** FINAL CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS **

AIME 2005 Ontology Engineering Workshop

DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: May 31st 2005
===================================================
Supported by the EU funded SemanticMining Network of Excellence

Key Information
============

Organisers: Jeremy Rogers, Alan Rector, Robert Stevens

Web: www.cs.man.ac.uk/mig/projects/current/semanticmining/workshop/
Location: Aberdeen, Scotland
Date: Sunday July 24th 2005

Main Conference: http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/aime05/

General Information
===============

Medicine has a long tradition of attempting to codify its terminology. The
London Bills of Mortality, compiled weekly from the 1680s through to the
1830s, categorised the cause of all reported deaths in London, with the goal
of monitoring disease prevalence trends generally and outbreaks of plague in
particular. They are recognised as the forerunner of more modern controlled
terminologies and coding systems for epidemiological monitoring such as the
International Classification of Disease (ICD).

Codified medical data is increasingly being put to uses beyond epidemiology,
including financial billing, resource management and (more recently) as the
input to software supporting or directing clinical care. However,
traditional clinical terminologies like ICD are insufficient to support many
of these desired applications . Similarly, the rapid growth of data in the
post-genomic era of biology has seen a concomitant need to share
understanding about those data.

In order to provide the necessary functionality, biomedical terminologies
are increasingly being re-engineered as ontologies such as OpenGALEN , The
Digital Anatomist and SNOMED-CT, The Gene Ontology, Open Biomedical
Ontologies.

This re-engineering is being catalysed and enabled by a very new
technology - description logics - arising out of the knowledge
representation community. More recently it has begun to be informed by much
older methodologies deriving from 2500 years of European philosophy.
However, whilst good logic and philosophy may be necessary to guarantee the
success of this re-engineering, they may not be sufficient.

This AIME 2005 workshop will bring together researchers across biomedical
informatics to discuss a range of other ontology engineering issues. Noting
that the two halves of the biomedical community are increasingly coming
together in the study of phenotype/genotype correlations, the workshop will
consider the extent to which common ontology engineering solutions are
required.

Submissions
==========

This workshop considers issues in biomedical ontology engineering other than
those relating to description logic or philosophy. These issues include but
are not limited to sociological, cognitive and commercial barriers to the
enterprise. Participants are invited from both the medical and
bioinformatics ontology engineering communities.

We invite submissions describing experiences, tools or methodologies in the
following or related areas (topics prefixed with an asterisk are
particularly encouraged):

CONSTRUCTING ONTOLOGIES
* Quality assurance of ontologies
* Re-use of ontologies
* Ontology induction
* Consensus building
* Managing multiple authors
Metamodels & ontology metadata
Work prioritisation
Versioning and change logs
The local update penalty
Models of editorial control
Funding, publishing and licensing

INTERFACING ONTOLOGIES
*..with information models
..with information extraction
..with natural language generation

DELIVERING ONTOLOGIES
* End-user interfaces
* Inter-rater variability
Lexical annotation quality
End-user training
Intermediate representations

Submission Instructions
==================

Submissions should be in the form of abstracts up to 2 page in length and
should use the standard MS-Word template available from

http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/mig/projects/current/semanticmining/workshop/template.do\
t

Alternatively please submit a simple ASCII text file. LaTeX and Acrobat are
strongly discouraged.

If you wish to discuss possible submissions please feel free to send
questions to the organisers.

Successful submissions will be invited to give presentations of between 15
and 30 minutes. We will also accept "News and Views" talks, describing the
current state of existing projects. These presentations will be of up to 15
minutes in length.

Submissions should be emailed to jeremy.e.rogers@.... We will
normally acknowledge within a (working) day or two. If you don't receive
this, please mail the organisers again!

The workshop is an informal meeting. Papers are reviewed by the programme
committee. All accepted papers will be published by the organisers on their
web site and in the main programme booklet. By submitting your paper, you
consent to this publication.

Authors will be informed of acceptance within a few days of the submission
deadline. (Approx 10th June 2005).

Registration
=========

Registration is via the main conference only
(http://www.csd.abdn.ac.uk/aime05/registration.shtml).