SUO: IJCAI-2001 workshop proposal
Prof. van Beek,
Below, please find a proposal for a workshop to be held at
IJCAI-2001. I look forward to hearing from you.
Adam
- A brief technical description of the workshop, specifying the workshop
goals and the technical issues that will be its focus.
This workshop will support the IEEE Standard Upper Ontology study group
effort.
This standard will specify an upper ontology. An ontology consists
of a set of concepts, axioms, and relationships that describe a domain of
interest. An upper ontology is limited to concepts that are meta, generic,
abstract and philosophical. The concepts in an upper ontology address all
domains of interest. Each concept will have a specification of its meaning
and a term to label it. The former consists of 1) a set of axioms expressed
in a formal language that define the concept and its relationships with
other concepts and 2) comments in natural language to aid human
understanding. This ontology will include roughly several thousand
concepts. It will provide a foundation for ontologies of much larger size
and more specific scope, whose concepts can be defined, partially or
completely, using concepts from the upper ontology.
a. The standard will be suitable for automated logical inference to
support knowledge-based reasoning applications.
b. Since this ontology could be mapped to more restricted forms such
as XML, database schema, or object oriented schema, this will enable
developers of databases and other software applications to define new data
elements in terms of a common ontology, and thereby gain some degree of
interoperability with other conformant systems.
c. Owners of existing systems will be able to map existing data
elements just once to a common ontology, and thereby gain a degree of
interoperability with other representations that conform to SUO.
d. Domain-specific ontologies that are compliant with this standard
will be able to interoperate (to some degree) by virtue of the shared common
terms and definitions.
e. Applications of the ontology will include:
1) E-commerce applications from different domains that need
to interoperate at both the data and semantic levels.
2) Educational applications in which students learn concepts
and relationships directly from, or expressed in terms of, a common
ontology. This will also enable a standard record of learning to be kept.
3) Natural language understanding tasks in which a knowledge
based reasoning system uses the ontology to disambiguate among likely
interpretations of natural language statements.interpretations of natural
language statements.
- A brief discussion of why and to whom the workshop is of interest.
This workshop will bring together Computer Scientists, Philosophers,
Linguists and others interested in formal ontology. It will provide an
opportunity for participants in the IEEE Standard Upper Ontology study
group to convene in person and make progress on this standards effort. It
will provide an opportunity for a broader membership of the AI community to
have impact on this standards effort. The interdisciplinary nature of this
effort should have a direct and positive impact on work in Artificial
Intelligence.
Topics covered will include formal theories of semiotics, mereology,
causality, modality, temporal ontology and contexts. Participants will be
asked to address issues of formal content rather than techniques for
logical computation. Participants will be asked to state any formal
content of their papers consistently with regard to the language and upper
level content provided at http://ltsc.ieee.org/suo/index.html
There is another IJCAI proposal for a workshop on "Ontologies and
Information Sharing" that is highly compatible with this workshop. Other
related proposal topics of which we are aware include "E-Commerce and the
Semantic Web", "Ontology Learning" and "Knowledge Management"
We would be interested in having a one day session on the IEEE
standardization effort, the agenda for which is proposed below, and then a
one day joint session with these related workshops.
- A preliminary workshop agenda and a proposed schedule for organizing the
workshop. This should include a brief description of how the organizers
intend to encourage an atmosphere appropriate for a workshop.
09:00 Introduction and Goals Pease
09:30 Summary of formal content submissions Menzel
10:00 Presentation of Abstracts All (10 min ea)
12:00 Lunch
01:00 Standards process Farance
01:30 SUO content discussion All
04:30 SUO - where do we go from here? All
05:30 Summary, wrapup, action item review Pease
Participants will be asked to review the material at
http://ltsc.ieee.org/suo/index.html including previous discussions,
language syntax and semantics and the proposed content of the standard to
date. Participants should address either additions which build on the
proposed standard, or concrete proposed changes which are intended to
revise and improve it.
- If available, a list of tentatively confirmed attendees.
Ian Niles, Teknowledge
Adam Pease, Teknowledge
Mike Uschold, Boeing
John Thompson, Boeing
Chris Menzel, Texas A&M U
other likely attendees who are not yet confirmed include IEEE SUO
participants who are listed at http://ltsc.ieee.org/suo/subscribers.html as
well as
Frank Farance, Farance inc.
- A list of related workshops held within the last three years, if any, and
their relation to the proposed workshop.
