Ontologies in Integrated, Social and Environmental Simulation
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
at ESSA 2011 (see http://www.essa2011.org/specific_sessions)
19.-23. September 2011, Montpellier, France
Ontologies are defined by Grüber (1993) as “Formal, explicit specifications of a shared conceptualisation,” but the concept of an ontology goes back to the early days of AI, where it was used to denote the formalisms applied to describing the often simplified ‘micro-worlds’ that AI systems operated on (e.g. ‘blocks-world’ (Winograd, 1972). Ontologies have since been applied to representing knowledge in the real world, the Cyc project (Lenat, 1995) being a famous example. Much of the recent work in ontologies in computing science has been applied to issues of semantic heterogeneity when operating on distributed databases across organisations, and in integrating knowledge on the semantic web. There is now a growing community of researchers using and reasoning with ontologies in formalisms such as OWL, F-logic, logic programming, or XML, in social simulation and integrated social and environmental simulation (Villa, Athanasiadis and Rizzoli (2008) review examples in environmental modelling).
The purpose of this session is to bring this community together to exchange ideas and explore future directions. Contributions could include, but are not limited to: using ontologies to capture metadata on simulation experiments, using ontologies to describe and categorise the simulations themselves, using ontologies to describe the structure and state of simulations, using ontologies to capture provenance of simulations, or their input data or outputs, using ontologies to describe scenarios and link simulations with other work, using ontologies to assist with data or model integration, technology gaps and barriers to adopting ontologies with simulations, eliciting ontologies for social and integrated social and environmental simulations.
Position papers of up to 3 pages to be submitted through ESSA submission (http://www.essa2011.org/)
Contact: Gary Polhill (Gary Polhill <[log in to unmask]>), Jean-Pierre Müller ([log in to unmask]), Pascal Perez ([log in to unmask])
------------------------------------
Jean-Pierre Muller e-mail: [log in to unmask]
Senior scientist tel.: +33 (0)4 67 59 38 28
CIRAD TA C-47/F secr.: +33 (0)4 67 59 39 58
Campus International de Baillarguet fax: +33 (0)4 67 59 38 27
34398 Montpellier cedex 5 - France web: http://cormas.cirad.fr
|