NEFORS 2008

Second International Workshop on New forms of reasoning for the Semantic Web: scaleable, tolerant and dynamic

http://nefors08.larkc.eu

Co-located with the 3rd Asian Semantic Web Conference (ASWC 2008) http://www.aswc2008.org/

Pathumthani, Thailand, 8th-11th December 2008

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Workshop Objectives

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The Semantic Web is the vision of a Web of data usable for both humans but also machines. This web, consists of inter-connected instance data annotated with possibly expressive ontologies. Therefore a tremendous amount of information becomes available that should be processed based on formal semantics attached to it. The Semantic Web community has developed a number of languages (such as RDF, RDF Schema, OWL) that deploy logic for this purpose. Impressive progress has been made on scalable storage, querying and inference for these languages, and they are successfully being deployed on large intranets and medium-scale web-applications.

However existing reasoning techniques often fail to live up to the expectations put into them in this context. They can often neither deal with high number of instances, the expressiveness of the ontologies describing them or the inherent inconsistency and incompleteness of data on the Web.

This workshop is intended to focus on these problems of scalability and robustness of reasoning on the Web, and furthermore to investigate alternative reasoning methods, which take incompleteness and distribution of data and knowledge as inherent properties into account.

NeForS08 is the follow-up of the first international workshop on "New forms of reasoning for the Semantic Web: scalable, tolerant and dynamic", which took place in Busan, Korea in November 2007 and was co-located with the 6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2007) and 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference (ASWC 2007).

Topics of Interest

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We welcome all research contributions that address one or more of the following topics:


 * Reasoning for the Web
 * Querying and searching
 * Scalability to the Web level
 * Efficient storage of structured data that scale to a very large size

We also aim to attract participants from scientific fields not typically seen at Semantic Web events:

theory and the role of negotiation in obtaining near-optimal results under bounded resources
 * Economics can tell us about cost-benefit trade-off models, sunk-cost

human reasoning which is so succesful in reaching good enough conclusion in limited time-spans, using methods such as priming, attention scoping, recency-based self-optimising memory, etc.
 * Cognitive Science can tell us about strategies of human memory and

notions of Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) computing, and strategies for abstraction and compression of information.
 * Computational Learning Theory has contributions to make with their

massive search-spaces with heuristics based on Monte Carlo simulations.
 * Combinatorial Search has made recent breakthroughs in handling

Event Information

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The workshop will take place during the 3rd Asian Semantic Web Conference (ASWC2008) as a full-day event. It will be organized as a full day event and include an invited talk by Kyung-il Tony Lee, president and CEO of Saltlux Inc. on the industrial view on semantic technologies and the need for large-scale reasoning.

Please note that for every accepted paper at least one of the authors must attend the workshop and must register for the workshop and the main conference. Submission of a paper is not required for attendance at the workshop. However, in the event that the workshop cannot accommodate all who would like to participate, those who have submitted a paper will be given priority.

Submissions

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The workshop invites full papers (up to 15 pages) as well as short papers (up to 5 pages). All contributions will be peer reviewed by the program commitee (see http://nefors08.larkc.eu) and accepted submissions will be published in a dedicated book. The number of accepted papers will be kept deliberately low in order to leave sufficient time for discussion after presentations. Additionally we are considering a special issue in a journal on semantic computing for extended versions of selected, high quality submissions.

Submitted papers must be written in English and one of the following format must be used for the first submission: PDF, PS, DOC. For submissions please follow LNCS formatting instructions (see http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-2-72376-0 for details) to prepare your paper and consider using the camera ready format even for the first submission.

Furthermore papers need to be submitted electronically through the EasyChair using the following link: http://www.easychair.org/conferences?conf=nefors08

Important Dates

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 * September 15, 2008: Submission of papers
 * September 30, 2008: Notification of acceptance
 * October 15, 2008: Camera-ready version due
 * December 8, 2008: Workshop

Organizers

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Zhisheng Huang, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands Uwe Keller, Semantic Technology Institute, University of Innsbruck, Austria Ning Zhong, Maebashi Institute of Technology, Japan and The International WIC Institute/BJUT, China

Program Committee

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Ruzica Piskac, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland Stefan Schlobach, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands Lael Schooler, MPI for Human Development, Berlin, Germany Pascal Hitzler, Institut for Angewandte Informatik und Formale Beschreibungsverfahren (AIFB), Karlsruhe, Germany Jia Hu, The International WIC Institute/BJUT, Beijing, China Yue Pan, IBM Research Laboratory, Beijing, China Xiaoping Chen, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China Emanuele Della Valle, CEFRIEL, Milano, Italy Stefania Galizia, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom Guilin Qi, Institut for Angewandte Informatik und Formale Beschreibungsverfahren (AIFB), Karlsruhe, Germany Michael Witbrock, Cycorp, Austin, Texas, USA Juanzi Li, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China Ilya Zaihrayeu, University of Trento, Trento, Italy

Steering Committee

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====== Dieter Fensel, Semantic Technology Institute, University of Innsbruck, Austria Frank van Harmelen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Contact

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Florian Fischer Semantic Technology Institute, University of Innsbruck, Austria Technikerstr. 21a, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria Email: florian.fischer@sti2.at	 This CfP was obtained from WikiCFP