IJCAI-99 Workshop KRR-5: Ontologies and Problem-Solving Methods: Lessons
Learned and Future Trends - Addressed how problem solving methods and
ontologies cna support each other. Did not address fundamental issues in
upper ontologies, standardization or relevance of issues in logical philosophy.
IJCAI-97 Ontologies and Multilingual NLP: Addressed how ontologies can
support natural language processing. While a goal of the SUO effort, NLP
is one goal of many and not a central focus.
Also identified as part of the IJCAI workshop proposal on "Ontologies and
Information Sharing" and included here are:
Workshops on Ontologies:
· Applications of Ontologies and Problem-Solving Methods, ECAI 2000
· Ontology Management, AAAI 1999, Orlando, Florida, USA.
· Ontologies and Problem-Solving Methods: Lessons Learned and Future
Trends, IJCAI'99
· Formal Ontologies in Information Systems, FOIS-98, Italy
· Cost Effective Development and use of Ontologies and Problem Solving
Methods, KAW'99 Applications of Ontologies and Problem-Solving Methods,
ECAI'98
· Shareable and Reusable Components for Knowledge Systems, KAW'98
Workshops on Information Sharing and Integration:
· Workshop “Information Sharing” at the International Symposium on Computer
Science for Environmental Protection (UI 2000)
· Third Workshop on Intelligent Information Integration at the
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-99)
· Second International Workshop on Practical Information Mediation,
Brokering, and Commerce on the Internet (I'MEDIAT'99), 1999
· First International Workshop on Information Integration and Web-based
Applications & Services (IIWAS'99), 1999
· Second Workshop on Intelligent Information Integration at the European
Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI-98)
· First International Workshop on Practical Information Mediation,
Brokering, and Commerce on the Internet (I'MEDIAT'98), 1998
- The names, postal addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses (if
available) of the proposed workshop organizing committee. This committee
should consist of three or four people knowledgeable about the technical
issues to be addressed.
Adam Pease (chair), Teknowledge, 1810 Embarcadero Rd, Palo Alto CA 94303
650 424 0500 x571, apease@teknowledge.com
Chris Menzel, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-4237
(979) 845-8764, chris.menzel@tamu.edu
Michael Uschold, Boeing, MC 7L-40, PO Box 24346, Seattle WA 98124-0346
mfu@redwood.rt.cs.boeing.com
- These people cannot all work at the same institution.
- The name of the primary contact for the organizing committee; this person
must have an email address.
Adam Pease, apease@teknowledge.com
- A description of the qualifications of the individual committee members
with respect to organizing an IJCAI workshop, including a list of workshops
previously arranged by any members of the proposed organizing committee, if
any.
Adam Pease is Program Manager and Director of Knowledge Systems at
Teknowledge Corporation. Recently, he has led an integration team for the
DARPA High Performance Knowledge Bases project. He was chair of the panel
"Practical Knowledge Representation and the DARPA High Performance
Knowledge Bases Project" at KR-2000. He is the author of the Core Plan
Representation (CPR), a domain- and task-independent plan representation.
He worked previously at NASA/Ames and at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center.
He holds M.S. and B.S. degrees in Computer Science from Worcester
Polytechnic Institute.
Christopher Menzel is associate professor of philosophy at Texas A&M
University. His primary area of research is philosophical logic, focusing
especially on formal and philosophical issues in intensional logic. He is
also heavily involved in the application of the tools of mathematical logic
to the representation and management of large knowledge bases. He is
currently serving on the program committee for FOIS 2001, the next
International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems. He was
an acting assistant professor and postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the
Study of Language and information at Stanford University. He hold a PhD
from the University of Notre Dame, and a BA in philosophy from Pacific
Lutheran University.
Mike Uschold currently works for Applied & Research and Technology, The
Boeing Company. His focus is on improving reliability, maintainability and
inter-operability of knowledge-based engineering systems; ontologies are a
key technology for meeting these goals. Before that, he was a senior member
of technical staff at the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute
(AIAI), The University of Edinburgh. His activities there included the
development and application of the `Enterprise Ontology', as well as
participating in the ESPRIT Euroknowledge Project, concerned with
standardisation of ontology technology. Mike has also been a lecturer and a
research associate at the Department of AI in Edinburgh. He holds a PhD in
Artificial Intelligence, from The University of Edinburgh, an M.S. in
Computer Science, from Rutgers University, and a B.A. in Mathematics and
Physics from Canisius College.
-----------------
Adam Pease
Teknowledge
(650) 424-0500 x571