1st International Workshop on Business Models, Business Rules and Ontologies (BuRO 2010)
(workshop co-located with the 4th International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems, RR2010, Bressanone/Brixen, Italy, September 22-24, 2010 )
Description of the Workshop
It is a challenge in a business to enable the right people to interact in their own way with the right part of their business application. We distinguish between three views on the business organization: (1) the view of the business analyst using a formal and validated business model; (2) the view of the knowledge engineer via ontologies and rules, and (3) the view of the IT department via an operationalization in applications. We can glue these views together via an end-to-end point solution: (1) conceptualization and where possible acquisition of business models and their transformation into ontologies and rules; (2) their management and maintenance, and (3) the transparent operationalization in IT applications.
The vision at the heart of the Semantic Web is of high relevance in a business setting as well. The proposed workshop addresses the different issues that arise in a business that wishes to have a transparent and where possible and useful a semi-automatic transfer of knowledge present in business documents expressing, e.g., policies, to an IT operationalization. Moreover, the workshop tackles these issues from an holistic perspective, raising awareness for the overall picture, instead of focusing on stand-alone issues. E.g., although OWL is well-investigated it is unclear how business knowledge expressed in SBVR can be mapped to it. Another example is the W3C's RIF effort: although based on well-investigated rule paradigms, it is less well-connected to upper business layers: how to go from a formal business model to RIF rules and how to interact with derived ontologies?
During the ONTORULE project which shares a similar vision on a business, it has been recognized that this holistic view goes beyond the results attainable within the project and that much more discussion and exchange is needed. As such the workshop wants to create awareness with researchers in stand-alone fields like ontology acquisition, business modeling, integration of ontologies and rules, implementations of rule/ontology engines, that there is a bigger picture that can and should be used to extract requirements on the one hand and to provide output that is fine-tuned for other fields on the other hand.
Topics of interest
Suggested topics include the following (but are not limited to):
- the acquisition of ontologies and rules from unstructured text via Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques
- the development of a complete, formal and validated business model, taking all possible inputs into account (people and documents, structured and unstructured, some of which as output from an NLP phase), using the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR)
- transformation from structured business representations, from SBVR, to RDF/OWL and/or rules
- the management and maintenance of business models, ontologies and rules, e.g., consistency maintenance and the integration of rules and ontologies (semantics, algorithms)
- implementations of such management systems
- use cases and field reports
Submissions
We invite full papers up to 14 pages length. The workshop content will be made available in separate workshop proceedings. Please use the Springer LNCS format for the papers. Submitted papers will be reviewed by at least two members of the program committee. Papers must be submitted electronically in PDF format. For paper submission we use the EasyChair conference management system: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=buro2010
Important Dates
- Submission deadline: Aug 6, 2010 Aug 20, 2010
- Notification of acceptance: August 20, 2010 Sep 3, 2010
- Camera-ready paper submission: September 3, 2010 Sep 10, 2010
- Workshop: September 21, 2010
Invited Talks
Adventures of Two Little OWLs in Rule Land
Markus Kroetzsch, Oxford University Computing Laboratory
Abstract: Combining ontological and rule-based modelling can be an onerous task, from the choice of a suitable semantic framework (there are quite a few) to the selection of a chain of tools for supporting it (there are just a few). Typical solutions combine not only the advantages but also the difficulties of both domains, especially regarding computational complexity. For the recently introduced light-weight profiles of OWL 2, however, the situation is remarkably different. Here we find that existing rule-based systems can rather easily be adopted to support ontological inferencing using established algorithmic methods. This is well-known for OWL RL – “RL” is for “Rule Language” after all – but much less so for OWL EL.
In this talk, we take a closer look at this exciting grey area between light-weight ontologies and rules where both approaches are close enough to allow for an easy combination. We recall the features of OWL EL and RL, and explain how reasoning tasks in both languages can be answered by common rule systems with only a slight transformation of syntax. This approach uses rules as a computational formalism for implementing OWL reasoning without implying a semantic connection: even production rule systems could be used. Going further, we aim at a more intimate semantic combination of (logical) rules, OWL EL, and OWL RL, carefully tuned to allow efficient implementation in polynomial time. Further insights into matters of practical efficiency are gained from recent results on the worst-case space requirements of OWL EL inferencing, and from our experiences with the prototype implementation Orel.
