ONTORACT 2008

The aim of ONTORACT'08, First International Workshop on using Ontologies in Interactive Systems, is to stage a multi-disciplinary event, bringing together researchers and application developers from a variety of disciplines, but who all have in common the use of ontologies as an essential part of managing user interaction and interactive systems.

Ontologies, formal representations of knowledge, are currently widely in use in computer science research. So far they have mainly been used as tools for creating and managing large terminologies (e.g. medical controlled vocabularies) and taxonomies (e.g. gene ontology) and in applications of Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, ontologies can also be used as extremely powerful modelling tools. A yet untapped but emerging domain of application is to use ontologies for user and task modelling. While there is currently a wide diversity of efforts and many scattered projects on these topics, the goal of ONTORACT is to highlight both what is common and complementary within the diversity of efforts. By bringing experts and researchers under a single roof, the workshop organisers hope that it will foster exchange of experience and expertise and foment future collaboration between the workshop participants.

Topics of Interest

•  Ontologies for accessibility and assistive technology
• Ontologies for digital inclusion of elderly and special need users
• Ontologies for user modelling, adaptation and personalisation
• Ontologies for multimodal interaction
• Ontologies in web applications
• Ontologies in pervasive environment
• Ontologies in Intelligent Transport Systems
• Ontologies and tutoring and dialogue systems
• Ontologies and recommender systems
• Ontologies for information retrieval
• Various applications of ontologies in interactive systems