*** With apologies for cross posting ***
Seventh Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) Workshop on "Ontology-based
knowledge discovery: Using metadata and ontologies for improving access to
agricultural information",
in collaboration with the Fifth Conference of the Asian Federation for
Information Technology in Agricultural (AFITA - 2006)
Bangalore, India
9 - 10 November 2006
Introduction
The goal of the Seventh AOS workshop is to provide a platform for
implementers to demonstrate how ontologies can extract and acquire additional
knowledge from existing agricultural information systems. It aims to bring
together research communities, with special focus on agriculture, whose
members are interested in efficiently capturing knowledge and in creating
representations and formalizations that can be useful for reasoning and
knowledge discovery.
The topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
* Automatic and semi-automatic metadata generation
* Decision-support tools
* Knowledge acquisition methods
* Knowledge elicitation techniques
* Knowledge extraction techniques
* Knowledge representation techniques (in ontologies)
* Metadata and accurate knowledge mark-up
* Ontology application
* Ontology learning
* Ontology life cycle
* Ontology modelling
* Question-answering systems
* Rules in ontologies
Background
The benefits of ontologies can only be fully exploited if they are used
efficiently within information systems for extraction or discovery of
'embedded' knowledge. In today's exponentially growing information world,
there is a mounting need to extract the most important information in the
shortest possible time. It has become vital to have systems that are able to
provide the most relevant results, while sieving through mushrooming
information systems, websites, publications, forums, blogs etc. Although
cataloguing and indexing resources are important steps, it is becoming
increasingly difficult to accomplish these tasks due to the lack of skilled
personnel, the cost of cataloguing and the rapid growth of the available
information resources.
Considerable work has been done to date in the area of knowledge capture
through the use of subject and process ontologies in the agricultural domain.
The AOS project covers, under its name, ontologies on Food and Nutrition,
Food Safety, Animal and Plant Health, Fisheries, etc., each of which captures
knowledge in a specific domain area of agriculture. The complete multilingual
AGROVOC Thesaurus, in the process of being made available in the form of an
ontology, is rich with translations, synonyms and relations. All of these
ontologies have been used in information systems to provide improved access
to information. However, much of this can be further enhanced through the
efficient use of ontologies for extracting the unknown and hidden pieces of
knowledge, not only for providing efficient search results to the users but
also for iteratively improving the ontology itself. We can achieve this only
through the explicit formalization of domain knowledge through its
elicitation from experts and by linking the ontologies to actual or instance
data.
The activities of the AOS initiative are documented at:
http://www.fao.org/aims/.
Important dates
* Paper submission deadline : March 31, 2006
* Announcement of paper acceptance : April 30, 2006
* Camera-ready paper submission deadline : June 26, 2006
Paper submission
All papers should be written in English. Electronic version (MS Word) of the
paper should be sent via email to: Johannes Keizer [log in to unmask]
Publication
Accepted papers will be published within the AFITA 20006 conference
proceedings. At least one author of an accepted paper must register for the
AFITA 2006 conference before the deadline for camera-ready copies of the
papers (26 June 2006). Otherwise the paper will not be published.
Workshop programme committee
Howard Beck, University of Florida, USA
Jayantha Chaterjee, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India
Johannes Keizer, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,
Italy
Gauri Salokhe, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Italy
Dagobert Soergel, University of Maryland, USA
Zhong Wang, Guangdong Academy of Agricultural, China
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