ESWC 2010 Workshop on Ontology Repositories and Editors for the Semantic Web (ORES 2010 Workshop)

Call for papers and system descriptions – DEADLINE EXTENDED TO March 7, 2010

The ORES 2010 Workshop is co-located with ESWC 2010 conference in Heraklion, Crete, Greece (May, 30^th - June,3^rd, 2010). The Extended Semantic Web Conference (EWSC 2010) brings together researchers and practioners dealing with different aspects of semantics on the Web.

== Topics ==

We would also like to announce the invited talk as part of the workshop, which
will be given by Nigam Shah from the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics
Research.

The growing number of online ontologies makes the availability of ontology
repositories, in which ontology practitioners can easily find, select and
retrieve reusable components, a crucial issue. The recent emergence of several
ontology repository systems is a further sign of this. However, in order for
these systems to be successful, it is necessary to provide a forum for
researchers and developers to discuss features and exchange ideas on the
realization of ontology repositories in general and to consider explicitly their
role in the ontology lifecycle. In addition, it is now critical to achieve
interoperability between ontology repositories, through common interfaces,
standard metadata formats, etc. ORES10 intends to provide such a forum.

Illustrating the importance of the problem, significant initiatives are now
emerging. One example is the Open Ontology Repositories (OOR) working group set
up by the Ontolog community. Within this effort regular virtual meetings are
organized and actively attended by ontology experts from around the world; The
Ontolog OOR 2008 meeting was held at the National Institute for Standards in
Technology (NIST), generating a joint communiqué outlining requirements and
paving the way for collaborations. Another example is the Ontology Metadata
Vocabulary (OMV) Consortium, addressing metadata for describing ontologies.
Despite these initial efforts, ontology repositories are hardly interoperable
amongst themselves. Although sharing similar aims (providing easy access to
Semantic Web resources), they diverge in the methods and techniques employed for
gathering these documents and making them available; each interprets and uses
metadata in a different manner. Furthermore, many features are still poorly
supported, such as modularization and versioning, as well as the relationship
between ontology repositories and ontology engineering environments (editors) to
support the entire ontology lifecycle.

We would like to bring together researchers and practitioners active in the design,
development and application of ontology repositories, repository-aware editors,
modularization techniques, versioning systems and issues around federated
ontology systems. We therefore encourage the submission of research papers,
position papers and system descriptions discussing some of the following
questions:

 * How can ontology repositories “talk” to each other?
 * How can the abundant and complex knowledge contained in an ontology
repository be made comprehensible for users?
 * What is the role of ontology repositories in the ontology lifecycle?
 * How can branching and versioning be managed in and across ontology
repositories?
 * How can ontology repositories interoperate with ontology editors, and other
applications and legacy systems?
 * How can connections across ontologies be managed within and across ontology
repositories?
 * How can modularity be better supported in ontology repositories and editors?
 * How can ontology repositories and editors use distributed reasoning?
 * How can ontology repositories support corporate, national and domain specific
semantic infrastructures?
 * How do ontology repositories support novel semantic applications?
 * What measurements for describing and comparing ontologies can we use? How
could ontology repositories use these?