EKAW’08 16th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management Acitrezza, Italy 29. September - 3. October

The EKAW series History –Started as „European Knowledge Acquisition Workshop“ in 1987 –From 1992 proceedings in LNCS, from 2000 denoted as conference –Originally annual, then each 1,5 year, most recently biannual - alternation with K-CAP conference oversea (originally KAW – „Banff workshop“) –Previous: EKAW 2006, Poděbrady, CZ Established community, friendly athmosphere, often location beyond big cities

Focus of the series Knowledge engineering „in narrow sense“ –Knowledge Acquisition –Knowledge Modelling (Problem Solving Methods, Ontological Engineering) –KBS design Recently strong influence by Semantic Web topics Special focus of the 2008 edition: knowledge patterns; in general, the centre of gravity was ontological engineering

Some statistics of EKAW full paper submissions –small decrease wrt (119) but possibly due to fewer ‘venture’ papers only attracted by LNCS indexed by Thomsons at that time… 32 accepted (31% acceptance rate) –17 long and 15 short papers Posters/demos –some rejected papers directly accepted for posters, some further submitted at later stage –21 posters/demos accepted altogether About 80 registered participants

Overall Programme 3 invited talks 2 tutorials Industrial half-day with panel Sessions with contributed papers (single track) Poster/demo session Social events –Welcome Party (in the hotel) –Trip to Etna –Social dinner & dance party in former manufacturing plant in Catania

Invited talks Peter Clark: Knowledge Patterns –Defining specific concepts as compositions of more generic ones –Modelling space flight simulation using generic patterns, e.g. electric circuit as distribution network (a la ontology content design patterns) Johan Bos: Computational Semantics and Knowledge Engineering –Recent advances in computational linguistics and theorem proving made deep analysis of text and subsequent reasoning possible! –(And low-hanging fruit is gone now anyway) –Use of background knowledge: WordNet, NomLex, CIA, FB, CyC Guus Schreiber: Principles for Knowledge Engineering on the Web

Industrial half-day Invited talk: –R. Baeza-Yates (Yahoo! Research): Towards semantic search –From web of pages to web of objects –Focus of Y!: microformats, flicker tags, related entities, info from clicks Panel: –P. Clark (Boeing), C. Shankey (Reinvent), J. M. Gomez-Perez (iSOCO), F. Fabbrocini (IBM) –Hot topics: online advertising, semwiki, expertise location, intranet search, info integration + interoperability, enterprise processes, IP management… –often: semantics yes, but with DBs, not with OWL…

Research papers Egana et al.: Applying ontology design patterns in Bio-ontologies –Modelling “modifiers” Aguado et al.: NL-based Approach for Helping in the Reuse of ODPs –Linguistic templates used to characterise OWL constructs Hoekstra & Breuker: Polishing Diamonds in OWL 2 –Case study in using patterns in OWL 2 modelling in the legal domain Scharffe & Fensel: Correspondence Patterns for Ontology Alignment –Structures arising when (smartly) aligning ontologies Meilicke, Volker, Stuckenschmidt: Learning disjointness for Debugging Mappings between Lightweight Ontologies Mochol, Jentzsch: Towards a Rule-Based Matcher Selection –rule-based recommending of mining tool Ramakrishnan et al.: Unsupervised Discovery of Compound Entities for Relationship Extraction

Papers – cont’d Ontology for collaborative ontology development workflows (Stanford) 2 talks on product taxonomies (M. Hepp) KEG’s contributions: –Long paper on detection of name/structural patterns –Poster on competitive intelligence reporting (Porter) –Poster on provenance modelling in ontologies

Next edition EKAW 2010 –Autumn 2010, Lisbon, Portugal –Conference Co-Chairs: Helena Sofia Pinto (Technical University of Lisbon) + Philipp Cimiano (AIFB Karlsruhe)