WONTO2006

event series:=WONTO2006 is the title:=3rd workshop on Ontologies and their Applications. It is held on start date:=October 27 2006 in has location city::Ribeirão Preto, has location country::Brazil. For more information, see web site:=http://www.icmc.usp.br/iarn2006/coevents/wonto.php.

A collocated event at the International Joint Conference IBERAMIA-SBIA-SBRN�06 IBERAMIA'2006 (the X Ibero-American Artificial Intelligence Conference) SBIA'2006 (the XVIII Brazilian Artificial Intelligence Symposium) SBRN'2006 (the IX Brazilian Neural Networks Symposium). http://www.icmc.usp.br/~iarn2006/

After pursuing a long tradition of study in Philosophy, the term �ontology� has become the new buzzword in computer science. It is receiving special attention not only from an active community of researchers pertaining to many areas of informatics but also from the industry, which is providing increasing budgets and investments to develop this technology and make it available in business as soon as possible. There is at least one main reason for this recognition: ontologies constitute the backbone of the Semantic Web, as they are responsible for providing context to pages, thus promising to make a relevant part of the Web contents understandable and processable by the software. However, there are some challenging obstacles that should be tackled to make ontologies wide-spread reputation shift from a promise to a daily used technology. For instance, heterogeneity and evaluation are two of these obstacles. As for heterogeneity, ontology is composed of knowledge and knowledge is naturally diverse in its various features: form, expression, syntax, contents, meaning, points of view, perspectives, uses, terminology, premises, among other features. Of course, this variety would be reflected on its encoding on ontologies and would pose subtle questions for its application. Dealing with heterogeneity in its many types has become a recurrent research issue for ontology employment, and also a good source of ontology usage, e.g. for problems like information integration of heterogeneous databases and systems. As for evaluation, in many applications, ontologies are applied in machine reasoning, thus requiring knowledge from them to encompass a great variety of point of views, and, most important, to sanction correct inferences that correspond to the reality being dealt with by the reasoner component. Following the success of the first edition of the Workshop on Ontologies and their Applications, we intend, with this second edition, to enrich the discussion on how to enhance ontologies� applicability, thus realizing this promising technology in general, but also in specific settings, such as e-business and e-commerce to name but a few.

Topics of Interest
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Ontology Engineering
 * methodologies
 * capture and learning
 * management

Semantic consistency
 * foundational ontologies
 * upper-level ontologies
 * evaluation methods, applications and problems

Semantic Interoperability
 * composition and modularity
 * merging, mapping and alignment
 * ontology language interoperability

Enhancement of ontology applicability
 * linguistic ontologies applied to text processing
 * patterns of ontologies for specific applications

Ontologies for Information Sharing
 * ontology-based information integration
 * mediators and brokers
 * agents and ontologies

Ontology Applications
 * Semantic Web
 * knowledge management
 * e-commerce, e-government
 * e-learning and e-science
 * information retrieval

Workshop format and attendance
We intend to avoid the usual conference format, where papers are presented and the audience plays a rather passive role. Therefore, the emphasis for this one-day workshop is on working groups. In order to foster lively and fruitful discussion, the workshop sessions will be defined according to groups of topics formed from accepted papers. In each group of topics, we plan to allocate around one-third of the time for debates.

Attendance will be limited to 60 registrations, formed by workshop papers authors and interested members of the community. Workshop attendees are required to register at the main joint conference IBERAMIA-SBIA-SBRN�2006. For more information, please have a look at the conference website at http://www.icmc.usp.br/~iarn2006.

Submission procedure
We encourage the submission of high-quality papers based on entirely new work or surveys, both meeting the foci of the workshop. Papers must be written in English and may have a length of up to 12 pages, including tables, figures, and references. Like the main conference, papers must conform to the Springer LNCC/LNAI style. It is recommended that authors use Springer-Verlag template files (see http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html, section "Proceedings and Other Multi-author Volumes" for formatting instructions) to minimize possible conflicts of paper length when preparing the camera ready.

Papers should be formatted in PDF (preferred) or PostScript, and submitted electronically only, through the EDAS Conference Management System web site (at https://submissoes.sbc.org.br/Paper.cgi?c=332&track=740).

Submission is a three-step process. In a first step authors are required to register as new authors with JEMS. After registration as author the login data will be sent to the specified email address. This data can be used to access the system. In a second step authors have to register their paper (click the submit paper button in JEMS). The third step consists on uploading the paper.

Submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by at least two program committee members and/or additional reviewers/referees. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings, in the CDROM with the joint conference technical papers and in the CEURS online.

At least one of the authors of accepted papers has to register for the main conference (IBERAMIA-SBIA-SBRN�2006), otherwise the paper will not be included in the proceedings.

Any other questions regarding papers submission may be directed to one of the organizers.

