Scope
Ontologies provide a shared common understanding about the entities of
a given domain, enabling reuse of data and information. Ontologies are
becoming pervasive; they can model the structure of a knowledge
system, be used to annotate data, applied to software agents or
describe web services. Furthermore, ontologies form the back-bone of
the Semantic Web effort, which envisions the Internet as a globally
linked database, one that supports data interoperability and machine
readable semantics.
However, as the use of ontologies grows, inevitably, many challenges
must be addressed. Ontologies must be peer reviewed and updated
through consensus, data annotations have to be updated as ontologies
change, bringing issues of collaboration and trust to the forefront of
semantic web technologies. Moreover, specific issues for ontology
development and alignment such as: user support, human factors,
alignment accuracy, applicability of different approaches,
scalability, ontology evolution/versioning, run-time requirements of
semantic web services and applications, etc. are critical to the
success of the Semantic Web.
Over the past decade, a number of cognitive support tools for
assisting users with ontology development tasks such as navigation,
exploration, annotation, and mapping have been developed. Human
intervention is necessary for the development of ontologies, to help
evaluate the quality of ontologies and make judgments about mapping
correspondences. Promising techniques from information visualization,
human computer interaction, and computer supported collaborative work
can, and have been applied, to help support such tasks. Furthermore,
initial studies have shown that visualization can help such management
tasks as ontology evaluation and alignment.
The OnAV Workshop aims to provide a forum for researchers discussing
state of the art approaches to ontology management and alignment, and
in particular, to investigate how information visualization techniques
can be applied to support ontology navigation, ontology alignment
decision making tasks, and ontology evaluation. However, we also
encourage researchers and practitioners working in other areas such as
ontologies for Semantic Web applications, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, to
submit interesting and challenging contributions.
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