The 7th International Workshop on Vocabularies, Ontologies and Rules for the Enterprise (VORTE 2012)
Co-located with the 16th IEEE International EDOC Conference, Beijing, China, 10th-11th September, 2012

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION

The VORTE series of workshops is devoted to the topics of vocabularies, ontologies and rules in the context of enterprise systems. The complexity of enterprise systems, the increasing needs for advanced collaboration between various systems within one institution or among many collaborating parties and the velocity of organizational, policy, structural and market changes strongly call for immediate mobilization of the research community to develop more flexible and reliable technologies for the advancement of enterprise systems.
Trying to respond to this urgent research need, the VORTE series of workshops has been established in order to bring together researchers and practitioners that are looking into the topics of ontologies and rules in enterprise system development from different yet complementary perspectives. The major objective is to provide a research forum for exchanging ideas and results covering the use of ontologies and rules in various stages of the lifecycle of enterprise systems.
Examples of topics covered by VORTE research contributions include the development and adaptation of foundational, business and domain ontologies for the enterprise, the use of ontologies and rules in all aspects of enterprise modelling such as business process management and services, the enhancement of rules and services with formal semantics, and the evaluation of such systems and approaches. The workshop is also a forum for the discussion of ontology-based knowledge management issues, interoperability issues and ontology engineering issues, and covers various application domains relevant for organizations (such as e-government and e-commerce). The workshop also welcomes contributions on open linked data initiatives for the enterprise and empirical studies on the use of ontologies and rules in the enterprise system development lifecycle.

TOPICS

Vocabularies and Ontologies for the enterprise:
- Ontology-driven representation of products, services, functionalities, design, processes;
- Ontologies for the know-how;
- Ontologies for corporate knowledge;
- Upper-level ontologies in the enterprise;

Knowledge management:
- Ontology and ontological methodologies in knowledge management and integration;
- Adaptation of ontologies for companies and organizations;
- Ontology engineering, learning and maintenance within organizations;
- Ontology integration and alignment within organizations;
- Ontology effectiveness and evaluation in organizations;

Conceptual and Enterprise Modeling:
- Ontological Foundations for Conceptual Modeling and Meta-modeling
- Ontology Design and maintenance for Conceptual Model Integration;
- Ontology-Based Conceptual Modeling Tools and Environments
- Ontologies and Enterprise Architecture Modeling
- Ontologies and Business Process Modeling
- Ontologies and Goal-Based Modeling
- Ontologies and Business Rules

Enterprise Semantic Interoperability:
- Web services, Semantic services
- Composition and Modularity
- Merging, Mapping and Alignment
- Ontology Language Interoperability
- Open linked data publishing and exploitation

Problems and case studies in ontology application:
- Practical issues in using ontologies in enterprises
- Real cases of successful/unsuccessful use of ontology in business
- From legacy systems to the new ontology-driven systems

SUBMISSION AND PUBLICATION

We solicit two types of papers:
- Short papers (4 pages) discussing controversial issues in the field or describing interesting or thought-provoking ideas that are not yet fully developed; and
- Full papers (8-10 pages) describing more mature results
All submissions MUST conform to the two-column format of IEEE Computer Society conference proceedings (http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/cscps/formatting) and include the author's name, affiliation, and contact details.
Papers must be submitted as PDF files using EasyChair at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vorte2012
All papers must not have been previously published or submitted elsewhere.

The papers accepted for the EDOC 2012 Workshops will be published after the workshop with an ISBN in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. At least one of the authors for each accepted paper must register for the main conference (there will be no workshop-only registration at EDOC 2012) and present their papers at the workshop.

Post-conference Journal Publication

For previous editions of the workshop, special issues have been published in journals such as Applied Ontology (2007), IJBPIM (2007), Elsevier's Information Systems (2008, 2010), and Journal of Research Practice in Information Technology (2009).
This year, authors of selected papers will be invited to submit extended versions for consideration for a special issue of the Applied Ontology Journal http://www.iospress.nl/journal/applied-ontology/.

KEYNOTE
TBA

IMPORTANT DATES

Workshop paper submissions: April 15, 2012
Workshops paper acceptance notifications: May 28, 2012
Camera-ready papers due: June 15, 2012
Workshop: September 10 or 11, 2012?

COMMITTEES

Workshop Chairs:

João Paulo A. Almeida, Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil, jpalmeida@ieee.org
Roberta Ferrario, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technology, Laboratory for Applied Ontology, CNR, Trento, Italy, roberta.ferrario@cnr.it
Amal Zouaq, Royal Military College of Canada, Athabasca University, Queen’s University, Canada, amal.zouaq@rmc.ca

Steering Committee:

Dragan Gasevic, Athabasca University, Canada
Giancarlo Guizzardi, Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES), Vitória, Brazil
Gerd Wagner, Institute of Informatics, Brandenburg University of Technology at Cottbus, Germany

Program Committee:

Uwe Assmann, TU Dresden, Germany
Colin Atkinson, University of Mannheim, Germany
Ebrahim Bagheri, Athabasca University, Canada
Emanuele Bottazzi, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, CNR, Trento, Italy
Marco Brambilla, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Christoph Bussler, Merced Systems, Inc., USA
Robert Colomb, The University of Queensland, Australia
Oscar Corcho, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
Jens Dietrich, Massey University, New Zealand
Sergio España, Polytechnic University of Valencia
Joerg Evermann, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada
Ricardo Falbo, Federal University of Espirito Santo, Brazil
Luís Ferreira Pires, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Adrian Giurca, Brandenburg University of Technology at Cottbus, Germany
Guido Governatori, NICTA, Australia
Pierre Grenon, European Bioinformatics Institute, Cambridge, UK
Giancarlo Guizzardi, Federal University of Espirito Santo, Brazil
Brian Henderson Sellers, University of Technology Sydney, Australia
Heinrich Herre, University of Leipzig, Germany
Florian Matthes, University of Munich, Germany
Alex Norta, University of Helsinki, Finland
Andreas Opdahl, University of Bergen, Norway
Jeffrey Parsons, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada
Adrian Paschke, Free University Berlin, Germany
Florian Probst, SAP Research Darmstadt, Germany
Christophe Roche, University of Savoie, France
Michael Rosemann, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Csaba Veres, University of Bergen, Norway
Gerd Wagner, Brandenburg University of Technology at Cottbus, Germany
Kewen Wang, Griffith University, Australia
Ron Weber, Monash University, Australia
Hans Weigand, Faculty of Economics of Tilburg University, Netherlands

LINKS

VORTE2012 web site: http://nemo.inf.ufes.br/vorte2012
EDOC2012 web site: http://edocconference.org
EasyChair submissions:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vorte2012
Formatting guidelines: http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/cscps/formatting