Special Issue
Authors of best papers will be recommended to submit expanded versions for a Special Issue on Ontologies and their Applications at The Journal of Universal Computer Science (J.UCS). You can check that at http://www.jucs.org/ujs/jucs/info/special_issues/in_preparation.html (see at the bottom of the page).

J,UCS - The Journal of Universal Computer Science - is a high-quality electronic publication that deals with all aspects of computer science. J.UCS has been appearing monthly since 1995 and is thus one of the oldest electronic journals with uninterrupted publication since its foundation. J.UCS is a joint publication of the Know-Center, Graz, Austria, in cooperation with the IICM, Graz University of Technology, Austria, Joanneum Research, Austria and Springer Pub. Co.

Important dates

 * paper deadline:=June 13 2006    - Deadline for workshop papers
 * camera ready due:=July 13 2006    - Notification of workshop paper acceptance
 * August 13 2006  - Deadline for workshop camera-ready papers


 * October 23-27 2006 - Joint Conference IBERAMIA-SBIA-SBRN�06 technical program
 * October 27-28 2006 - 2nd Workshop on Ontologies & their Applications

Program Committee

 * has PC member::Troels Andreasen, Roskilde Universitetscenter, Danmark
 * has PC member::Stefano Borgo, Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA), ISTC-CNR, Italy
 * has PC member::Joost Breuker, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
 * has PC member::Virginia Brilhante, Universidade Federal do Amazonas, Brazil
 * has PC member::Ronald Cornet, Amsterdam Medical Center, Netherlands
 * has PC member::Monica Crubezy, SMI, Stanford University, USA
 * has PC member::Henrik Eriksson, Linköping University, Sweden
 * has PC member::Jérôme Euzenat, INRIA, France
 * has PC member::Mariano Fernandez-López, CEU, Spain
 * has PC member::Fred Freitas, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil
 * has PC member::Giancarlo Guizzardi, Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA), ISTC-CNR, Italy
 * has PC member::Michel Klein, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
 * has PC member::Konstantinos Kotis, University of the Aegean, Greece
 * has PC member::Andreia Malucelli, PUC/PR, Brazil
 * has PC member::Leo Obrst, Mitre Corporation, USA
 * has PC member::H.Sofia Pinto, IST/INESC-ID, Portugal
 * has PC member::Jorge Santos, Instituto Politécnico de Porto, Portugal
 * has PC member::Stefan Schlobach, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands
 * has PC member::Christoph Schmitz, Universitaet Kassel, Germany
 * has PC member::Stefan Schulz, Universitaet Freiburg, Germany
 * has PC member::Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Universitaet Mannheim, Germany
 * has PC member::Sergio Tessaris, Free University of Bozen � Bolzano, Italy
 * has PC member::Ingo Timm, Universitaet Bremen, Germany
 * has PC member::André Valente, University of Southern California, USA
 * has PC member::Ubbo Visser, Universitaet Bremen, Germany
 * has PC member::Renata Wasserman, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil

Organizing Committee

 * Fred Freitas, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil fred@cin.ufpe.br (contact person)
 * Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Universitaet Mannheim, Germany heiner @ informatik.uni-mannheim.de
 * H.Sofia Pinto, IST/INESC-ID, Portugal sofia@algos.inesc-id.pt
 * Andreia Malucelli, PUCPR, Brazil malu@ppgia.pucpr.br

Context of the workshop and the collocated conferences
IBERAMIA'2006 is the 10th conference of the IBERAMIA conference series, which has been one of the most suitable forums to Ibero-American Artificial Intelligence researchers (from South and Central America countries, Mexico, Spain and Portugal) present their results.

SBIA'2006 is the 18th conference of the SBIA conference series, which is the leading conference in Brazil for presentation of research and applications in Artificial Intelligence. However, since the 1990's it has also attracted researchers from all over the world, when it started to have an international program committee and also keynote invited speakers.

The proceedings of these two conferences will be published in a single volume of the Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series of Springer-Verlag, as occurred in 2000 (LNAI 1952).

IBERAMIA�2006 and SBIA�2006 will be held together with the IX Brazilian Neural Networks Symposium (SBRN).

About the city
The city of Ribeirão Preto was founded June 19, 1856, by farmers coming from the southeast of São Paulo State in search of good climate and soil for coffee growing. The city was laid by a stream called �Black Stream�, and was named after it (ribeirão preto means black stream in Portuguese). Eventually the farmers� choice revealed itself as very adequate and the fertile soil of the Ribeirão Preto region allowed the highest crop productivity in Brazil.

The creation of the University of Sao Paulo at Ribeirao Preto (USP-RP) stimulated the cultural and academic life in Ribeirão Preto and several schools, colleges and universities were opened in the city since then. Today, besides USP-RP there are six other universities and faculties in the city. More information on the city can be found at http://www.icmc.usp.br/iarn2006/inf/aboutrp.php.