Deadline Extended: AAAI 2011 Fall Symposium on Open Government Knowledge: AI Opportunities and Challenges

Due to numerous requests, we have extend the deadline of OGK2011 to June=20
17, 2011

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AAAI 2011 Fall Symposium
Open Government Knowledge: AI Opportunities and Challenges
4-6 November 2011 =95 Arlington, Virginia USA

paper due: June 17, 2011
homepage: http://tw.rpi.edu/ogk2011
submission site: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=3Dogk2011
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The 2011 AAAI Fall Symposium on Open Government Knowledge: AI=20
Opportunities and
Challenges (OGK2011) seeks papers on all aspects of publishing public
government data as reusable knowledge on the Web. Both long papers=20
presenting
research results and shorter papers describing late breaking work, outlin=
ing
implemented systems, identifying new research challenges, or articulating=
 a
position are invited. Submissions are due by June 17, notifications will=20
be sent
by July 15, and the final camera-ready copy must be provided by September=
 9,
2011.


Background

Websites like data.gov, research.gov and USASpending.gov aim to improve=20
government transparency, increase accountability, and encourage public=20
participation by publishing public government data online. Although=20
industry and academia have used these for some intriguing applications,=20
the data in its present form is hard for citizens to understand and use.=20
Research and deployment challenges emerging from open government data=20
practices include the following.

* Scalability. How can we search, access and reuse the hundreds of=20
thousands of datasets from data.gov as well the much larger number of=20
datasets directly available at federal agencies' website? Is there an=20
organic way to dramatically increase the amount of open government data=20
in a distributed and collaborative fashion?
* Interoperability. Multi-scale open government data came from city=20
governments, state governments, and national governments. How can one=20
compare the GDP of the US and China, and later link to state-level=20
financial data? Open government data covers many domains. How can one=20
associate open government data with domain knowledge to build, e.g. a=20
cancer prevention application?
* Provenance and quality. How should provenance be leveraged to=20
facilitate high-quality data management interactions (e.g. reuse,=20
mash-up and feedback) and community participation between the government=20
and the public?
* Citizen Involvement. How can linked data application sites encourage=20
more citizen participation for comments and contributions, and then how=20
can these more diverse contributions be tracked, managed, validated, and=20
evaluated?

Several approaches have been proposed to address these challenges. Using=20
semantic technologies, especially Linked Data, to enrich the value of=20
such data and ultimately convey the data to the citizens is one=20
possibility. For example, linking together Justices' backgrounds, and=20
related supreme court decisions has the potential to provide a better=20
understanding of the working of the Supreme Court. Linked Open=20
Government Data are enabled by Semantic Web technologies such as RDF,=20
RDFS, SPARQL and RDFa. Once linked, the value of government data can be=20
greatly increased with a potential reduction of cost (i) applications=20
are no longer limited to one or several datasets but can use all the=20
inter-connected datasets (including non-government data) on the Web;=20
(ii) data-as-interface allow data curators, visualizers and analysts=20
incrementally work on a specific smaller part of data processing=20
independently, (iii) linked data enables transparent data mining and=20
generates detailed provenance traces that allow the study of trust,=20
privacy and policy issues. Using crowd-sourcing to distribute the task=20
of building parsers and visualizers for different data.gov datasets is=20
another possibility. Machine learning to find and explore relationships=20
between data is also a possible approach.

Secondly, for governments to be able to release high quality datasets,=20
they must be able to express usage access and restriction policies. To=20
achieve this, provenance mechanisms must be provided to keep track of=20
which datasets have been used and how these have been combined and=20
policy mechanisms must be used to ensure compliance with appropriate=20
usage restrictions. This involves several interesting areas of research:=20
machine understandable usage restrictions, provenance tracking and=20
maintenance, and scalable reasoners capable of verifying policy complianc=
e.

