OIC 2007 - Ontology for the Intelligence Community

[Smith, Barry]

OIC 2007: ONTOLOGY FOR THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY

Towards Effective Exploitation and Integration of Intelligence Resources

Hilton Hotel, Columbia, MD

November 28-29, 2007

The increasing volume, variety and velocity of intelligence analysis 
requires new approaches that will enable greater flexibility, 
precision, timeliness and automation of analysis to maximize valuable 
human resources in responding to fast-evolving threats. 
Ontology-based technology as applied in areas such as bioinformatics 
has demonstrated the possibility of gains along all of these 
dimensions. The time is ripe to extend these gains also to other spheres.

This conference will bring together experts on ontology-based 
technology with particular experience in the problems facing the 
intelligence community. It will feature invited talks from prominent 
ontologists and intelligence community leaders, as well as submitted 
papers focusing especially on the creation of public-domain ontology 
resources to support the work of intelligence analysts.

Conference Director: Barry Smith (National Center for Ontological 
Research, Buffalo)

Scientific Committee
Kathleen Stewart Hornsby (Maine) (Chair)
Bill Andersen (Ontology Works)
Selmer Bringsjord (Rensselaer)
Werner Ceusters (Buffalo)
Randall Dipert (Buffalo)
Terry Janssen (Lockheed)
Kathryn Laskey (George Mason University)
Kevin Lynch (CIA)
Leo Obrst (Mitre)
Chris Welty (IBM Research)


CALL FOR PAPERS
Submissions are invited of short papers in pdf format (up to 1500 
words) designed to serve as the basis for 20-minute oral 
presentations at the conference. The authors of selected papers will 
be invited to submit longer versions for publication in volume 1 of a 
new series on Ontology for the Intelligence Community, to be 
published by IOS Press.

Papers may address a wide variety of issues addressing the ontology 
needs of the intelligence community. We are especially interested in 
papers devoted to the task of creating an interoperable suite of 
public-domain ontologies relevant to intelligence analysis, covering 
areas such as:

         emergency response
         urban settings
         geospatial / cartographic
         ethnicity
         social networks
         images and imaging
         transportation
         moving object tracking
         religion and politics
         biology and health

The ontologies should be combinable at will in such a way as to 
support the integration of data describing different domains. We 
encourage submissions that describe scenarios where multiple 
ontologies are linked to support higher-order analysis and reasoning 
over complex data. Questions to be addressed might include: which 
domains should be included in such a suite of ontologies? how can we 
ensure that ontologies interoperate in useful ways? how can we 
address the specific problems arising in virtue of the partiality and 
uncertainty of intelligence data? how can we use domain ontologies to 
organize, display and share intelligence analysis hypotheses while 
also maintaining a clean distinction between types and instances in 
knowledge representation artifacts?

Deadlines
Receipt of papers: July 15, 2007
Notification of acceptance: August 31, 2007

Further information regarding submission will be provided in due 
course at http://ncor.us/oic2007

For inquiries please write to ncor at buffalo.edu.

This meeting is sponsored by the NATIONAL CENTER FOR ONTOLOGICAL 
RESEARCH - BUFFALO.