研讨会的中心议题包括，但不仅仅限制于以下方面：

· 元数据的自动及半自动产生
· 决策支持工具
· 知识获取方法
· 知识萃取技术
· 知识获取技术
· 在本体中的知识表示方法
· 元数据精确知识标记
·  本体应用
· 本体学习
· 本体生命周期
· 本体建模
· 问答系统
· 本体中的规则  

相关链接如下：

http://caitian.cn:7001/lianong/index.jsp
http://www.afita2006.org/index_files/Page1119.htm
国内会议论文投寄咨询：广东省农业科学院科技情报研究所 王众
email: burley_wang@yahoo.com
Tel: 020 87599478, 13924268908

Seventh Agricultural Ontology Service (AOS) Workshop on
“Discovering the Unknown: Using Metadata and Ontologies for Knowledge Extraction”
Bangalore, India
9 - 10 November 2006

The benefits of ontologies can only be fully exploited if they are used efficiently within information systems for extraction of ‘unknown’ knowledge.  In today’s exponentially growing information world, there is a mounting need to extract the most important information in the shortest possible time. It has become vital to have systems that are able to provide the most relevant results, while sieving through mushrooming information systems, websites, publications, forums, blogs etc.   Although cataloguing and indexing resources are important steps, it is becoming increasingly difficult to accomplish these tasks due to the lack of skilled personnel, the cost of cataloguing and the rapid growth of the available information resources.

Considerable work has been done to date in the area of knowledge capture through the use of subject and process ontologies. The AOS project covers, under its name, ontologies on Food and Nutrition, Food Safety, Animal and Plant Health, Fisheries, etc., each of which captures knowledge in a specific domain area of agriculture. The complete multilingual AGROVOC Thesaurus, also available in the form of an ontology, is rich with translations, synonyms and relations.  All of these ontologies have been used in information systems to provide improved access to information. However, much of this can be further enhanced through the efficient use of ontologies for extracting the unknown and hidden pieces of knowledge, not only for providing efficient search results to the users but also for iteratively improving the ontology itself. We can achieve this only through the explicit formalization of domain knowledge through its elicitation from experts and by linking the ontologies to actual or instance data.

The goal of the Seventh AOS workshop is to provide a platform for implementers to demonstrate how ontologies can extract and acquire additional knowledge from existing agricultural information systems.  It aims to bring together research communities, with special focus on agriculture, whose members are interested in efficiently capturing knowledge and in creating representations and formalizations that can be useful for reasoning.  The activities of the AOS initiative are documented at: http://www.fao.org/aims.

The topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
· Automatic and semi-automatic metadata generation
· Decision-support tools
· Knowledge acquisition methods
· Knowledge elicitation techniques
· Knowledge extraction techniques
· Knowledge representation techniques (in ontologies)
· Metadata and accurate knowledge mark-up
· Ontology application
· Ontology learning
· Ontology life cycle
· Ontology modelling
· Question-answering systems
· Rules in ontologies

Important dates:
Papers are invited regarding all the topics covered by the workshop.  

· Paper submission deadline : March 31, 2006
· Announcement of paper acceptance : April  30, 2006
· Camera-ready paper submission deadline : June 26, 2006

Abstract submission:
You are requested to send an abstract of your paper - not exceeding 300 words - in MS Word version. All abstracts should be written in English. Electronic version of the abstract should be sent via email to:  Johannes Keizer {Johannes.Keizer@fao.org}