Dear research colleagues,

we would like to invite you to contribute to the OntoFarm project, which aims at growing a testbed collection of parallel ontologies capturing the same domain from different perspectives. The chosen domain, conference organisation, has the advantage of being broadly understandable by the research community, so all of us are ‚domain experts‘, with experience of having co-organised or at least attended a conference in the past :-).

Different perspectives of the same domain (based on experience with e.g a concrete conference series) results in ‚naturally-introduced‘ heterogeneity in the collection. The main purpose of the collection therefore is to test Semantic Web applications designed to tackle such heterogeneity, such as Ontology Matching or Distributed Reasoning tools. One track of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Inititative (OAEI), organised in connection with ISWC-06, Athens, GA, was already based on this collection. More information about the OAEI initiative is at http://oaei.ontologymatching.org/2006/, specifically about the conference track at http://nb.vse.cz/~svabo/oaei2006/, and some results of the latter are reported in [1].

The development of the collection is being supported by the Knowledge Web EU IST Network of Excellence, as well as by several national projects. Since 2005 we collected 13 ontologies that were created according to three types of underlying resources:

• actual conference (series) and its web pages,
• actual software tool for conference organisation support and
• experience of people with personal participation in conference organisation.

While we have 8 ontologies developed according to tools and 3 ontologies developed according to web sites of conferences, we only have 2 ontologies developed by organisers of some conferences. However, it is such ontologies that are most valuable, as they are likely to provide the deepest insight into the domain.

We foresee to repeat the ‚conference‘ track again in the context of OAEI 2007, and, for this purpose, we would like to extend the collection while improving the quality. Therefore, we would like to encourage current and past organisers of various conferences from the Semantic Web, Ontological Engineering, Artificial Intelligence and similar areas to materialise their experience in the form of an OWL ontology as contribution to the OntoFarm collection.

In return, we expect to provide to the contributors:

• feedback to the ontology content and structure, following up with application of Ontology Mapping and (Distributed) Reasoning tools developed by OAEI participants
• for example, more specifically, some hint on which conference organisation support tool is most suitable for the given conference, or which other conferences share a similar conceptualisation of their organisation.
• last but not least, a sort of advertisement for the given conference within the community, and of course an acknowledgment to the contributors at the OntoFarm and OAEI track websites.

If you are interested, please do not hesitate and send comments, questions and/or ontologies ;-) to svabo at vse dot cz

Best regards,
Ondrej Svab and Vojtech Svatek
University of Economics, Prague
and Knowledge Web IST NoE

[1] Svab O., Svatek V. and Stuckenschmidt H.: A Study in Empirical and ‘Casuistic’ Analysis of Ontology Mapping Results. Accepted to ESWC 2007.