ODBIS 2006

2nd VLDB Workshop on Ontologies-based techniques for DataBases and Information Systems

Co-located with VLDB 2006

The Convention and Exhibition Center (COEX) Seoul, Korea

September 11, 2006

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 the 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, France

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

Program Committee

Bill Andersen, Ontology Works, Baltimore, USA
Jurgen Angele, Ontoprise, Karlsruhe, Germany
Paolo Bouquet, University of Trento, Italy
Nieves R. Brisaboa, University of A Koruña, Spain
Bruno Cremilleux, University of Caen, France
Monica Crubézy, Stanford Medical Informatics, USA
Rose Dieng, INRIA, Sophia Antipolis, France
Peter W. Eklund, University of Wollongong, Australia
Maria-José Escalona, Universiy of Sevilla, Spain
André Flory, University of Lyon, France
Carl-Chritian Kanne, University of Mannheim, Germany
Isabelle Mirbel, University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France
Michele Missikoff, Laboratory for Enterprise Knowledge and Systems, IASI-CNR, Italy
Claire Nedellec, INRA, Jouy-en-Josas, France
Natasha Noy, Stanford Medical Informatics, USA
Nicolas Pasquier, University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France
Oscar Pastor University of Valencia, Spain
Domenico Rosaci, University "Mediterranea" di Reggio Calabria, Italy
Heiner Stuckenschmidt, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Gerd Stumme, University of Kassel, Germany
Vojtech Svátek, University of Economics, Prague, Czech Republic

Submission of papers

Authors are invited to submit original research contributions or experience reports. We also encourage submitting position papers describing work in progress. All submissions must be in English. Submissions must clearly identify the nature of the paper as research, experience, or position. All submitted papers will be carefully evaluated based on originality, significance, technical soundness, and clarity of expression. The submitted material must not be published or submitted for publication in other outlets.
It is planned (without confirmation yet) to publish the proceedings in the Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series. Submissions must not exceed 15 pages for full length papers and 6 pages for research-in-progress proposals and must be formatted using the camera-ready templates of Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Author instructions can be found at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html
By submitting a paper, authors implicitly agree that at least one of them will register to the workshop and present the paper.
Papers must be submitted electronically in PDF or PostScript format using the Easychair submission system at http://www.easychair.org/ODBIS2006

Important dates

Paper submission deadline: ~~April 22, 2006~~ new date : May 2, 2006

Notification of acceptance: ~~June 1, 2006~~ new date : June 12, 2006

Camera ready due: June 22, 2006

Workshop: September 11, 2006

VLDB conference: September 12 - 15, 2006

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 (odbis2006@i3s.unice.fr)