Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

—————————————————–
Semantic Web Applications and Tools for Life Sciences
Berlin, 10th December 2010

http://www.swat4ls.org/2010/

—————————————————–

Overview
________________________________________
SWAT4LS is a workshop that provides a venue to present and discuss benefits and limits of the adoption of Web based information systems and semantic technologies in life sciences, biomedical informatics and computational biology.

Rationale
________________________________________
The web is a key medium for information publishing, and web based information systems play a key role in biomedical information exchange and integration. At the same time, the variety and complexity of biomedical information call for the adoption of semantic-based solutions. The Semantic Web provides a set of technologies and standards that are key to support semantic markup, ontology development, distributed information resources and collaborative social environments. Altogether the adoption of the web-based semantic-enabled technologies in the Life Sciences has potential impact on the future of publishing, biological research and medicine. This workshop will provide a venue to present and discuss benefits and limits of the adoption of these technologies and tools in biomedical informatics and computational biology. It will showcase experiences, information resources, tools development and applications. It will bring together researchers, both developers and users, from the various fields of Biology, Bioinformatics and Computer Science, to discuss goals, current limits and some real use cases for Semantic Web technologies in Life Sciences.

Topics
________________________________________
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• Standards, Technologies, Tools for the Semantic Web
o Semantic Web standards and new proposals (RDF, OWL, SKOS, Linked Data, … )
o Biomedical Ontologies and related tools
o Alternative approaches to integrate semantic representations and web based solutions
o Formal approaches to large biomedical knowledge bases
• Systems for a Semantic Web for Bioinformatics
o RDF stores, Reasoners, query and visualization systems for life sciences
o Semantic biomedical Web Services
o Semantics aware Biological Data Integration Systems
• Existing and prospective applications of the Semantic Web for Bioinformatics
o Semantics aware application tools
o Semantic Wikis
o Semantic collaborative research environments
o Case studies, use cases, and scenarios

Type of contributions
________________________________________
The following possible contributions are sought:
• Research papers
• Position papers
• Posters
• Software demos
We are also accepting proposals for tutorials, hackathons or other related events to be held on Dec 8th (hackathons) and Dec 9th (tutorials). If interested, please contact info at swat4ls.org

Proceedings
________________________________________
All accepted communications will be published in the proceedings. Proceedings for the last editions of the workshop have been pubslished via the CEUR-WS.org Workshop Proceedings service (see http://ceur-ws.org/). Best papers will be invited to a journal special issue (probably BMC Bioinformatics).

Special issue
________________________________________
Authors of accepted contributions to the last editions of SWAT4LS have been invited to submit extended and revised contributions for a special issue in BMC Bioinformatics (dedicated to the SWAT4LS 2008 edition), and for a special issue of the BMC Journal of Biomedical Semantics (dedicated to the SWAT4LS 2009 edition, in preparation). We will continue with this approach and we will announce more detailed infomation as soon as we have reached an agreement with publishers.

Deadlines
________________________________________
• Submission openinig: 7 September 2010
• Papers submission deadline: 12 October 2010
• Posters and demo submission deadline: 1 November 2010
• Communication of acceptance: 8 November 2010
• Camera ready: 21 November 2010

Instructions
________________________________________
All papers and posters must be in English, formatted according to LNCS format (http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html) and submitted in pdf format.
• Submissions for papers should report original research, and should be between 8 and 15 pages.
• Submissions for position papers should report qualified opinions, recommendations or conclusions, and should be between 3 and 6 pages.
• Submissions for posters should be between 2 and 4 pages.
• Submissions for software demo proposals should also be between 2 and 4 pages.

Submission
________________________________________
All submissions will be handled via the EasyChair submission system. A link will be provided when registrations open.
To ensure high quality, submitted papers will be carefully peer-reviewed by at least three members of the Scientific Program Committee.

