Ontologies-Based Databases and Information Systems: First and Second VLDB Workshops, ODBIS 2005/2006 Trondheim, Norway, September 2-3, 2005 Seoul, Korea, September 11, 2006 Revised Papers

Overview

Thisvolumeconstitutesthejointpost-proceedingsofthetwointernationalVLDB workshops on Ontologies-based Techniques for DataBases and Information S- tems, ODBIS 2005 and ODBIS 2006, co-located with the 31st and 32nd Int- national Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB). It is a collection of extended versions of papers presented at the workshops. Ontologiesare generallyused to specify and communicate domain knowledge in a generic way. While in a formal sense “ontology” means study of concepts, one can use the word “ontology”as a concept repository about a particular area of interest. Ontologies are very useful for structuring and defining the meaning of the metadata terms that are currently collected inside a domain community. They are a popular research topic in knowledge engineering, natural language processing, intelligent information integration and multi-agent systems. Onto- gies are also applied in the World Wide Web community where they provide the conceptual underpinning for making the semantics of a metadata machine - derstandable. More generally, ontologies are critical for applications which want to merge information from diverse sources. They become a major conceptual backbonefor a broadspectrum of activities dealing with databasesand infor- tion systems. In these workshops, the objectives were to present databases and information systems research as they relate to ontologies and, more broadly, to gain insight into ontologies as they relate to databases and information systems. These post-proceedings are divided roughly into three sections: ontology-based interoperability and schema matching, management of ontological bases and links between ontologies and knowledge.

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