7.0472 Summer Institute: Cognitive Science (1/77)

Elaine Brennan (EDITORS@BROWNVM.BITNET)
Sun, 13 Feb 1994 19:42:15 EST

Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 7, No. 0472. Sunday, 13 Feb 1994.

Date: Mon, 7 Feb 1994 12:23:10 GMT
From: Nicola Guarino <GUARINO@ladseb.pd.cnr.it> (par les soins de vieu@irit.fr
Subject: Cognitive and Ontological Foundations of Knowledge Engineering


FIRST INTERNATIONAL SUMMER INSTITUTE IN COGNITIVE SCIENCE
Buffalo 5-30 July 1994

Participant Symposium on
COGNITIVE AND ONTOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING
23-24 July 1994

During the First International Summer Institute in Cognitive Science to be
held in Buffalo in July, participant symposia will be scheduled in all three
weekends during the course of the Institute (9-10, 16-17 and 23-24 July). All
registered participants may submit papers to be presented at one or more of the
participant symposia. Registration must extend for at least one week beginning
or ending with the relevant weekend period.

Within this general framework, a participant symposium has been scheduled in
the weekend of 23-24 July, with the title "Cognitive and Ontological
Foundations of Knowledge Engineering". The main purpose of this symposium is to
assess the cognitive and ontological status of various notions used as
primitives in KR systems as well as in work on databases and on object-oriented
systems, notions such as concept, object, individual, property, quality,
attribute, part, role, relation, state, situation, event, process, action, etc.
Related issues involve the development of adequate tools for domain analysis
capable of improving the cognitive transparency of knowledge and data bases,
and therefore their potential reusability. Expected topics include:

1. Cognitive and ontological adequacy of KR primitives
- Primitives for knowledge structuring: intended meaning, formal semantics;
- Epistemological vs. conceptual primitives.

2. Ontological instruments in knowledge engineering
- Ontological distinctions between kinds of knowledge;
- Ways of knowledge structuring: dependency analysis, role of mereology;
- The notion of ontological commitment for a knowledge base.

3. NL instruments in knowledge engineering
- Language as a privileged domain for conceptual analysis;
- The role of linguistic competence in knowledge engineering: ontological
assumptions from lexical items or NL descriptions;
- Role of terminological choices in knowledge engineering; discipline for
compound terms;
- Use of on-line linguistic resources in knowledge engineering.

4. Case analyses: concrete experiences of ontology design or reuse
- Striving for reusability: task-oriented vs. domain-oriented analysis;
experiences of ontology reuse.
- Top-level ontologies;
- Existing modeling methodologies and environments for domain analysis.

Symposium organizer:

Nicola Guarino
National Research Council
LADSEB-CNR, Corso Stati Uniti 4
I-35020 Padova, Italy
email: guarino@ladseb.pd.cnr.it
phone: +39 49 8295751
fax: +39 49 8295778, 8295763

Intending participants are invited to send a brief statement of interest to
the symposium organizer as soon as possible, together with comments and
organization suggestions; the final deadline for papers (max 12 pages) is April
15th.

REGISTRATION AND FEES

The partial registration fees for one week of the Summer Institute for
Cognitive Science are US$ 350 for academic affiliates (faculty/student), and
US$ 650 for corporate affiliates. Send a message to

cogsci94@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu

to receive detailed information on the Institute, including course offerings,
speaker series, workshops, fees, living accomodations, and scholarship and
travel support for students.