Workshop Description
The goal of the 3rd International Workshop on Ontology Dynamics is to bring together researchers and students working on the fields of ontology evolution, revision and versioning, as well as people from the industry conducting activities (applications, case studies) that involve the dynamic aspects of ontologies. Following the success of the two previous workshops, IWOD is quickly becoming the core annual event to discuss advances in the broad area of ontology dynamics, and to track recent work directly or indirectly related to the problem of evolving ontologies. During this year’s workshop, we will place special emphasis on applications and systems relying on and supporting ontology dynamics by making “Ontology Evolution in Practice” the theme of the workshop. Alongside the general track, we plan to have a special track on case studies in order to specifically encourage the submission of application papers.
Motivation
Ontologies constitute one of the main pillars of the Semantic Web and of semantic applications. With the emergence of new, more accessible semantic technologies, of new needs from applications and with the raising awareness of their potential, more and more people and organisations have started to develop ontologies and applications of ontologies. However, ontologies, just like any structure holding knowledge and information, need to be updated: changes could be initiated because of a change in the world being modeled; or by a change in the users’ needs which would require a different conceptualization; or by the acquisition of knowledge previously unknown, unclassified or otherwise unavailable; or by the noticing of a design flaw in the original conceptualization.
In all these cases, the representation of knowledge in the ontology should be modified so as to form a more accurate or adequate conceptualization of the domain. Such a modification presents several difficulties from both practical and theoretical points of view, raising a variety of research questions and development issues, such as how to support the developers of ontologies in maintaining up-to-date, adequate conceptualizations; how to detect the need for evolution; how to facilitate the integration of new knowledge in ontologies; how to validate and evaluate the impact of the evolution of an ontology; how to handle evolutions triggered from multiple sources and collaborative updates; and how to keep track of (possibly concurrent) versions of ontologies and ensure the delivery of up-to-date and valid knowledge.
IWOD-09 intends to be a forum where these questions are discussed. In particular, we welcome submissions on all topics related to ontology dynamics, including (but not restricted to) the following topics:
- Ontology evolution
- Ontology versioning
- Formal aspects of ontology dynamics
- Foundational issues
- Language extensions for evolution
- Belief revision for ontologies
- Inconsistency in evolving ontologies
- Change propagation in ontologies
- Ontologies for dynamic environments
- Dynamic knowledge building, and use
- Engineering evolvable ontologies
- Requirements for ontology evolution
- Case studies in ontology evolution
- Tools to support ontology evolution
- Application with dynamic ontologies
- Open problems
In addition, the theme of this year’s workshop is “Ontology Evolution in Practice”. We want to encourage the submission of case study papers, describing either applications with specific needs for support on the ontology evolution process or systems providing concrete solutions to problems related to the dynamic aspects of ontologies.
Target Audience
Anyone (from academia or industry) working on ontology evolution or related fields; people designing, supporting, or using ontologies that are subject to change; software engineers of ontology management/versioning/evolution tools.