Short Bio: Markus Krötzsch is a post-doctoral researcher at the Oxford University Computing Laboratory. He completed his PhD studies at the Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods (AIFB) of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in 2010. His research interest is the intelligent automatic processing of information, ranging from the foundations of formal knowledge representation to application areas like the Semantic Web. He is the lead developer of the successful Semantic Web application platform Semantic MediaWiki, co-editor of the W3C OWL 2 specification, chief maintainer of the semanticweb.org community portal, and co-author of the textbook Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies.
Using OWL in Ontology-based data integration
Domenico Lembo, Sapienza Universita of Rome
Abstract: Data integration is the problem of providing a single interface and unified mechanisms to access data stored in several autonomous, possibly heterogeneous, information sources. This is a challenging task in many IT applications, such as enterprise information management and data warehousing, as well as in scenarios like e-science, e-government, and web data management. In the context of the Semantic Web, data integration has been often faced through the adoption of shared conceptualizations of the domain of interest referred to as ontologies, with the aim of posing the semantics of the application domain at the center of the scene. It is therefore interesting to analyze which are the implications of using ontologies in data integration, and in particular of adopting Semantic Web languages, such as OWL, within the traditional architecture for data integration. According to such architecture, a data integration system is composed by a global schema, which represents the interface towards the user, a source schema, which models all the sources to be integrated, and the mapping between the two.
In this talk, we consider data integration under this framework when the global schema is specified in OWL, and discuss the impact of this choice on computational complexity of query answering under different instantiations of the framework in terms of query language and form and interpretation of the mapping. As we will see, query answering in the resulting setting is in general computationally too complex, and some limitations on the expressive power of the various components of the framework has to be adopted in order to have efficient query answering. In particular, we will present OWL 2 QL, a tractable profile of OWL 2, and consider it as the ontology language used to express the global schema. OWL 2 QL essentially corresponds to a member of the DL-Lite family, a family of Description Logics designed to have a good trade-off between expressive power of the language and computational complexity of reasoning.
The results in this talk represent joint work with Diego Calvanese (Free University of Bozen/Bolzano), Giuseppe De Giacomo, Maurizio Lenzerini, and Riccardo Rosati (SAPIENZA University of Rome).
Short Bio: Domenico Lembo is assistant professor at the Department of Computer and System Sciences of the SAPIENZA University of Rome. His research interests concerns mainly information integration, Description Logics, Ontologies and the Semantic Web, inconsistency-tolerance in information systems. He authored more than 50 publications on the above topics in international journals and conferences. He is the author of several tutorials in the areas of data integration, ontologies, and the Semantic Web.
Organizing Committee
- Thomas Eiter, TU Vienna, Austria
- Adil El Ghali, IBM, France
- Sergio Fernández, Fundación CTIC, Spain
- Stijn Heymans, TU Vienna, Austria
- François Lévy, Université Paris 13, France
Program Committee
- Patrick Albert, IBM, France
- Darko Anicic, FZI, Germany
- Christopher Brewster, Aston University, UK
- Jordi Cabot, Université de Nantes, France
- Jean Charlet, INSERM, France
- Michael Erdmann, ontoprise GmbH, Germany
- Bernardo Cuenca Grau, University of Oxford, UK
- Stephan Grimm, FZI, Germany
- Pascal Hitzler, Wright State University, USA
- Giovambattista Ianni, Universita della Calabria, Italy
- Thomas Krennwallner, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
- Markus Kroetzsch, AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
- Yue Ma, LIPN, Univ. Paris 13, France
- Diana Maynard, University of Sheffield, UK
- Adeline Nazarenko, Univ. Paris 13, France
- Sjir Nijssen, PNA University
- Adrian Paschke, Free University Berlin, Germany
- Maria Theresa Pazienza, Univ. Tor Vergata, Roma, Italy
- Luis Polo, Fundacion CTIC, Spain
- Edna Ruckhaus, Universidad Simon Bolivar Caracas, Venezuela
- Sebastian Rudolph, AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
- Jos de Bruijn, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Venue
The workshop is colocated with the 4th International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems (RR2010) and will take place at Bressanone/Brixen (Italy) on September 21, 2010. There are some hotels around Brixen at reduced rates for attendees of BuRO 2010. Details about registration will coming soon.
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Dissemination
