CALL FOR PARTICIPATION AND PAPERS SYMPOSIUM ON ONTOLOGICAL ENGINEERING AAAI 1997 Spring Symposium Series March 24 - 26, 1997 Stanford University, California The last few years have seen a growing interest in the design, use, and sharing of ontologies. Work in this area naturally incorporates formal knowledge representation with practical implemented systems. Recently, there have been workshops on ontologies at ECAI (August 1996), IJCAI (August 1995), LaJolla (November 1994), on implemented ontologies at ECAI in Amsterdam (August 1994), on knowledge sharing and information interchange at IJCAI in Chambery (August 1993), and the workshop on formal ontology in Padova, Italy (March 1993). This symposium will contribute to the continuum of current research, by focusing on the practical aspects of ontology development and use including tools, methodologies, and engineering practice. This is a symposium rather than a mini-conference. We solicit papers (see below), but at the symposium itself the emphasis will be on sharing experiences with ample time for all participants to contribute to the discussion. This symposium will focus on practical experience in the design and construction of ontologies in a variety of different domains. Domains of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following: * Medicine * Natural Language * Materials Science and Engineering * Enterprise Modeling (including process, product, and organization modeling). The goals of the symposium will be to achieve greater understanding of the following issues: * What are the roles that implemented ontologies play. Do they support automated reasoning and problem-solving? Are they used as an interlingua to achieve interoperabilty, reuse, or sharing? Are they used 'merely' to ensure communication of a shared understanding between people? * What methodologies can we use to design and evaluate ontologies? Will these methodologies differ according to the different intended uses? * How can tools best provide assistance for the design and implementation of ontologies? * To what extent are the ontologies designed in different domains shareable and reusable? How can we structure ontologies to support sharing and reuse? * Do we require a suite of generic ontologies to support the more domain-specific ones? If so, what are these generic ontologies? How can they be related to existing standards? * What are the obstacles to the integration of different ontologies? * What lessons have people learned from the implementation of their ontologies? SUBMISSION INFORMATION Persons interested in participating should, by October 25, submit either (1) a technical paper (max. 12 pages, excluding bibliography), (2) a position paper addressing the issues above, or (3) a title and abstract together with a request for an extension of the deadline. Submit electronically as specified on the WWW site listed below, or send three hard-copies of your submission to the contact address. Authors will be notified of acceptance via email. Additional information including final instructions on format and submissions will be posted at: http://ksl-web-web.stanford.edu/projects/htw/sss97/ General information on the AAAI Spring Symposium Series is posted at: http://www.aaai.org/ Please address correspondence to: 1997 Spring Symposium on Ontological Engineering Adam Farquhar Gates Building 2A, MC 9020 Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305, USA Phone: 001-415-723-9770 Fax: 001-415-725-5850 Email: afarquhar@ksl.stanford.edu, gruninger@ie.utoronto.ca ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Adam Farquhar (co-chair, Stanford University, USA) Michael Gruninger (co-chair, University of Toronto, Canada) Asuncion Gomez-Perez (Technical University of Madrid, Spain) Mike Uschold (Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute, Edinburgh, UK) Paul van der Vet (University of Twente, the Netherlands) ** Please Post and Distribute this CFP **