Ontology dynamics and vocabulary best practice

[Norman Gray]

Folks:

Pointer number one: an annotated bibliography of documents and web  
pages concerned with taxonomy and thesaurus management.  This is at  
<http://www.nglis.org.uk/tipsbib.htm> (that document is Word-only,  
but it seems they're going to put a PDF version there soon, and  
there's an older PDF version at <http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/documents/ 
Bibliography2005-05-11.pdf>).  This came from a chat with a (paper)  
archivist colleague at Glasgow.

It seems one of the key pointers in this list is to ISO 5964,  
`Guidelines for the establishment and development of multilingual  
thesauri' (it seems it's about thesauri in general, rather than  
specifically multilingual ones).  The 'Art and Architecture  
Thesaurus' is reportedly a much-cited model of good practice.  It  
appears that archives people do indeed have drummed into them the   
substantial costs involved in creating or maintaining thesauri.



Pointer number two: I've forwarded, below, a call for a journal  
special issue on 'ontology dynamics'.  I doubt that any of us here  
will have anything to put in, but this is to highlight the fact that  
there is a network of issues here: how do you maintain ontologies and  
vocabularies, in the dual sense of maintaining the concepts and  
relationships, and linking the various versions to each other.  These  
are (a) worried about professionally, (b) deemed to be non-trivial,  
and (c) have a name.



Begin forwarded message:

> Resent-From: semantic-web at w3.org
> From: "Giorgos Flouris" <fgeo at ics.forth.gr>
> Date: 2007 October 15 13:07:28 BDT
> To: "'Giorgos Flouris'" <fgeo at ics.forth.gr>
> Subject: FW: Journal of Logic and Computation: Special Issue on  
> Ontology Dynamics - Second call for Papers
>
>
>
> [apologies if you receive multiple copies]
>
> CALL FOR PAPERS
>
> ===========================================
> Journal of Logic and Computation
> Special Issue on Ontology Dynamics
> ===========================================
>
> Description
> -----------
> Recently, there has been a growing interest in encoding human  
> knowledge
> using ontologies represented under some formal representation  
> language.
> Simply creating an ontology is not enough though; ontologies, just  
> like any
> structure holding knowledge, need to be updated as well. There are  
> several
> reasons why an ontology should change: changes could be initiated  
> because of
> a change in the world being modeled; the users' needs may change,  
> requiring
> a different conceptualization; knowledge previously unknown,  
> classified or
> otherwise unavailable may become known; or a design flaw may have been
> noticed in the original conceptualization.
>
> In all these cases, the representation of our knowledge in the  
> ontology
> should be modified so as to form a more accurate or adequate
> conceptualization of the domain. Such a modification presents several
> difficulties from both the practical and the theoretical point of  
> view, as
> it is not always clear what the expected, or desired, result of any
> particular modification should be, nor how such a result can be  
> determined.
>
> This special issue intends to publish articles related to the field of
> ontology dynamics, in order to discuss and analyze important
> characteristics, open research issues and recent research  
> developments on
> the field. We are interested in advances in the field of ontology  
> evolution,
> which is the main research area dealing with ontology dynamics, as  
> well as
> in works that are directly or indirectly related to the problem. Both
> theoretical research work as well as works describing implemented  
> systems or
> tools are welcome. It is targeted to anyone (from academia or  
> industry)
> working on ontology evolution or related fields, as well as to people
> designing, supporting, or using ontologies that are subject to change.
>
> Topics of Interest
> ------------------
> We encourage submissions on all topics related to ontology dynamics,
> including original theoretical work on the issues involved directly or
> indirectly with change as well as applications or implemented systems
> related to such issues. We are particularly (but not exclusively)  
> interested
> in the following topics:
> - Ontology evolution and versioning
> - Foundations and formal aspects of ontology dynamics
> - Extensions to ontology languages to better support change
> - Belief revision for ontologies
> - Inconsistency handling in evolving ontologies
> - Change propagation in ontologies and metadata
> - Ontologies for dynamic environments
> - Dynamic knowledge construction and exploitation
> - Case studies, software tools, use cases, applications
>
> Important Dates
> ---------------
> Submission deadline:		October 31, 2007
> Acceptance notification:		January 31, 2008
> Revised Version deadline:	March 31, 2008
> Final Decision:			May 30, 2008
>
> Method of Submission
> --------------------
> Only electronic submissions will be considered. All submissions  
> should be
> sent by email to Giorgos Flouris (fgeo at ics.forth.gr) in pdf format.
> Submitted articles should follow the general formatting guidelines  
> of the
> Journal of Logic and Computation (see:
> http://www.oxfordjournals.org/logcom/for_authors/index.html).
>
> Guest Editors
> -------------
> Giorgos Flouris, FORTH (fgeo at ics.forth.gr)
> Mathieu d'Aquin, The Open University (M.Daquin at open.ac.uk)
> Grigoris Antoniou, FORTH (antoniou at ics.forth.gr)
> Jeff Z. Pan, University of Aberdeen (jpan at csd.abdn.ac.uk)
> Dimitris Plexousakis, FORTH (dp at ics.forth.gr)
>
>
>
>

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
eurovotech.org  :  University of Leicester, UK