== 1st International Workshop of Self-Organization and Approximation Techniques
for the Web of Data (SOAT2010) ==
http://www.ag-nbi.de/conf/SOAT2010/

Hosted at FIS2010, the 3rd Future Internet Symposium. September 20-22, 2010
http://www.fis2010.org/

The Internet of Things and the Web of Data promise a future where everything
will be connected and where data can be seamlessly exchanged throughout highly
heterogeneous networks. However, it is yet unclear how these incredible amounts
of messy data will be dealt with. The goal of this workshop is to bring together
researchers from the Internet and Web communities with more heuristic-oriented
problem-solving communities, such as the people interested in Computational
Intelligence (CI) and Nature-inspired algorithms.
A particular focus will be set on the Web of Data (WoD) for which the billions
of facts hosted by many different parties, represented using a variety of
vocabularies with varying degrees of preciseness, and supplied in an
inconsistent fashion yield a high level of messiness. This WoD highlights the
scalability and robustness problems the Future Internet will have to deal with.

= Workshop Topics =
The Future Internet considers new approaches to realize an information transport
and processing infrastructure. An important component of it, the Web of Data,
carries out the vision of a network of information suitable for consumption from
both humans and machines. This web, consisting of inter-connected instance data
annotated with possibly expressive ontologies, promises a huge opportunity for
Web-based applications in many domains. In this Web where everyone is free to
create information, centralized top-down approaches to control the data
available are expensive and hard to design. Just as for the Web of Documents,
any centralized tools have to be approximate: Google does not index all
information on the WWW, and actually, its users would not need to known every
page matching their requests.
Existing reasoning techniques making use of the WoD often fail to live up to
this distributed vision of knowledge on the web. Reasoners may not be able to
cope with the high number of instances and/or the expressiveness of the
ontologies describing them (scalability problem) or fail to deal with a
sometimes unreliable network, lack of maintenance of information or the variety
in quality (robustness problem).

The problems of scalability and robustness of reasoning on the Web have been
widely recognised in the Semantic Web (SW) community. To deal with them, the
urge for alternative reasoning methods has been investigated: e.g. incomplete
reasoning techniques are often able to provide some answers faster than complete
ones. To cope with the variety on the web, and the distribution of the data and
knowledge, the research community looks more and more into alternative reasoning
paradigms. More than only thinking of targeted fixes for specific problems,
there is a need for the SW research community to focus on returning "good
enough" answers. This line of research falls under the heading of approximation,
a domain well studied by researchers working on fields such as Computational
Intelligence and Nature-inspired optimization techniques.
Nature inspired mechanisms are applicable to further areas of interest in the
effort to fulfill the Future Internets promise of location independent,
interoperable, coherent, consistent, scalable, pervasive, reliable, secure and
efficient access to a coordinated set of services. The expected outcome of this
workshop is to reach out to new communities and to open up to the use of new
paradigms within the SW community. A short list of keywords for the workshop
would be:

* Internet of Things
* Web of Data / Semantic Web
* Evolutionary computing
* Artificial immune systems
* Epidemic protocols
* Swarm intelligence
* Collective intelligence
* Emergence and Self-organization

On a broader point of view, any heuristic approach providing anytime approximate
solutions to a problem are likely to be of interest to the participants of this
workshop.

= Important Dates =
Extended Deadline: August 2nd, 2010 (23:59 pm Hawaii time, GMT-10)
Author Notification: August 16th, 2010
Workshop: September 20, 2010

= Submissions =
Papers are requested to be written in English and formatted using the Springer
Publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) and to contain
4-6 pages. Submissions will be made using the EasyChair Conference System, and
proceedings of the papers will be provided through the CEUR online service.
Please refer to the workshop web page for details.
http://www.ag-nbi.de/conf/SOAT2010/

= Workshop Structure =
We plan to use the following Workshop schedule and structure:
The workshop will be organized on a full-day schedule.
The program will be structured around 2 keynotes and a set of submitted papers.
A closing meeting will address future perspectives of the proposed methods.

= Program Committee =
* Ozalp Babaoglu
* Matteo Casadei
* Christophe Gueret
* Barbara Hammer
* Stefan Schlobach
* Robert Tolksdorf
* Frank van Harmelen

We expect confirmations from additional members soon.

= Workshop Organizers =
* Prof. Robert Tolksdorf, Freie Universität Berlin
* Dr. Christophe Guéret, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
* Dr. Stefan Schlobach, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam

= Local Organizers =
* Kia Teymourian, Freie Universität Berlin
* Hannes Mühleisen, Freie Universität Berlin