affiliations, and electronic mail addresses for all authors, a brief abstract, a short summary of the evaluation approach (up to one page), the results of each performed ontology evaluation, sorted by the ontologies, and how much time the evaluation of each ontology took. For each ontology you did not evaluate explain why. We do not want to limit the length of the evaluation results, as this will depend heavily on your approach, but we ask you to keep them concise. Detailed results should be delivered in an ontology itself. A simple starting point for the format is provided, but needs to be extended by the evaluators needs. For the publication of the ontology evaluation results we will work out a format with the authors individually, depending on the number and form of submissions. For the workshop we will distribute all accepted evaluation results in order to ease discussion. The form of the final publication of the evaluation results will be decided later and depends on the quality and number of submitted evaluations.


Important Dates Top

  • Deadline for paper submissions: March 3rd, 2006
  • Notification of acceptance: March 27th, 2006 (sorry for the delay)
  • Camera-ready versions: April, 10th, 2006
  • Demo proposals due: April 14th, 2006
  • Evaluation results submission: April 14th, 2006
  • Notification on demos: April 18th, 2006
  • Notification on evaluation: April 18th, 2006
  • Workshop: May 22nd, 2006

Please do not hesitate to contact Denny Vrandecic for any questions you have!