Dear Colleagues,

Greetings. We wish to bring to your attention a special issue of the Journal
of AIS (JAIS) focusing on "Ontology-driven Information Systems" that we are
currently preparing. A CFP for this issue will be announced soon. In the
meanwhile, prospective authors are highly encouraged to “workshop” their
papers at AMCIS 2003 prior to submitting them to JAIS. We are also
co-chairing a minitrack on the same topic at AMCIS
(http://www.amcis2003.org/) This will greatly help the potential authors to
obtain valuable feedback from the conference in streamlining and
strengthening their papers. While workshopping their ideas at AMCIS 2003 is
desirable, it is not required for submission to the JAIS special issue. We
encourage all ontology researchers to avail this opportunity at AMCIS.

Please send us an email if you have any questions.

Thanks and best regards

R. Ramesh & Rajiv Kishore
School of Management
SUNY at Buffalo
-------------------AMCIS CFP --------------------------------------
          AMCIS'2003 MINITRACK CALL FOR PAPERS

        Ontology-Driven Information Systems

        Co-Chairs:    Rajiv Kishore and R.  Ramesh, School of Management,
The State University of New
                      York at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-4000

        AMCIS Website:  http://www.amcis2003.org
        Submission Deadline: march 17, 2003
        Conference: Tampa, Florida, (August, 2003)


Ontology – or the nature of being, once an esoteric term in the field of
philosophy, has been a subject matter of inquiry in the field of artificial
intelligence for quite some time, and now generally refers to specification
of some knowledge about entities and their relationships in a particular
knowledge domain. Of late, however, there is a growing recognition that
ontological principles and concepts need not be restricted to the
traditional domains of knowledge inquiry, but they can be fruitfully applied
to and developed further in the broader field of information systems (IS).
This has led to the notion of “ontology driven information systems,” a
concept that, although in a preliminary stage of development, opens up new
ways of thinking about ontologies and IS in conjunction with each other, and
covers both the structural and the temporal dimensions of IS. In the
structural aspect, ontologies can provide a mechanism for structuring and
storing generic IS content including database schemas, user interfaces
objects, and application programs that can be customized and integrated into
a functioning IS. In the temporal dimension, ontologies can guide the
development of new information systems by helping analysts and designers
choose appropriate processes, algorithms, rules, and software components
depending upon their needs. It has also been suggested recently that
ontologies, frameworks, and systems are essentially knowledge artifacts at
different levels of knowledge abstraction and, therefore, systems can be
generated from ontologies through specialization and combination. Ontologies
and ontology-driven information systems are being developed and applied in a
variety of emerging business and IT application areas, such as enterprise
modeling, diagnostics, decision-support, adaptive learning, infrastructure
modeling, planning and adaptation, and process and systems modeling. It also
appears that the emerging web services paradigm, spearheaded by leading
companies like IBM, will enable the large-scale development, deployment, and
sharing of ontologies and   ontology-driven information systems.


The mini-track will address topics and issues related to the emergence of
ontologies in the IS field and their application in information systems
development and operation in the business domain, including but not limited
to:

Ontology and Ontologies
Is ontology just a database or a knowledge base? Or is it something more?
Role of Ontologies in Information Systems
Ontologies as Representation Languages vs. Ontologies as Knowledge Bases
Ontologies and Object-Orientation
Ontologies and Intelligent Agent Systems
Ontologies and Logic

Ontological Engineering
Modeling of Ontologies
Conceptual and Formal Representation of Ontologies
Metrics for Ontologies and Ontological Engineering
Ontological Quality Assessment
Representing Behavioral Knowledge and Constraints in Ontologies
Tools and Environments for Ontology Development
Relationships between Ontologies, Frameworks, Patterns, and Components
Learning Ontologies and Dynamic Updating of Ontologies
Evolution and Growth of Ontologies

Emerging Applications of Ontology-Driven Information Systems
Enterprise Systems, Integrative Business Information Systems,   Workflow
Systems
Web Caches as Ontologies
        Adaptive Learning in Design Process
        Co-design of Business and IT using Ontologies
        Ontologies and Digital Libraries
        Onto-mining: Data mining in ontological structures

Enabling Platforms
        Web Services
        Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI)