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

[Glen Newton]

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                               Call For Papers
AAAI 2011 Fall Symposium on Open Government Knowledge: AI
Opportunities and Challenges
                  4-6 November 2011  - Arlington, Virginia USA
                           http://tw.rpi.edu/ogk2011
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The AAAI 2011 Fall Symposium on Open Government Knowledge: AI Opportunities and
Challenges (OGK2011) seeks papers on all aspects of publishing public
government data
as reusable knowledge on the Web. Both long papers presenting research
results and
shorter papers describing late breaking work, outlining implemented systems,
identifying new research challenges, or articulating a position are invited.
Submissions are due by June 3, notifications will be sent by July 15,
and the final
camera-ready copy must be provided by September 9, 2011.


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Background

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

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

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

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

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

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Symposium structure

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

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

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Important dates

* 3 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

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General symposium information

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

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

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Program committee  (to be confirmed)




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