Workshop Chairs
________________________________________
• Adrian Paschke, Corporate Semantic Web, Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany
• Albert Burger, School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, and Human Genetics Unit, Medical Research Council, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
• Paolo Romano, Bioinformatics, National Cancer Research Institute, Genova, Italy
• M. Scott Marshall, Adaptive Information Disclosure Group, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Andrea Splendiani, Biomathematics and Bioinformatics dept., Rothamsted Research, UK

Program Committee
See website http://www.swat4ls.org/2010/

Natasha Noy and Peter Yim will be our keynote speakers at the 1st International Workshop on Semantic Repositories for the Web (SERES 2010).

==============================

CALL FOR PAPERS
==============================

1st International Workshop on Semantic Repositories for the Web (SERES 2010)

http://www.ontologydynamics.org/od/index.php/seres2010/

at the 9th International Semantic Web Conference

http://iswc2010.semanticweb.org

November 7, 2010, in Shanghai, China
==============================

Ontologies and Linked Data vocabularies are being actively developed and used by numerous applications. Several domains are making their vocabularies available for others to reuse. In addition, good practices when developing ontologies are often followed, particularly for producing reusable modules. The Semantic Web is a modular and highly federated environment of reusable knowledge sources; these provide the meaning so that SW applications change our experience of the web. Within this context, the need for repositories delivering the added value that makes the SW a concrete step beyond our current experience of the web is palpable. SERES addresses issues around semantic repositories within the context of the SW.

The number of ontologies being built and made available for reuse has increased steadily in the last few years. Semantic Web search engines such as Swoogle and Watson currently index several tens of thousands of them; there are also systems specifically designed to support the publication of ontologies, e.g. Cupboard, NCBO Bioportal, and ONKI. Some tools also support editing features, e.g. Neologism, Knoodl. While being a foundation for the Semantic Web, this new environment where ontologies are shared and interlinked online also poses new challenges; fostering thus a number of research projects aiming to understand, amongst others, ontology reuse, storage, publication, versioning, quality control, evaluation, retrieval and modularization. For instance, as part of the EU NeOn project new tools supporting Knowledge Engineering in the age of “networked ontologies” have been developed, while in the EU OASIS project approaches from software engineering and formalization are now also being applied to inter-connect ontologies. Moreover, despite initial efforts, ontology repositories are hardly interoperable amongst themselves. Although sharing similar aims (providing easy access to Semantic Web resources), they diverge in the methods and techniques employed for gathering these documents and making them available; each interprets and uses metadata in a different manner. Furthermore, many features are still poorly supported; for instance, modularization, versioning, and the relationship between ontology repositories and ontology engineering environments (editors) to support the entire ontology lifecycle.

By the same token, there are several domains making available knowledge resources; for instance, digital libraries such as Pubmed Central offer a large collection of biomedical abstracts and, in some cases, open access to the full document. Some researchers are starting to bridge the gap between clinical and experimental data and literature; such connection is being built via ontologies, some approaches have had BioPortal as their ontology repository. Linked Data is also being explored as a means for publishers to expose their content. Knowledge management over documents is actively aiming to make real the notion of self-descriptiveness; being this intrinsically related to various resources over the web providing meaning for atomic component in documents –words, tables, figures, maps, etc. In order for these systems to be successful, it is necessary to provide a forum for researchers and developers to discuss features and exchange ideas on the realization of repositories providing semantics. In addition, it is now critical to achieve interoperability between these repositories, through common interfaces, standard metadata formats, etc. SERES10 intends to provide such a forum.

Questions addressed by SERES10:

· How can semantic repositories support the realization of the SW?

· Semantic repositories, ontology repositories, knowledge repositories, where are the boundaries? How are they interacting? Are they changing our experience of the web?

· How are domain specific knowledge repositories, such as biomedical digital libraries, interconnecting knowledge in meaningful manners?

· How are e-government initiatives using and delivering semantics and knowledge repositories?

· How can ontology repositories support novel semantic applications?

· How can ontology repositories encourage the development of high quality ontologies that are used routinely by relevant communities?

· How can ontology repositories provide semantics for applications?

· How can ontology repositories contribute to the reuse of ontologies across different domains and applications?

