ODBIS 2005

VLDB Workshop on Ontologies-based techniques
for DataBases and Information Systems

Co-located with VLDB 2005

Radisson SAS Royal Garden Hotel

Trondheim, Norway, September 2-3, 2005

Program

Final Program

Aims and Scope

Ontologies are generally used to specify and communicate domain knowledge in a generic way. While in a formal sense, "ontology" means study of concepts, one can use the word "ontology" as a concept repository about a particular area of interest. Ontologies are very useful for structuring and defining the meaning of the metadata terms that are currently collected inside a domain community. They are a popular research topic in knowledge engineering, natural language processing, intelligent information integration and multi-agent systems. Ontologies are also applied in the World Wide Web community where they provide the conceptual underpinning for making the semantics of metadata machine understandable.
More generally, ontologies are critical for applications which want to merge information from diverse sources. They become a major conceptual backbone for a broad spectrum of activities dealing with databases and information systems.
IS professionals and researchers have traditionally dealt with issues of identifying, capturing, and representing domain knowledge within information systems. Ontologies can provide mechanisms for organizing and storing items including database schemas, user interface objects, and application programs. The “ontology-driven information systems” approach proposes new ways of thinking about ontologies and IS in conjunction with each other.
A key point in databases is the ability to make data available semantically, that is, to find an automated and meaningful way of expressing their structure and semantics. Indeed schemas as sets of rules represent complex agreements made by designers with domain experts about data and so constitute a potentially valuable basic resource for eliciting ontologies. For instance, relational schemas are purely lexical, often obtained from more conceptual ones which are flattened into tables with a loss of information about roles and concepts. Within this perspective, an approach is to search for a tool which will automatically create ontologies corresponding to the content of the database and make them available for humans and machines.
On the other hand, availability of the background knowledge stored in ontologies increases significantly the support which can be given for indexing as well as for searching. Ontologies may be useful too for conducting extraction in Data Mining tasks for discovering patterns, interpreting rules or conceptual clustering. Furthermore ontologies can be used to provide semantic annotations for collections of images, audio or other non-textual objects.
The objective of this workshop is to present databases and information systems research as they relate to ontologies and more broadly, to gain insight into ontologies as they relate to databases and information systems. It is meant to cover foundations, methodologies and applications of Ontologies for Databases and Information Systems.

Topics

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Ontology elicitation from databases
  • Management of large ontology bases
  • Ontology-driven Information Systems
  • Evaluation of systems analysis modeling techniques using ontological principles
  • Ontologies for automated query and reporting systems
  • Ontologies for semi-structured data
  • Ontologies and semantic annotations
  • Ontologies for searching document databases
  • Ontologies for semantic interoperability
  • Data mining techniques using ontologies for document management solutions
  • Data mining techniques for enrichment of ontologies
  • Ontology-based interpretation and validation of mined knowledge
  • Data filtering, cleaning, and summarization using ontologies
  • Data and ontology integration, merge, alignment, fusion
  • Applications, evaluations, and experiences in Geographic IS, Scientific Databases, Bioinformatics, Web-based Information Systems …

    • Program Co-Chairs

    Martine Collard, I3S laboratory, University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis

    Jean-Louis Cavarero, I3S laboratory, University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis

    Program Committee

    Submission of papers

    Authors are invited to submit original research contributions or experience reports in English. We also encourage submitting position papers describing work in progress. The submitted material must not be published or submitted for publication in other outlets.
    Submissions must not exceed 6 pages for full length papers or 4 pages for research-in-progress proposals and they must be formatted using the VLDB format (http://www.vldb2005.org/information/docformat.php). Each submission must be accompanied by a separate cover letter with the title, key words, every author name and affiliation, and must specify a contact author along with postal address, phone & fax numbers and email address.
    By submitting a paper, authors implicitly agree that at least one of them will register to the workshop and present the paper.
    Submissions must be in electronic form using Portable Document Format (.pdf) or PostScript (.ps) via email to odbis2005@i3s.unice.fr

    Important dates

    Paper submission deadline: May 17, 2005   new date : May 24, 2005

    Notification of acceptance: July 1, 2005

    Camera ready due: July 15, 2005

    Workshop: September 2 – 3, 2005

    VLDB 2005: August 30 – September 2, 2005

    Workshop Format

    Each paper will be a 20-minutes presentation, followed by 10-minutes discussion and debate. The workshop will start with a talk by an invited speaker and will close with a panel to discuss key questions and topics that arise from the presentations. The panel will be multidisciplinary and including researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry who have presented the best and/or most controversial papers.

    Questions should be directed to the ODBIS organizers (odbis2005@i3s.unice.fr)