9th International Workshop on
Knowledge Representation meets Databases
(KRDB-2002)

The 9th International KRDB Workshop continues the tradition of annual international workshops devoted to facilitate cross-fertilization between the fields of knowledge representation (KR) and databases (DB), started in 1994. KRDB is a forum for exchanging ideas between DB and KR researchers and for stimulating the discussion between researchers and practitioners. The number of participants in the workshop will be restricted. Potential participants are encouraged to submit a position paper (see Submission of Papers below) that describes their current research and possibly previous accomplishments related to the workshop topic. Authors of papers accepted for the proceedings will have the opportunity to present their opinions by talks.

SCOPE:
Databases and knowledge bases are both used to model application domains and to facilitate access to stored information. Research in KR originally concentrated around formalisms that are typically tuned to deal with relatively small knowledge bases, but provide powerful reasoning services, and are highly expressive. In contrast, DB research mainly dealt with efficient storage, retrieval, and sharing large amounts of data. However, data representation and query languages were relatively simple, and reasoning played only a minor role. This distinction between the requirements in KR and DB is vanishing rapidly. On the one hand, to be useful in realistic applications, a modern KR system must be able to handle large data sets. This suggests that techniques developed in the DB area could be useful for knowledge bases. On the other hand, the information stored in DBs is becoming more complex, thus requiring more intelligent retrieval and reasoning techniques. The goal of the workshop is to bring together people from the Database and the Knowledge Representation and Reasoning communities, in order to compare different points of views and various sets of techniques that can be used for the tasks related to Modeling, Querying and Managing Incomplete Information.

TOPICS:
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Languages and models for representing incomplete information
  • in knowledge bases,
  • in relational databases,
  • in semistructured data,
  • in data cubes.
• Incompleteness in information integration systems.
• Answering queries against incomplete data.
• Incompleteness in data warehouses.
• Approximate answering/reasoning on incomplete data.
• Updating incomplete information.
• Negation and incomplete information.
• Disjunctive databases and logic programs.
• Nonmonotonic reasoning for databases.
• ABox reasoning in Description Logics and its relationship to databases.

SUBMISSION OF PAPERS:
Authors are invited to submit extended abstracts not exceeding 8 pages (LaTeX 12-point article-style pages). An extended abstract can be a position paper or a summary of a full paper. A position paper may be a viewpoint on a controversial topic or a summary of lessons learned from recent research or practical experience. An abstract of a full paper may be a description of a new formalism, mechanism, or architecture, a product or prototype, an application, or results of work in progress. The extended abstracts will be reviewed with focus on relevance and potential contribution to discussions.

IMPORTANT DATES: