WOP 2009

Workshop Focus and Relevance

As interest in the Semantic Web increases and technologies for realizing the semantic web become more mature, the need for high-quality and reusable semantic web ontologies increases. To address the quality and reusability issues, different types of Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) have emerged. Patterns can supply ontology designers with several kinds of benefits, including a direct link to requirements, reuse, guidance, and better communication. ODPs are well on their way to providing those benefits. ODPs have been proposed by the W3C and are currently being collected in various repositories, such as the catalogue maintained by the University of Manchester and the ODP portal at ontologydesignpatterns.org. However, pattern catalogues are still small and do not cover all types of patterns and all domains. Semantic Web applications could also benefit from additional types of patterns, such as knowledge patterns and specialized software patterns for semantic applications. In addition, to achieve communication benefits, patterns need to be shared by a community in order to provide a common language for discussing and understanding modeling problems. The workshop can leverage the activities conducted in the ontologydesignpatterns.org initiative, and aims to use the portal as its main means of communication, e.g. for pattern submission, reviewing and discussions outside the workshop schedule.

Reuse has been an important research subject in ontology engineering for many years, and this is also true for the semantic web community. Patterns are an approach to knowledge reuse that has proved feasible and very profitable in many other areas such as software engineering and data modeling. During the past few years, patterns for semantic web ontologies and ontology-based applications have been introduced, and at this point in time we believe that the community would highly benefit from a series of workshops focusing on this particular topic. An earlier workshop, Ontology Patterns for the Semantic Web, was arranged at ISWC2005, however at that time the community was considerably smaller. The focus then was on discussing reusable OWL and RDF ontologies addressing general open problems. The WOP series broadens this scope to include all patterns related to ontology design and knowledge engineering for the Semantic Web. This is in line with the successful EKAW2008 conference (with the sub-title Knowledge Patterns). Topics of this conference included ontology engineering patterns but also patterns for re-engineering of knowledge resources, process knowledge, social and cognitive aspects of semantics.

A workshop should be a practical and interaction-rich event, hence the workshop will have three parts: regular papers, posters, and “pattern writing”, with a focus on the latter. The inspiration for this model comes from the pattern writing workshops for software patterns. The aim is to promote development and review of actual patterns, rather than papers describing patterns. Related events are also VoCamps for writing vocabularies for the Semantic Web. Topics

The main aim of the workshop is to discuss and collect best practices and experiences, hence submissions should focus on some notion of best practices. Original research papers and poster papers are invited to consider the following (non exhaustive) list of topics:

* Good practices of ontology design * Good practices for Linked Data and related applications * Good practices for hybridization of semantic web and NLP techniques * Software patterns for semantic web applications * Interaction patterns and the Semantic Web

* Good Practices and Patterns of semantic social networks, semantic wikis, semantic blogs * Pattern-based methodologies for Semantic Web ontologies and software engineering

* Ontology Design Patterns and Linked Data * Ontology Patterns and Microformats * Application Profiles * Patterns for using different vocabularies together e.g. FOAF, SIOC, DC, etc. * Ontology design patterns (ODPs) for specific knowledge domains e.g. multimedia, fishery and agriculture, user profiling, business modeling, etc.

* Tools support for pattern-based knowledge engineering * Collaboration patterns in ontology design and engineering * Pattern-based ontology evaluation and selection * Domain specific applications based on patterns and successful stories

* Correspondence patterns for ontology matching and integration * Automatic ontology construction (ontology learning) based on patterns * Lexico-syntactic patterns * Reasoning patterns (workflows made of reasoning steps for addressing specific goals) * Processes and services - process patterns * Re-engineering patterns for conceptual models, folksonomies, lexicons, thesauri

* Contextual reasoning and patterns as context * Knowledge patterns and knowledge re-engineering based on patterns * Pattern-based information extraction * Problem solving methods and patterns

* Quality evaluation of patterns * Benefits of ontology patterns and knowledge patterns * Web semantics from a pattern perspective

Pattern proposals for the “pattern writing” sessions will be collected through the ODP portal, and templates for submission are provided for the following types of patterns (see general typology for explanation of the types):

