NEFORS2008 - call for papers

[Uwe Keller]

** Apologies for possible cross-posting **

========================= CALL FOR PAPERS =========================

Second International Workshop: "New forms of reasoning for the Semantic 
Web: scaleable, tolerant and dynamic"

http://nefors08.larkc.eu

Co-located with the 3rd Asian Semantic Web Conference (ASWC 2008) 
http://www.aswc2008.org/

Pathumthani, Thailand, 8th-11th December 2008

===================================================================


Workshop Objectives
===================
The Semantic Web is the vision of a Web of data usable for both humans 
but also machines. This web, consists of inter-connected instance data 
annotated with possibly expressive ontologies.  Therefore a tremendous 
amount of information becomes available that
should be processed based on formal semantics attached to it. The 
Semantic Web community has developed a number of languages (such as
RDF, RDF Schema, OWL) that deploy logic for this purpose. Impressive 
progress has been made on scalable storage, querying and inference
for these languages, and they are successfully being deployed on large 
intranets and medium-scale web-applications.

However existing reasoning techniques often fail to live up to the 
expectations put into them in this context. They can often neither deal 
with high number of instances, the expressiveness of the ontologies 
describing them or the inherent inconsistency and incompleteness of data 
on the Web.

This workshop is intended to focus on these problems of scalability and 
robustness of reasoning on the Web, and furthermore to investigate 
alternative reasoning methods, which take incompleteness and 
distribution of data and knowledge as inherent properties into account.

NeForS08 is the follow-up of the first international workshop on "New 
forms of reasoning for the Semantic Web: scalable, tolerant and 
dynamic", which took place in Busan, Korea in November 2007 and was 
co-located with the 6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 
2007) and 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference (ASWC 2007).


Topics of Interest
==================
We welcome all research contributions that address one or more of the 
following topics:
* Reasoning for the Web
* Querying and searching
* Scalability to the Web level
* Efficient storage of structured data that scale to a very large size

We also aim to attract participants from scientific fields not typically 
seen at Semantic Web events:
* Economics can tell us about cost-benefit trade-off models, sunk-cost 
theory and the role of negotiation in obtaining near-optimal results 
under bounded resources
* Cognitive Science can tell us about strategies of human memory and 
human reasoning which is so succesful in reaching good enough conclusion 
in limited time-spans, using methods such as priming, attention scoping, 
recency-based self-optimising memory, etc.
* Computational Learning Theory has contributions to make with their 
notions of Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) computing, and 
strategies for abstraction and compression of information.
* Combinatorial Search has made recent breakthroughs in handling massive 
search-spaces with heuristics based on Monte Carlo simulations.


Event Information
=================
The workshop will take place during the 3rd Asian Semantic Web 
Conference (ASWC2008) as a full-day event.
It will be organized as a full day event and include an invited talk by 
Kyung-il Tony Lee, president and CEO of Saltlux Inc. on the industrial 
view on semantic technologies and the need for large-scale reasoning.

Please note that for every accepted paper at least one of the authors 
must attend the workshop and must register for the workshop and the main 
conference.
Submission of a paper is not required for attendance at the workshop. 
However, in the event that the workshop cannot accommodate all who would 
like to participate, those who have submitted a paper will be given
priority.


Submissions
===========
The workshop invites full papers (up to 15 pages) as well as short 
papers (up to 5 pages). All contributions will be peer reviewed by the 
program commitee (see http://nefors08.larkc.eu) and accepted submissions 
will be published in a dedicated book. The number of accepted papers 
will be kept deliberately low in order to leave sufficient time for 
discussion after presentations.
Additionally  we are considering a special issue in a journal on 
semantic computing for extended versions of selected, high quality 
submissions.

Submitted papers must be written in English and one of the following 
format must be used for the first submission: PDF, PS, DOC. For 
submissions please follow LNCS formatting instructions (see 
http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-2-72376-0 for details) 
to prepare your paper and consider using the camera ready format even 
for the first submission.

Furthermore papers need to be submitted electronically through the 
EasyChair using the following link:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences?conf=nefors08


Important Dates
===============
* September 15, 2008: Submission of papers
* September 30, 2008: Notification of acceptance
* October 15, 2008: Camera-ready version due
* December 8, 2008: Workshop


Organizers
==========
Zhisheng Huang, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Uwe Keller, Semantic Technology Institute, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Ning Zhong, Maebashi Institute of Technology, Japan and The 
International WIC Institute/BJUT, China

Program Committee
=================
Ruzica Piskac, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
Stefan Schlobach, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Lael Schooler, MPI for Human Development, Berlin, Germany
Pascal Hitzler, Institut für Angewandte Informatik und Formale 
Beschreibungsverfahren (AIFB), Karlsruhe, Germany
Yue Pan, IBM Research Laboratory, Beijing, China
Xiaoping Chen, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China
Emanuele Della Valle, CEFRIEL, Milano, Italy
Stefania Galizia, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Milton 
Keynes, United Kingdom
Guilin Qi, Institut für Angewandte Informatik und Formale 
Beschreibungsverfahren (AIFB), Karlsruhe, Germany
Michael Witbrock, Cycorp, Austin, Texas, USA
Juanzi Li, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Ilya Zaihrayeu, University of Trento, Trento, Italy

Steering Committee
===================
Dieter Fensel, Semantic Technology Institute, University of Innsbruck, 
Austria
Frank van Harmelen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands


Contact
=======
Florian Fischer
Semantic Technology Institute, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Technikerstr. 21a, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria
E florian.fischer at sti2.at