· How can ontology repositories interoperate with one another to support scalability, availability and distributed reasoning?

· How can provenance and intellectual property information be managed in and across ontology repositories?

· How can the abundant and complex knowledge contained in relevant ontology repositories be made comprehensible for users?

· How can branching, versioning, mappings, dependencies and configurations/compositions be managed in and across ontology repositories?

· How can ontology repositories interoperate with related applications such as ontology editors, automated reasoners, and rule engines?

· How can modularity be better supported in and across ontology repositories; similarly, how could modularization be formalized?

· How can ontology repositories support distributed reasoning?

· How can ontology repositories support corporate, national and domain specific metadata/semantic infrastructures?

· What measurements for describing and comparing ontologies can we use? How could ontology repositories use these?

Workshop Audience

We want to bring together researchers and practitioners active in the design, development and application of semantic web technology, semantic registries and repositories, knowledge management systems, knowledge repositories, repository editors, modularization techniques, versioning systems and issues around federated ontology systems. As some repository-related tools are already under development, and repositories are a crucial part of business infrastructure, we also address progressive Chief Technology Officers interested in using these technologies.

IMPORTANT DATES
==============================

Paper Submission Deadline August 20, 2010, 23.50 Hawaii time
Acceptance Notification September 17, 2010
Camera Ready October 7, 2010
SERES Workshop (tentative date) November 7, 2010

SUBMISSION AND PROCEEDINGS
==============================
Research papers are limited to 12 pages and position papers to 5 pages. For
system descriptions, a 5 page paper should be submitted. All papers and system
descriptions should be formatted according to the LNCS format

http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0

Proceedings of
the workshop will be published online. Depending on the number and quality of
the submissions, authors might be invited to present their papers during a
poster session.

Please submit your paper via EasyChair at

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=seres10

Submissions that do not comply with the formatting of LNCS or that exceed the
12 page limit (research papers) or 5 page limit (position papers and systems descriptions) will be rejected without review.

We note that the author list does not need to be anonymized, as we do not have
a double-blind review process in place.

Submissions will be peer reviewed by three independent reviewers. Accepted
papers have to be presented at the workshop and they will be included in the

workshop proceedings that are published online at CEUR-WS.

Program Committee

Natasha Noy, Stanford University, USA.

Li Ding, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA.

John Bateman, Universität Bremen, Germany.

Michael Kohlhase, Jacobs University, Germany.

Raul Palma, Poznan University, Poland.

Oscar Corcho, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain.

Fabian Neuhaus, University of Maryland, USA.

Aleman-Bonarges Meza, Universidad Politecnica de Victoria, Mexico

Christoph Lange, Jacobs University, Germany.

Sandro Hawke, W3C.

Christopher Baker, University of New Brunswick, Canada.

Nigam Shah, Stanford University, USA.

Peter Haase, Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods, Germany.

Michael Gruninger, University of Toronto, Canada

Leyla Garcia, Bundeswehr University, Germany.

Benjamin Good, USA

Matthew Horridge, University of Manchester, UK

Organizing Committee

Alexander Garcia, University of Bremen
Mathieu d’Aquin, Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University
Mike Dean, Principal Engineer at Raytheon BBN Technologies
Kenneth Baclawski, College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University

I found this very interesting video by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA, http://thersa.org) adapted from Dan Pink’s talk at this organization which illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace.

Enjoy!

May 30, 2010, co-located with ESWC 2010 in Crete

Agenda:

9.30 – 10.00 Project overview (Coordinator)
10.00 – 11.00 Tools presentations (WP4 partners)
11.00 – 11.30 Coffee
11.30 – 12.30 Open discussion and feedback from UAB
12.30 – 13.00 Closing (Coordinator)
19.00 Social event

Please confirm your attendance to Alice Carpentier until Friday, 19.3.2010 12.00.

