The advent of electronic tools for producing and storing information has resulted in an avalanche of computer readable text. The access to all this information has gone through a slow but steady process to adapt to the growth of availability of electronically stored data, and a large number of tools have been developed to enable users to access and manage these large volumes of information. But what has uncertainty and logic to do with accessing and managing information stored in a computer?

Uncertainty plays a very important role in the representation, access, and retrieval of information. The representation of information objects is often uncertain. For example, the extraction of index terms from a document or a query to represent the document or the query information content is a highly uncertain process. The data describing the redness of a red object present in a picture stored in a multimedia database is subject to a certain degree of uncertainty too. Probability theory is one way of dealing with uncertainty, but there are other approaches, such as, fuzzy logic, Dempster-Shafer's theory of evidence, imaging, neural networks, and so on.

Logic plays a very important role in the representation, access, and retrieval of information. Logic has proved over centuries to be a very powerful modelling and reasoning tool, providing a degree of formality and correctness that can be very useful for manipulating information objects. For the task of retrieving information, logic has been used to build models that provide a rich and uniform representation of information with the aim to improve retrieval effectiveness. Classical logic is one possible approach. Other approaches include belief revision, situation theory, possible world semantics, abductive logic, conceptual graphs, conditional logic, description logic, and so on.

The purpose of this workshop is to promote discussion and interaction among members of the Information Systems community; in particular among those members with research interests in logical and uncertainty models for the treatment of semi-structured and unstructured information. We are particularly interested in experiences dealing with unstructured or poorly structured information. We believe that a very large part of the information that will be available in future will be of this nature. This community is made of people coming from different fields: theoretical computer science, databases, information retrieval, hypermedia, digital libraries, artificial intelligence, to mention just a few areas.

The workshop aims at being an international forum for the presentation of both theoretical and applicative results. Papers describing application experiences are particularly encouraged. Papers presented will deal with, but not limited to, the following areas:

where information is modelled and/or managed using any of, but not limited to, the following approaches:

Probabilistic Theory, Non-standard Logics, Default Reasoning, Fuzzy Methods, Non-monotonic Logics, Knowledge Acquisition, Theory of Evidence, Meta Logics, Knowledge Representation, Belief Networks, Situation Theory, Machine Learning, Possibility Theory, Multivalued Logics, Inductive Methods, Rough Sets, Description Logics, Abductive Methods, Approximate Reasoning, Belief Revision, Relevance Theory.

This will be the second workshop on the same topics. The first LUMIS was held as part of the Fifth European Conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty (ECSQARU'99), in London, in July 1999.

WORKSHOP CHAIRS:

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:

SUBMISSION DETAILS:

• Electronically by email to mounia@dcs.qmw.ac.uk, or
• By conventional mail to Mounia Lalmas at the address below

We encourage email submission of full paper in postscript file. The title page must include the name and email address of the contact author, and 3-4 relevant keywords. If hard copy submission is chosen, please send 4 copies of your paper. Your paper should reach us no later than 1 March 2000.

IMPORTANT DATES:

CORRESPONDENCE:

Direct correspondence and inquiries related to this workshop should be addressed to:

Peter Bruza
Distributed Systems Technology Center
University of Queensland
Building 78, Staff House Road, Qld 4072, Australia
Email: bruza@dstc.edu.au

Fabio Crestani
International Computer Science Institute
1947 Center Street, Suite 600
Berkeley, CA 94704, USA
Email: fabio@icsi.berkely.edu

Mounia Lalmas
Department of Computer Science
Queen Mary & Westfield College
University of London
Mile End Road
London E1 4NS, England
Email: mounia@dcs.qmw.ac.uk