Call for Papers:

18th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 2012)
National University of Ireland Galway Quadrangle
October 8-12, 2012.

http://ekaw2012.ekaw.org

The 18th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management is concerned with all aspects of eliciting, acquiring, modeling and managing knowledge, and its role in the construction of knowledge-intensive systems and services for the semantic web, knowledge management, e-business, natural language processing, intelligent information integration, etc.

The special focus of the 18th edition of EKAW will be on "Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management that matters". We are explicitly calling for papers that have a potentially high impact on a specific community or application domain (e.g. pharmacy and life sciences), as well as for papers which report on the development or evaluation of publicly available data sets relevant for a large number of applications. Moreover, we welcome contributions dealing with problems specific to modeling and maintenance of real-world data or knowledge, such as scalability and robustness of knowledge-based applications, or privacy and provenance issues related to organizational knowledge management.

In addition to the main research track, EKAW 2012 will feature a tutorial and workshop program, as well as a poster and demo track. Moreover, there will be a Doctoral Consortium giving new PhD students a possibility to present their research proposals, and to get feedback on methodological and practical aspects of their planned dissertation.

The proceedings of the conference will be published by Springer Verlag in the LNCS series. The LNCS volume will contain the contributed research papers as well as descriptions of the demos presented at the conference. Papers published at any of the workshops will be published in dedicated workshop proceedings.

EKAW 2012 welcomes papers dealing with theoretical, methodological, experimental, and application-oriented aspects of knowledge engineering and knowledge management. In particular, but not exclusively, we solicit papers about methods, tools and methodologies relevant with regard to the following topics:

1) “Knowledge Management and Knowledge Engineering that matters”

• Real-world applications of methods for knowledge management and engineering in domains such as
- e-Government and public administration
- Life sciences, health and medicine
- Automotive and manufacturing industry
- Cultural heritage applications
- Digital libraries
• Development and evaluation of publicly available knowledge repositories for new applications or domains
• Methods and methodologies addressing the challenges of real-world data, e.g.,
- Scalability, robustness etc.
- Maintenance costs and financial risks
- Privacy and data security
• Lessons learned from case studies, e.g.,
- Knowledge management in large organizations
- Adoption of semantic web technologies
- Maintenance of corporate knowledge repositories

2) Knowledge Management

• Methodologies and tools for knowledge management
• Knowledge sharing and distribution, collaboration
• Best practices and lessons learned from case studies
• Provenance and trust in knowledge management
• Methods for accelerating take-up of knowledge management technologies
• Corporate memories for knowledge management
• Evolution, maintenance and preservation of knowledge
• Web 2.0 technologies for knowledge management
• Incentives for human knowledge acquisition (e.g. games with a purpose)

3) Knowledge Engineering and Acquisition

• Tools and methodologies for ontology engineering
• Ontology design patterns
• Ontology localization
• Ontology alignment
• Knowledge authoring and semantic annotation
• Knowledge acquisition from non-ontological resources (thesauri, folksonomies etc.)
• Semi-automatic knowledge acquisition, e.g., ontology learning
• Mining the Semantic Web and the Web of Data
• Ontology evaluation and metrics
• Uncertainty and vagueness in knowledge representation
• Dealing with dynamic, distributed and emerging knowledge

4) Social and Cognitive Aspects of Knowledge Representation

• Knowledge representation inspired by cognitive science
• Synergies between humans and machines
• Knowledge emerging from user interaction and networks
• Knowledge ecosystems
• Expert finding, e.g., by social network analysis
• Trust and privacy in knowledge representation
• Collaborative and social approaches to knowledge management and acquisition
• Crowdsourcing in knowledge management

As last EKAW conference we will accept different types of papers. The papers will all have the same status and follow the same formatting guidelines in the proceedings but will receive special treatment during the reviewing phase. In particular, each paper type will be subject to own evaluation criteria. The PC will also make sure that there is a reasonable balance of the paper types accepted. At submission time the paper has to be clearly identified as belonging to one of the following categories.

• Research papers: These are “standard” papers presenting a novel method, technique or analysis with appropriate empirical or other types of evaluation as proof-of concept. The main evaluation criteria here will be originality, technical soundness and validation.

• In-use papers: Here we are expecting papers describing applications of knowledge management and engineering in real environments. Applications need to address a sufficiently interesting and challenging problem on real-world datasets, involving many users etc. The focus is less on the originality of the approach and more on presenting systems that solve a significant problem while addressing the particular challenges that come with the use of real-world data. Evaluations should involve a representative subset of the actual users of the system.

• Position papers: We invite researchers to also publish position papers which describe novel and innovative ideas. Position papers may also comprise an analysis of currently unsolved problems, or review theses problems from a new perspective, in order contribute to a better understanding of these problem in the research community. We expect that such papers will guide future research by highlighting critical assumptions, motivating the difficulty of a certain problem or explaining why current techniques are not sufficient, possibly corroborated by quantitative and qualitative arguments.

Submissions of research and in-use papers should comprise a maximum of 15 pages formatted according to Springer Verlag LNCS guidelines and uploaded using Easychair ( http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ekaw2012). Position papers are required to have at most 5 pages in the same format.

We will select the best papers from EKAW and invite the authors for a special edition of Journal of Data Semantics.

Important Submission Dates:

Abstract Submission: April 18th, 2012
Full Paper Submission: April 25th, 2012
Notification:June 6th, 2012
Camera-Ready: June 30th, 2012
Tutorial & Workshop Proposal: May 16th, 2012
Demo Submission: July 2nd, 2012
Demo Notification: July 23rd, 2012
Demo Camera-Ready Version: August 4th, 2012
Poster Submission: August 13th, 2012
Poster Notification: September 3rd, 2012

Organizing Committee:

General chair: Heiner Stuckenschmidt
Co-chair and local organizer: Siegfried Handschuh
Program chairs: Annette ten Teije, Johanna Voelker
Workshop and tutorials chairs: Claudia d’Amato, Krysztof Janowicz
Demo and poster chairs: Mathieu d’Aquin, Andriy Nikolov
Doctoral consortium chairs: Nathalie Aussenac-Gilles, Nathalie Hernandez
Sponsor chair: Christian Bizer