CALL FOR PAPERS: EvoDyn 2012

2nd Joint Workshop on Knowledge Evolution and Ontology Dynamics
Collocated with the 11th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2012)
November 11/12th, 2012
Boston, US

http://www.ontologydynamics.org/od/index.php/evodyn2012

DESCRIPTION
===========
Over the course of the last decade, the Semantic Web research has engaged
in capturing and representing global knowledge in the form of the Linked
Data cloud and expressive distributed ontologies of various levels of
granularity. Usually, emphasis is put on representing as up-to-date and accurate
a state of knowledge as possible. However, an important aspect that has
largely been overlooked, and has been treated only in a very rudimentary
fashion so far, is the evolution of knowledge itself. Ontology dynamics
and versioning is one aspect of this field that has been well studied,
but only for the purposes of change-management. This is only one of many
facets of knowledge evolution and we propose to create and foster a research
community concerned with all aspects of how knowledge evolves and changes
over time in the context of the Semantic Web. This includes analysis of trends
and change in formal descriptions (i.e., ontologies), but also in associated
raw sources of knowledge (scientific publications, unstructured or
semi-structured web content, traditional data stores, e-mail or on-line
discussion threads, etc.).

EvoDyn 2012 builds on the success of the 2011 edition and on the previous
workshops aggregated under the IWOD workshop series. EvoDyn continues in the
tradition of IWOD in being 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. As ontologies are formal
representations of knowledge, the study of their dynamics is an inherent part
of investigating the knowledge evolution phenomena, yet it is only one of many
relevant aspects this workshop aims to cover in an integral manner.

In particular, the workshop focuses on analysis of trends and change in formal
descriptions (i.e., ontologies), but also in associated raw sources of knowledge
(scientific publications, unstructured or semi-structured web content,
traditional data stores, e-mail or on-line discussion threads, etc.). We are
especially interested in research targeted on various states of knowledge evolution,
such as (a) conflicts, (b) consolidation, (c) discovery, (d) paradigm shifts,
and (e) breakthroughs. One crucial objective of better understanding these different
states may be to study directly the underlying causes and dynamics needed to
generate discoveries and breakthroughs. We will only be able to facilitate and
possibly also generate such desirable situations if we can understand the process
of how knowledge evolves. The process of how knowledge in a field grows and changes,
crystallizes, and fractures are all areas of interest of this workshop. The same
holds for related novel applied technologies, such as:
* Tools for tracking the progress of knowledge from latent ideas, through hypotheses
   to well-supported facts and/or claims;
* Methods for identifying what are the crucial fulcrum-points where a particular field
   may blossom or fail;
* Methodologies and supporting tools for identification and reinforcement of emerging
   promising trends in various academic and/or industrial domains;
* Platforms facilitating interconnection and cross-fertilization of related endeavors
   in isolated disciplines.

TOPICS
======
The topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following categories and
their sub-domains.

Foundations of Knowledge Evolution:
* Philosophical and epistemological aspects of evolving knowledge
* Evolving knowledge as a complex system
* Models and ontologies for knowledge evolution
* Models and ontologies for change management

Temporal Aspects of Knowledge Capture:
* Dynamic ontology learning
* Ontology-based data mining
* Hypothesis and claim extraction
* Information retrieval and extraction for detecting paradigm shifts
* Evolution of ontologies from a general purpose design to a usable application-oriented
   form

The Representation and Reasoning of Evolving Knowledge:
* Time representation
* Semantic evolution and discovery
* Temporal reasoning
* Provenance
* Reasoning for trend analysis
* Reasoning for knowledge shift detection

Knowledge Integration and Analysis Over Time:
* Time-aware ontology alignment
* Time-aware data integration
* Similarity metrics for evolving knowledge
* Detecting, managing and reconciling conflicting knowledge

The Visualization and Presentation of Evolving Knowledge:
* Querying for evolving knowledge
* Browsing evolving knowledge
* Visualizing trends, changes and paradigm shifts
* Visual summarization of knowledge sub-domains
* User interfaces for evolving knowledge presentation

Possible Application Domains:
* Genetics / Molecular Biology
* Clinical Science
* Biomedical informatics
* Neuroscience / Neuroinformatics
* Business analytics
* Legal studies
* Discourse analysis
* Digital humanities

We especially encourage submissions that integrally cover multiple above-mentioned topics.

SUBMISSIONS
===========
We accept two types of submissions:
* Full papers - up to 12 pages
* Position papers - up to 4 pages

All submissions should be submitted in PDF format, via EasyChair at:
*http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=evodyn2012

Submissions should be formatted according to the LNCS Springer format
(http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0). The
workshop proceedings will both be uploaded to CEUR (http://ceur-ws.org/)
and placed on electronic media for distribution at the conference.

DATES
=====
July 31, 2012:    Submission of papers
August 21, 2012: Notification of acceptance/rejection
September 10, 2012: Camera ready paper submissions

COMMITTEES
==========
Organising Committee

  * Tudor Groza, School of ITEE, The University of Queensland
  * Dimitris Plexousakis, Institute of Computer Science, FORTH, Greece
  * Vit Novacek, DERI (Digital Enterprise Research Institute), National University
    of Ireland Galway

Steering Committee

  * Grigoris Antoniou, Institute of Computer Science, FORTH
  * Mathieu d'Aquin, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University
  * Gully Burns, Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California
  * Giorgos Flouris, Institute of Computer Science, FORTH
  * Carole Goble, Information Management Group, Manchester University
  * Zhisheng Huang, Division of Mathematics and Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit of
    Amsterdam
  * Jeff Z. Pan, Department of Computing Science, University of Aberdeen
  * Guilin Qi, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, China
  * Fouad Zablith, Olayan School of Business, American University of Beirut, Lebanon

Program Committee

* Paul Buitelaar, DERI Galway, Ireland
* Vinay Chaudhri, SRI International, US
* Tim Clark, MGH, Harvard University, US
* Yolanda Gil, ISI, University of Southern California, US
* Jerome Euzenat, INRIA&  LIG, France
* Lawrence Hunter, University of Colorado, US
* Pascal Hitzler, Wright State University, US
* Thomas Meyer, Meraka Institute, South Africa
* Enrico Motta, Open University, UK
* Livia Predoiu, University of Magdeburg, Germany
* Cartic Ramakrishnan, ISI, University of Southern California, US
* Agnes Sandor, Xerox Research Centre Europe, France
* Kavitha Srinivas, IBM, US
* Tania Tudorache, Stanford University, US
* Kewen Wang, Griffith University, Australia
* Renata Wasserman, Universidade de Sao Paolo, Brazil