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International Workshop on Ontology Alignment and Visualization - OnAV'08

March 4 - 7, 2008, Barcelona, Spain, Polytechnic University of Catalonia
In conjunction with the International Conference on Complex,
Intelligent and Software Intensive Systems

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Scope

Ontologies represent a shared meaning of domain knowledge and act as enabler for many applications such as data integration, agent communication, peer-to-peer systems, e-commerce, and semantic web services. With an increase in the development of ontologies comes the need for tools and techniques for solving heterogeneity problems among different ontologies. Ontology alignment helps to establish mutual agreement between different knowledge representations and to reconcile differences that may arise when two ontologies represent constructs at different levels of abstraction. Although algorithms and tools exist which aim at automatically identifying similarities and differences, ontology alignment is still a largely human-mediated process. User interaction is essential in order to control, approve, and optimize the alignment results.

Currently, we cannot guarantee that the results from ontology alignment algorithms will always be accurate. In general, a user interacting with an ontology alignment tool, must check the candidate alignments produced by the tool, indicate which ones are correct and which ones are not, and create additional matches that the tool may have missed. This is a difficult task, especially when dealing with large, complex ontologies.

This workshop aims at providing a place of discussion for researchers interested in the field of ontology alignment and ontology visualization in order to analyze current shortcomings, identify users' needs and future research challenges, present exciting ideas, and find new solutions for effective and qualitative data integration in the semantic web. Researchers interested in discussing new techniques for understanding and presenting ontology alignment results are encouraged to participate. This also includes researchers with a general interest in ontology visualization techniques.