16th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2010 – http://amcis2010.org/)
Lima, Peru, August 12 – 15, 2010

TRACK: Agent-Based Information Systems (SIGABIS)
Chair: Vijayan Sugumaran, Oakland University

Complete Papers Due: March 1, 2010

This Track is sponsored by AIS Special Interest Group on Agent-Based Information Systems (SIGABIS). Best papers from this Track will be fast tracked for publication in a special issue of International Journal of Intelligent Information Technologies (IJIIT).

The purpose of this track is to provide a forum for academics and practitioners to identify and explore the issues, opportunities, and solutions related to semantic technologies and intelligent systems design, implementation, integration and deployment. An increasing number of artificial intelligence-based systems are being developed in different application domains employing a variety of tools and technologies. This track is intended to increase cross-fertilization of ideas from these domains, and share the lessons learned.

Mini-Tracks
=========
* Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining (Chair: Riyaz T. Sikora)
* Intelligent Agent & Multi-Agent Systems and Semantic Web Applications
(Co-chairs: Vijayan Sugumaran, Stefan Kirn)

A brief description of each of the mini-tracks is given below.

Mini-Track: Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining =====================================
Riyaz T. Sikora (co-chair SIGABIS)
University of Texas at Arlington

One of the side effects of the increase in connectivity and collaboration has been the phenomenal increase in the magnitude and volatility of the available data. Intelligent methods are now emerging as a way to deal with this staggering variety and volume of data in distributed and heterogeneous environments. This has become especially relevant since most large-scale information systems applications of today assume that components will be added dynamically and that they will be autonomous (serve different users or providers and fulfill different goals) and heterogeneous (be built in different ways).

The mini-track on AI and DM provides a forum to bring together like-minded researchers, teachers, and practitioners to advance this important field. The AI/DM mini-track will seek research and applications highlighting the frontiers of new knowledge and advances in AI and DM. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Foundations of AI and DM
* Machine Learning and Statistical Learning Algorithms
* Data Mining
* Pattern Recognition
* Intelligent Agents
* Heuristic Search
* Intelligent Information Retrieval
* Support Vector Machines
* Web/Text mining
* Intelligent Search Techniques
* Reinforcement Learning

Mini-Track: Intelligent Agent & Multi-Agent Systems and Semantic Web Applications ===============================================================
Vijayan Sugumaran, Oakland University
Stefan Kirn, Universität Hohenheim

Intelligent agent and semantic technologies have been one of the most important and rapidly advancing areas in Information Technology. There is a tremendous explosion in the development of multi-agent systems and semantic web applications in a variety of fields such as electronic commerce, supply chain management, intelligent manufacturing, mass customization, information retrieval and filtering, decision support, simulation, and healthcare. While research on various aspects of intelligent agent and semantic technologies is progressing at a very fast pace, this is only the beginning. There are still a number of issues that have to be explored in terms of the design, implementation and deployment of multi-agent systems and semantic technologies. For example, salient characteristics of agents in different domains, formal approaches for agent-oriented modeling, ontology based information system, ontology engineering, semantic web for e-learning, and organizational impact of agent-based systems & semantic technologies are some of the areas in need of further research. The purpose of this mini-track is to provide a forum for academics and practitioners to identify and explore the issues, opportunities, and solutions related to intelligent agent and semantic technology design, implementation, integration and deployment.

Possible Topics (but not limited to):
* Intelligent Applications in Business
* Distributed Intelligent Systems
* Agent architectures and behavior models
* Models and architectures for agent-oriented information systems
* Agent-oriented software engineering
* Multi-agent systems and applications in various domains
* Agent collaboration and coordination
* Human and agent interaction models
* Agent-based e-commerce applications
* Semantic interoperability
* Semantic web for e-business and e-learning
* Service discovery, description, and composition
* Semantic Web mining
* Ontology creation, evolution, reconciliation, and mediation
* Ontology mapping, Integration, and/or alignment
* Software agents for Semantic Web
* Innovative Semantic Web/Ontology applications
* Semantic technologies and tools

Best papers from both the mini-tracks will be fast tracked for publication in a special issue of International Journal of Intelligent Information Technologies (IJIIT).