Final CFP: ISWC'12 Workshop on Discovering Meaning On the Go in Large & Heterogeneous Data (LHD-12)

[Fiona McNeill]

Apologies for cross-posting

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Call for papers for LHD-12 workshop at ISWC-12, 11 or 12 November 2012, Boston:

The 2nd Workshop on Discovering Meaning On the Go in Large & Heterogeneous Data

http://dream.inf.ed.ac.uk/events/lhd-12/
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An interdisciplinary approach is necessary to discover and match
meaning dynamically in a world of increasingly large data sources.
This will be a half-day workshop which will bring together
practitioners from academia, industry and government to participate in
discussion and debate.  It will involve

*  A panel discussion focussing on these issues from an industrial and
governmental point of view.  Membership to be confirmed, but we expect
a representative from Scottish Government and from Google, as well as
others.
* Short presentations grouped into themed panels, to stimulate debate
not just about individual contributions but also about the themes in
general.

This is a continuation of the LHD-11 workshop
(http://dream.inf.ed.ac.uk/events/lhd-11/).


Workshop Description

The problem of semantic alignment - that of two systems failing to
understand one another when their representations are not identical -
occurs in a huge variety of areas: Linked Data, database integration,
e-science, multi-agent systems, information retrieval over structured
data; anywhere, in fact, where semantics or a shared structure are
necessary but centralised control over the schema of the data sources
is undesirable or impractical. Yet this is increasingly a critical
problem in the world of large scale data, particularly as more and
more of this kind of data is available over the Web.

In order to interact successfully in an open and heterogeneous
environment, being able to dynamically and adaptively integrate large
and heterogeneous data from the Web "on the go" is necessary. This may
not be a  precise process but a matter of finding a good enough
integration to allow interaction to proceed successfully, even if a
complete solution is impossible.

Considerable success has already been achieved in the field of
ontology matching and merging, but the application of these techniques
- often developed for static environments - to the dynamic integration
of large-scale data has not been well studied.

Presenting the results of such dynamic integration to both end-users
and database administrators - while providing quality assurance and
provenance - is not yet a feature of many deployed systems. To make
matters more difficult, on the Web there are massive amounts of
information available online that could be integrated, but this
information is often chaotically organised, stored in a wide variety
of data-formats, and difficult to interpret.

This area has been of interest in academia for some time, and is
becoming increasingly important in industry and - thanks to open data
efforts and other initiatives - to government as well. The aim of this
workshop is to bring together practitioners from academia, industry
and government who are involved in all aspects of this field: from
those developing, curating and using Linked Data, to those focusing on
matching and merging techniques.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Integration of large and heterogeneous data
* Machine-learning over structured data
* Ontology evolution and dynamics
* Ontology matching and alignment
* Presentation of dynamically integrated data
* Incentives and human computation over structured data and ontologies
* Ranking and search over structured and semi-structured data
* Quality assurance and data-cleansing
* Vocabulary management in Linked Data
* Schema and ontology versioning and provenance
* Background knowledge in matching
* Extensions to knowledge representation languages to better support change
* Inconsistency and missing values in databases and ontologies
* Dynamic knowledge construction and exploitation
* Matching for dynamic applications (e.g., p2p, agents, streaming)
* Case studies, software tools, use cases, applications
* Open problems
* Foundational issues
Applications and evaluations on data-sources that are from the Web and
Linked Data are particularly encouraged.

Submission

LHD-12 invites submissions of papers of no more than 8 pages. Position
papers of 2-3 pages are also encouraged.  Papers will be accepted on
the basis of interesting content that will stimulate discussion, and
are not required to describe work that is completed or extensively
evaluated, though such work is also encouraged.

All accepted papers will be published as part of the ISWC workshop
proceedings, and will be available online from the workshop website.
The previous workshop resulted in a special issue of the Artificial
Intelligence Review, and we will consider another special issue
following this workshop.

All contributions should be in pdf format and should be uploaded via
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lhd12. Authors should use
the LNCS style (http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6793341-0).


Important Dates
Submission: July 31, 2012
Notification: August 31, 2012
Camera ready: September 10, 2012
Early registration: TBA
Late registration: TBA
Workshop: November 11 or 12, 2012

Organising Committee:
Fiona McNeill (University of Edinburgh)
Harry Halpin (Yahoo! Research)
Andriana Gkaniatsou (University of Edinburgh)

Program committee:
Krisztian Balog (University of Amsterdam)
Alan Bundy (University of Edinburgh)
Vinay Chaudri (SRI)
James Cheney (University of Edinburgh)
Oscar Corcho (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)
Jerome Euzenat (INRIA Grenoble Rhone-Alpes)
Eraldo Fernandez (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro)
Pascal Hitzler (Wright State University)
Tom McCutcheon (Dstl)
Shuai Ma (Beihang University)
Adam Pease (Articulate Software)
David Roberston (University of Edinburgh)
Peter Winstanley (Scottish Government)