Lastly, the techniques developed for extracting semantics, using, and=20
sharing open government datasets can also be applied to closed/secure=20
datasets for applications such as sharing private information=20
within/across agencies, and integrating electronic health records across=20
healthcare organizations. In this symposium, we invite input from=20
diverse communities including but not limited to: government data=20
publishers, developers, user communities who run real systems and=20
generate demand for new technologies, and the AI community who can=20
provide solutions and advance the research in the areas specified above.=20
The location of symposium is extremely attractive since a lot of open=20
government data practitioners are conveniently located in Washington, DC.
Suggested Topics include but are not limited to the following

* Automatic and semi-automatic creation of linked data resources
* General ontologies for open linked government data
* Entity linking and co-reference detection between linked data resources
* Adding temporal qualifications to government data
* Creating mash-ups with open government data
* Scalable solutions for linking open government data
* Linked open government data analysis
* Semantic technologies for government data and applications
* Representing and propagating provenance metadata
* Policies for information sharing, use, and privacy
* Managing usage restrictions and privacy of government data
* Metadata for certainty and trust in linked open government data
* Social networks in government data
* Publishing results of machine learning applied to open government data
* Visualization of open government data revealing underlying patterns=20
and relations

Symposium structure

This single track symposium will run from 9:00am Friday November 4 until=20
12:30pm Sunday November 6 and include a mixture of invited talks, paper=20
presentations, panels, system demonstrations, a poster session, and=20
discussions. We plan to have several invited speakers, e.g., a US=20
federal Government representative addressing the current status of the=20
US open government initiative, a researcher discussing open challenges=20
and a W3C staff member describing the role of current and future=20
standards in government knowledge. We will also have a panel to address=20
the emerging issue of health informatics, the potential nationwide=20
health information network, where private health data and public=20
governmental data are interconnected. We are also interested in running=20
a half-day tutorial/hack-a-thon to provide attendees hands-on=20
experiences in creating Linked Open Government Data and building mashups.


Submissions

We invite submissions of full papers (up to eight pages) presenting=20
research results, short papers (up to four pages) defining a position,=20
and statement of interests (up to two pages), articulating a new problem=20
or describing a working system. All accepted papers will be published in=20
a proceedings issued as a AAAI technical report. Papers should be=20
original material that has not been previously published or under review=20
for another venue. Late breaking ideas are encouraged as the subject of=20
a short papers. Papers must be prepared in AAAI format and submitted=20
using the ogk2011 easychair site=20
(http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=3Dogk2011).


Important dates

* 17 June 2011 Submit papers using the ogk2011 site
* 15 July 2011 Notifications sent to authors
* 9 Sept 2011 Camera ready papers due
* 16 Sept 2011 author registration deadline
* 14 Oct 2011 Open pre-registration deadline
* 3 Nov 2011 AI Funding seminar
* 4-6 Nov 2011 Fall Symposium

General symposium information

General information on the 2011 AAAI Fall Symposia will be available=20
from the 2011 AAAI FSS Website. This includes information about=20
deadlines, registration, location, transportation, and hotel accommodatio=
ns.
Organizers

* Li Ding, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
* Tim Finin, UMBC
* Lalana Kagal, MIT
* Deborah McGuinness, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Program committee

* Hal Abelson, MIT, USA
* Quan Bai, CSIRO, Australia
* David Chadwick, Kent University, UK
* Vinay Chaudhri, SRI, USA
* Nick Gibbins, University of Southampton, UK
* Karthik Gomadam, Accenture Technology Labs, USA
* Stuart Graham, USPTO, USA
* Alon Halevy, Google, USA
* Andreas Harth, KIT, DE
* Michael Hausenblas, DERI Galway, Irland
* Sandro Hawke, W3C, USA
* Anupam Joshi, UMBC, USA
* David Karger, MIT, USA
* Gary Katz, MarkLogic, USA
* Qing Liu, CSIRO, Australia
* Ashok Malhotra, Oracle, USA
* Natasha Noy, Stanford University, USA
* Theresa Pardo, SUNY Albany, USA
* Vassilios Peristeras, European Commission, Belgium
* Alexander Pretschner, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
* Alan Ruttenberg, SUNY Buffalo, USA
* Satya Sahoo, Case Western Reserve, USA
* Abdul Shaikh, NIH/NCI, USA
* Kavitha Srinivas, IBM Research, USA
* Joshua Tauberer, POPVOX, USA
* George Thomas, HHS, USA
* Curt Tilmes, NASA Goddard, USA
* Evelyne Viegas, Microsoft Research, USA
* David Wood, Talis, UK
* Peter Yeh, Accenture Technology Labs, USA
* Harlan Yu, Princeton, USA