VUSW09

The Semantic Web has recently attracted much attention both from academia and industry, and it is widely regarded as the next step in the evolution of the World Wide Web, towards the Intelligent Web. It aims at enhancing content on the World Wide Web (WWW) with meta-data, enabling agents (machines or human users) to process, share and interpret Web content. Nowadays, for many people, the WWW has become an indispensable tool of research (it is used in order to provide useful information to humans). Unfortunately, searching the Web in its current form is not well suited for finding information which is ill-defined (in texts, pictures, videos, and so on). Up to now, users are able to only find “precise information”, using the underlying binary logic. An immediate problem is that search engines usually provide a huge number of answers, many of which are completely irrelevant, whereas some of the more interesting answers are not found. One of the reasons for this unsatisfactory state of affairs is that existing Web resources are mainly oriented towards human understandability: the mark-up (meta-data) only provides rendering information for textual and graphical information intended for human consumption. Hence, a way to improve the expressiveness of the Web-knowledge is to integrate it with uncertain and vague features. The Semantic Web challenge is to develop frameworks to bring semantics to Web contents, with the aim to make agents (i.e. machines and humans) understand each other by sharing knowledge. Any agent might thus process and interpret Web contents. This could only be performed if imprecise and uncertain information can be correctly interpreted and processed. Thus, to reach this scope, Web-based Retrieval Systems must include new semantic features in order to retrieve semantically correlated information and to satisfy user's queries. However, up to now, the use of the techniques for making the Web more intelligent is still in the early stages. Hence, the objective of this workshop is to provide a concrete study and analysis for making Web-knowledge more expressive and fruitful, hosting novel research contributions (i) to develop Semantic Web tools, models and languages (e.g., Jena developers, ontologies editors developers), and (ii) to provide facilities for representing knowledge and reasoning under uncertainty and/or imprecision.

[edit] The topics of main interest are:

• Fuzzy Ontology and Fuzzy Description Logics
• Probabilistic Ontology and Probabilistic Description Logics
• Ontology Approximation
• Ontology languages
• Granular computing tools for the Semantic Web
• Uncertainty reasoning tools for the Semantic Web
• Concept-based Information retrieval

[edit] Organizing Committee:

• Silvia Calegari, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy
• Davide Ciucci, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy
• Elie Sanchez, LIF, Faculte de Medecine (Universite Aix-Marseille), France
• Umberto Straccia, ISTI-CNR, Italy

[edit] Program Committee:

• Paulo Cesar da Costa, George Mason University, USA
• Ernesto Damiani, Universita degli Studi di Milano, Italy
• Martine De Cock, Ghent University, Belgium
• Stijn Heymans, Technische Universitaet Wien, Austria
• Anne Laurent, LIRMM, France
• Thomas Lukasiewicz, Oxford University / TU Vienna, U.K. / Austria
• Trevor Martin, University of Bristol, UK
• Gabriella Pasi, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy
• Peter Vojtas, Charles University Prague, Czech Republic