ICAPS05 Workshop

The Role of Ontologies in AI Planning and Scheduling

(To be held on June 7th, in Monterey, California, USA)

Dead-line for submission of papers extended to March 21st

(download pdf Call for Papers)

Overview

Ontologies are becoming increasingly important in several AI fields (such as knowledge management and integration, cooperative problem solving, knowledge acquisition and knowledge-based systems, e-commerce and the Semantic Web) and, at present, there is also an increasing interest about their use in Planning and Scheduling (P&S) systems.

In the field of P&S ontologies allow , on the one hand, knowledge exchange between intelligent processes (performed both by humans and other intelligent systems) in real world applications. On the other hand they allow to describe more complex domains and problems, since they are based on very rich representation languages (for example, semantic web languages as RDF, OWL,OWL-S). These languages are more expressive than those presently used in P&S, since they use the Open World Assumption rather than the planner-friendly Closer World Assumption. However , they are really ``static'' languages and do not include (generally) knowledge about states and state change, what prevents their ``direct'' application in current P&S systems. In any case, the way the use of ontologies and such languages impact the field of AI P&S needs to be investigated.

In summary, the integration between ontologies and P&S techniques is demanding more attention both from theorists and practitioners, and there are many different approaches in the literature on this issue. Therefore, one of the main topics of this workshop will be the study of the benefits that an ontology-based knowledge representation could bring into current P&S technologies.

Scope

The goal of the workshop consists in trying to understand and discuss different ways of integration between ontologies techniques and intelligent planning. This can be seen as a different, general approach to bridge the gap that currently exists between the very efficient P&S technology and its application to real world. Papers submitted should either present theoretical / practical work or report experiences with applications (describing projects or applications, the difficulties they had to overcome, some lessons learned, etc.) on the following topics:

Interest of the workshop

At this time, ontologies are becoming a keystone in the development of AI based systems, and the scientific events related to the general field of ontologies are constantly growing in the last few years. However, since there are no specific events dedicated to the interdisciplinary field of ``Ontologies, Planning and Scheduling'', the concrete advances done about the links between ontologies and P&S systems are dispersed in other non-P&S related events. This workshop can be seen as an opportunity to gather and synthesize such work and advances.


In addition, it is important to point out the links with this year's inaugural competition on knowledge engineering for planning systems. Many of the participants might be interested in this workshop, since a goal of the competition is to encourage sharing of domain knowledge between systems, and since several acquisition techniques are likely to make a significant use of ontologies.

Workshop format

The workshop will be structured to allow ample time for discussion and interactions, with the following format:

Important Dates

Submission Instructions


Authors are encouraged to submit papers electronically in PDF format. Papers should be no more than 10 pages and formatted using the AAAI style template. Please send submissions by e-mail either to Eva Onaindía (onaindia@dsic.upv.es ) or Juan Fernández (faro@decsai.ugr.es) no later than February 21, 2005

Organizing Committee

Workshop Chairs