Conceptual Analysis and Ontological Modelling in Information Systems

Track-Chairs:

Prof. Dr. Heinz Dreher, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australien
Prof. Dr. Stefan Voß, Universität Hamburg (Coordinator)
Dr. Torsten Reiners, Universität Hamburg
Bob Williams, Blue Wren

Content:

With Web 2.0, the creation of digital content using all types of media accelerated as a result of increasing Internet accessibility, social communities who share and collect information as well as improved applications allowing everyone to become a producer. The current usage of tags and asynchronous linking provides a means to reveal some basic structural elements within the vast ‘repositories of knowledge’ and generally in the seemingly endless prolifera-tion of data but ignores the needs of (basic) users with respect to differentiate expert knowl-edge from ‘data’ (opinion, unverified reports, and other material disguised amateurish gossip and musings. Users wish to retrieve precise results on questions asked in imprecise natural languages, and to overcome any cultural or language barrier, or to extract additional infor-mation such as context, temporal relationships, concept interconnectedness, and alternative media documents representing like content.

The next generation of the Web is called 3.0 and is supposed to be ‘intelligent’ in that it em-phasizes machine-facilitated understanding of information by incorporating, for example, semantic networks, machine learning, autonomous agents, artificial intelligence and distrib-uted databases. Of especial importance is the ‘understanding’ of content by applications, requiring agents to operate autonomously, and the provision of service oriented architec-tures where missing components are automatically searched for and integrated and pro-vided via a natural interface to the user.

One popular approach for progressing issues relating to concept ‘understanding’ being used in recent times is ontology based. Ontologies are an explicit, formal specification of common conceptual classification schemes and generally describe a hierarchy of concepts using a subsumption relation. From a theoretic understanding, ontologies also describe semantic relations between concepts allowing the distinguishing of different objects with the same identifier (domain knowledge). Concepts represent the meaning behind ‘objects’, i.e. to un-derstand and express similarity or differences among objects, provide a classification, and identify objects as belonging. Conceptual analysis is the examination and analysis of texts to identify and mark concepts for ‘understanding’, detecting the context, or scenario, and other forms of sophisticated information-rich structures.

This track reviews the state-of-the-art theories and applications of conceptual analysis in the context of information Science. The importance of understanding the content rather than manipulating and managing the documents is increasing as the amount of data is not longer manageable by humans, especially considering influences by language, culture and required expert knowledge. Three scenarios with importance for Information Science are

plagiarism,
text mining, and
machine translation evaluation

whereas all have in common that most implementations are still based on explicit word group comparison. That is, for plagiarism tuplets or triplets of words are searched in data-bases to find similarities, not handling translations, synonyms or rewriting of ideas. Concep-tual Rubrics is an emerging topic that moves us beyond “string of text” comparisons. Con-ceptual analysis uses the concepts and compares these as well as its order/structure to find similarities in between documents, search requests or translated documents, whereas simi-larity is not given by grammar or vocabulary but understanding in a socio-cultural context. For plagiarism and machine translation evaluation, aligned terminologies databases can be used to match concepts in different languages and therefore settle these technologies on an international market.

Possible themes for contributions:

Knowledge Representation
Terminology Databases / Alignment
Ontological models and systems
Ontology based analysis
Information Retrieval / Concept Retrieval
Text Mining
Evaluation of Machine Translation
Plagiarism Detection and Analysis
Scenario Building and Evaluation
Automated Essay Grading
Concept Searching, Analysis, and Evaluation
Concepts in a Socio-Cultural Context
Concept Rubrics
…

Program comitee:

Prof. Dr. Heinz Dreher, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australien
Dr. Christian Gütl, Universität Graz
Dr. Felix Mödritscher, WU Wien
Prof. Dr. Alan Rea, Western Michigan University
Dr. Torsten Reiners, Universität Hamburg
Prof. Dr. Stefan Voß, Universität Hamburg

Review process and submissions:

Papers can be submitted in German or English and should fit to the style sheet of the MKWI 2010. Papers should not exceed a total length of 12 pages (full version).

All contributions will be reviewed at least double-blind by a program committee. Please re-move name, address etc. from the submitted papers and also meta-data from the submitted Word- / PDF-documents.

The style sheet is available here.

Papers can only be submitted within one track/one sub-conference. Authors should submit their contributions by using the ConfTool (provided later).

Publication:

Accepted papers will be published as short version (2 pages) in the proceedings, published by the Göttinger Universitätsverlag. Full versions of accepted papers will be stored on CD which will be part of the proceedings. Additionally, full versions of accepted papers will be made available in the publication repository of the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen and will be linked within the literature reference systems.

Additionally the best contributions are designated for subsequent journal publication in an extended version (more than 12 pages).

Publishing of an accepted paper in the proceedings requires at least one of the authors attending the MKWI 2010 and paying the conference fee.

Dates:

04.10.2009: Deadline for submission of papers
02.11.2009: Notification of Acceptance
27.11.2009: Deadline for submission of final papers
23. - 25.02.2010: MKWI 2010