* Content patterns * Structural patterns: logical and architecture patterns * Correspondence patterns: re-engineering and alignment patterns

For other types of patterns, or if the author wishes to elaborate on theoretical rather than practical aspects, a pattern description may be submitted as either a research paper or poster paper. Related references

* Valentina Presutti and Aldo Gangemi. Content Ontology Design Patterns as Practical Building Blocks for Web Ontologies (ER 2008) * Natasha Noy and Alan Rector. Defining N-ary Relations on the Semantic Web (2006) * Aldo Gangemi. Ontology Design Patterns for Semantic Web Content (ISWC 2005). * Natasha Noy, Michael Uschold, Chris Welty. Representing Classes As Property Values on the Semantic Web (2005) * Alan Rector. Representing Specified Values in OWL: "value partitions" and "value sets" (2005) * Francois Scharffe. Correspondence Patterns Representation. PhD Thesis (2009) * Peter Clark, John Thompson, and Bruce Porter. Knowledge Patterns. In Handbook of Ontologies (2003) * Mikel Egaña, Alan Rector, Robert Stevens, Erick Antezana. Applying Ontology Design Patterns in bio-ontologies. (EKAW 2008).

Important Dates and Submission

For details on how to submit to WOP2009 see the submission page. Research papers and poster submissions, as well as extended abstracts describing the accepted patterns, will be published online in the CEUR-Workshop Proceedings.

Important dates

* Submission deadline (papers and patterns) - August 9 * Notification of acceptance (papers and patterns) - September 7 * Camera ready deadline (papers and pattern abstracts) - September 21 * Upload of final pattern version (patterns) - October 9 * Online proceedings published (papers and pattern abstracts) - October 9 * Workshop date - October 25

WOP Organisation Steering Committee

The workshop series is arranged by a fixed steering committee, appointing the chairs and adjusting the focus of the workshop on a yearly basis.

The WOP Steering committee consists of:

* Eva Blomqvist, ISTC-CNR (IT) * Aldo Gangemi, ISTC-CNR (IT) * Valentina Presutti, ISTC-CNR (IT) * Alan Rector, University of Manchester (UK) * Francois Scharffe, INRIA (FR) * Steffen Staab, University of Koblenz (DE) * Chris Welty, IBM Watson Research Center (US)

WOP2009 Chairs

* Paper chair - Kurt Sandkuhl, Jönköping University (SE) contact * Poster chair - Vojtech Svatek, University of Economics, (CZ) contact * Pattern chairs - Eva Blomqvist, ISTC-CNR (IT) contact and Francois Scharffe, INRIA (FR) contact

Program Committee

(To be completed...)

* Alessandro Adamou, ISTC-CNR (IT) * Marie-Aude Aufaure, Ecole Centrale Paris (FR) * Fabio Ciravegna, University of Sheffield (UK) * Mathieu D'Aquin, Open University (UK) * Enrico Daga, ISTC-CNR (IT) * Violeta Damjanovic, Salzburg Research (AT) * Rim Djedidi, Paris-Sud University (FR) * Henrik Eriksson, Linköping University (SE) * Aldo Gangemi, ISTC-CNR (IT) * Jose-Manuel Gomez, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (ES) * Gerd Groener, University of Koblenz (DE) * Luigi Iannone, University of Manchester (UK) * Holger Lewen, AIFB University of Karlsruhe (DE) * Pierluigi Miraglia, Gerson Lehrman Group (US) * Mark Musen, Stanford University (US) * Natasha Noy, Stanford University (US) * Wim Peters, University of Sheffield (UK) * Valentina Presutti, ISTC-CNR (IT) * Alan Rector, University of Manchester (UK) * Marta Sabou, Open University (UK) * Guus Schreiber, VU University Amsterdam (NL) * Steffen Staab, University of Koblenz (DE) * Mari Carmen Suárez-Figueroa. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (ES) * Boris Villazón-Terrazas, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (ES) * Holger Wache, University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland (CH) * Chris Welty, IBM Watson Research Center (US) This CfP was obtained from WikiCFP