IR-KR2009 at IJCAI-09

The IJCAI-09 Workshop on "Identity and Reference in web-based Knowledge Representation

July 11, 2009 - Pasadena, CA, USA

IR-KR2009 goals

The goal of this workshop, which in past years was mainly organised within the Web and Semantic Web (SW) communities (see past editions: IRW2006 at WWW2006, I3 at WWW2007, IRSW2008 at ESWC2008), is to widen debate on the impact and the challenges that the notions of identity and reference in web-oriented KR poses to some of the core concepts of AI.

Background & Description of the workshop

The Semantic Web initiative advances the idea that the web may become a space not only for publishing and interlinking documents (through HTML hyperlinks), but also knowledge bases (e.g. in the form of RDF graphs) in an open and fully decentralized environment.

Even though models and languages used to implement the nascent Semantic Web have been taken from long-standing research in AI, SW and AI have different priorities. While traditionally a strong focus within AI has been developing theories and code to support sound and complete reasoning, web-oriented KR has a primary concern of web-wide information interoperability and integration.

Perhaps the most central issue in reconciling these concernd is the Principle of Global Identifiers: "global naming leads to global network effects" (see Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One, 2004, at http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-webarch-20041215/). As for the web of documents, the overall value of such open and distributed network of truly interlinked knowledge sources, based on global names, would be immensely bigger than the sum of the value of the components.

This central role of identity and reference for a web-scale KR poses new challenges to traditional KR, and many researchers have suggested that the concept of URI may deeply affect the notions of language (e.g. the semantics of using the "same" URI in different models), reference (e.g. rigid vs. non rigid designation), interpretation (e.g. the meaning of "links" across knowledge bases) & reasoning (e.g. distributed reasoning across theories) in traditional logic-based KR in AI. This workshop addresses these challenges.

Expected outcome

The anticipated outcome of the workshop is to assess the state of the art in the area of Identity and Reference in AI and the SW, and to go beyond the limited scope of the current Semantic Web, as well as to discuss and critically evaluate approach and next steps in implementing and reasoning about identity and reference. It is expected that the workshop will provide a valuable opportunity for cross-fertilization across different research communities.

Workshop format

Based on the successful experience in the past workshops on this topic, the format of IR-KR2009 will be the following:

• a keynote talk that illustrates the importance of the topic very short presentations of the accepted papers, to give participants an overview of the research work of the main workshop contributors
• presentation of a detailed list of topics to discuss, by the  workshop chair
• extensive, moderated plenary discussion
• collaborative write-up of conclusions and next steps

Submissions

The workshop aims at collecting contributions which can roughly be grouped as follows:
 

• Foundations: formal and conceptual theories of identity and reference for web-oriented KR
• Formal theories: semantics for KR on the web, soundness and completeness of web-oriented reasoning, semantics of interlinked data

• Vision papers: visionary solutions to the problems of identity and reference in KR
• Project papers: descriptions of research & development projects in this area
• Experiences: contributions from research and industry that illustrate case studies or approaches to deal with the issues of identity and reference on a web-scale
• Critical viewpoints: discussions of advantages and disadvantages of the proposed approaches

We especially encourage contributions from groups or organizations which are working on assembling large knowledge-based data collections in order to compare the different practical solutions which were found for integrating semantic data from multiple sources.

Submission Requirements and Dates

IR-KR2009 will accept submissions for full papers, posters and demonstrations. The selection will be based on the significance and the quality of submissions as well as oriented towards fostering cross-pollination and discussions during the event. All elected abstracts will be included in the IJCAI-09 Working Notes. Authors are kindly requested to provide keywords upon submission. The format for submissions is the same as that of IJCAI-09. Please check http://ijcai-09.org for the style files. Submissions should be no longer than 5 pages.

• Submission deadline (papers, posters, demos): March 16, 2009 <--- EXTENDED
• Notification to authors: April 17, 2009
• Camera-ready version: May 8, 2009
• Workshop dates: July 11-13, 2009

Submissions will be managed through EasyChair.org at: https://www.easychair.org/login.cgi?conf=irkr2009

Attendance

Following IJCAI-09 policy, the total number of participants in IR-KR2009 will be limited to 75 people. This includes organizers, PC
members, invited speakers, authors and attendees. Authors will be selected based on the significance of their submission and will be preferred during registration to non-presenting attendees. Non-presenting attendees will be selected on a first-come-first-served basis. Please refer to http://ijcai-09.org for the application procedure and fees.

Workshop Chair

Paolo Bouquet, University of Trento [PRIMARY CONTACT]
bouquet@disi.unitn.it

Workshop Organizers

Marko Grobelnik, IJS, Slovenia
marko.grobelnik@ijs.si

Harry Halpin, University of Edinburgh
hhalpin@ibiblio.org

Frank van Harmelen. VU Amsterdam
Frank.van.Harmelen@cs.vu.nl

Heiko Stoermer. University of Trento
stoermer@dit.unitn.it

Giovanni Tummarello. DERI Galway
giovanni.tummarello@deri.org

Michael Witbrock, Cycorp Inc
witbrock@cycorp.eu

Program Committee

Bo Andersson
Karl Aberer
Michael K. Bergman
Stefano Bocconi
Dan Brickley
Werner Ceusters
Kendall Clark
Richard Cyganiak
Hugh Glaser
Nicola Guarino
Gregor Hackenbroich
Tom Heath
Alexander Löser
Antonio Maña
Larry Masinter
Bijan Parsia
Peter F. Patel-Schneider
Valentina Presutti
Marta Sabou
Leo Sauermann
Luciano Serafini
Dagobert Soergel
Andraz Tori
Bernard Vatant