The 20th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management is concerned with the impact of time and space on the representation of knowledge. Knowledge engineering has mostly been about creating static, universal representations. Yet the world is rarely static : everything changes, including the models, and real world systems need to evolve along with the surrounding world. Also, what makes some representations valid in some contexts may make them invalid elsewhere (e.g., jurisdiction for laws).

The special focus of this year’s EKAW is "evolving knowledge", which concerns all aspects of the management and acquisition of knowledge representations of evolving, contextual, and local models. This includes change management, trend detection, model evolution, streaming data and stream reasoning, event processing, time-and space dependent models, contextual and local knowledge representations, etc.

EKAW 2016 will put a special emphasis on the evolvability and localization of knowledge and the correct usage of these limits.

Proceedings

The proceedings of the research track will be published by Springer Verlag in the LNCS series.

The authors of selected best papers will be invited to submit an extended version of their manuscript to a special issue of the Semantic Web Journal by IOS Press.

Best paper award

Research and in-use papers are eligible for the Bob Wielinga Best Paper Award sponsored by Springer Nature that will award a prize of 1,000 euros to the best paper of the main track.

Topics of interest

EKAW 2016 welcomes papers dealing with theoretical, methodological, experimental, and application-oriented aspects of knowledge engineering and knowledge management.

In particular, but not exclusively, we solicit papers about methods, tools and methodologies relevant with regard to the following topics :



• Knowledge in evolving and local contexts

  

  • Model evolution

    

    • Ontology evolution

    


    • Ontology debugging

    


    • Ontology change management and versioning

    


    • Ontology usage trends

    


    


  


  • Methods and methodologies for time awareness

    

    • Modelling of time-indexed knowledge

    


    • Ontology design patterns for time-indexed knowledge

    


    • Reasoning over time-indexed knowledge

    


    • Stream processing and stream reasoning

    


    • Event processing

    


    


  


  • Methods and methodologies for context awareness

    

    • Modelling of contextualised knowledge

    


    • Ontology design patterns for representing context

    


    • Reasoning with context

    


    • Context-aware knowledge-based applications

    


    


  


  • Lessons learned from case studies

    

    • Knowledge management in large organisations

    


    • Adoption of semantic web technologies

    


    • Maintenance of corporate knowledge repositories

    


    


  


  • Applications in specific domains domains such as

    

    • eGovernment and public administration

    


    • Life sciences, health and medicine

    


    • Humanities and Social Sciences

    


    • Automotive and manufacturing industry

    


    • Cultural heritage

    


    • Digital libraries

    


    • Geosciences

    


    • ICT4D (Knowledge in the developing world)

    


    


  


  





• Knowledge Management

  

  • Methodologies and tools for knowledge management

  


  • Knowledge sharing and distribution, collaboration

  


  • Best practices and lessons learned from case studies

  


  • Provenance and trust in knowledge management

  


  • Methods for accelerating take-up of knowledge management technologies

  


  • Corporate memories for knowledge management

  


  • Evolution, maintenance and preservation of knowledge

  


  • Web 2.0 technologies for knowledge management

  


  • Incentives for human knowledge acquisition (e.g. games with a purpose)

  


  





• Knowledge Engineering and Acquisition

  

  • Tools and methodologies for ontology engineering

  


  • Ontology design patterns

  


  • Ontology localisation

  


  • Ontology alignment

  


  • Knowledge authoring and semantic annotation

  


  • Knowledge acquisition from non-ontological resources (thesauri, folksonomies etc.)

  


  • Semi-automatic knowledge acquisition, e.g., ontology learning

  


  • Mining the Semantic Web and the Web of Data

  


  • Ontology evaluation and metrics

  


  • Uncertainty and vagueness in knowledge representation

  


  • Dealing with dynamic, distributed and emerging knowledge

  


  





• Social and Cognitive Aspects of Knowledge Representation

  

  • Similarity and analogy-based reasoning

  


  • Knowledge representation inspired by cognitive science

  


  • Synergies between humans and machines

  


  • Knowledge emerging from user interaction and networks

  


  • Knowledge ecosystems

  


  • Expert finding, e.g., by social network analysis

  


  • Trust and privacy in knowledge representation

  


  • Collaborative and social approaches to knowledge management and acquisition

  


  • Crowdsourcing in knowledge management

  


  





Type of papers

We will accept different types of papers. The papers will all have the same status and follow the same formatting guidelines in the proceedings but will receive special treatment during the reviewing phase. In particular, each paper type will be subject to its own evaluation criteria. The Programme Committee will also make sure that there is a reasonable balance of the paper types accepted. At submission time the paper has to be clearly identified as belonging to one of the following categories.



• Research papers : These are "standard" papers presenting a novel method, technique or analysis with appropriate empirical or other types of evaluation as a proof-of concept. The main evaluation criteria here will be originality, technical soundness and validation.




• In-use papers : Here we are expecting papers describing applications of knowledge management and engineering in real environments. Applications need to address a sufficiently interesting and challenging problem on real-world datasets, involving many users etc. The focus is less on the originality of the approach and more on presenting systems that solve a significant problem while addressing the particular challenges that come with the use of real-world data. Evaluations are essential for this type of paper and should involve a representative subset of the actual users of the system.




• Position papers : We invite researchers to also publish position papers, which describe novel and innovative ideas. Position papers may also comprise an analysis of currently unsolved problems, or review these problems from a new perspective, in order contribute to a better understanding of these problems in the research community. We expect that such papers will guide future research by highlighting critical assumptions, motivating the difficulty of a certain problem or explaining why current techniques are not sufficient, possibly corroborated by quantitative and qualitative arguments.




Important dates



• Abstract deadline : July 8, 2016




• Submission deadline : July 15, 2016




• Notification of acceptance : September 8, 2016




• Camera-ready paper : September 26, 2016




• Conference days : November 19-23, 2016




Submissions

Pre-submission of abstracts is a strict requirement. All papers and abstracts have to be submitted electronically via EasyChair.

All submissions for research, in-use and position papers must be in English, and no longer than 15 pages. Papers that exceed this limit will be rejected without review.

Submissions must be either in PDF or in HTML, formatted in the style of the Springer Publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). For details on the LNCS style, see Springer’s Author Instructions. For details on the HTML format, see the HTML submission guide.

Organization

General chair



• Paolo Ciancarini (University of Bologna, Italy)




Program chairs



• Eva Blomqvist (Linköping University, Sweden)




• Fabio Vitali (University of Bologna, Italy)