12th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications
 
 


 
 

Third International Workshop on Logical and Uncertainty Models for Information Systems
(LUMIS 2001)

Technical University of Munich, Germany
  September 3-7, 2001







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.

Logic has and is currently used to formulate advanced models for representing, accessing, and retrieving information from large repositories. 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. Some logical models are able to represent, within a uniform framework, various features of information systems, such as hypermedia links, multimedia content, and users knowledge. Logic also provides a common approach to the integration of content retrieval (information retrieval) and fact retrieval (database retrieval). Finally, logic makes it possible to reason about a model and its properties. This latter possibility is becoming increasingly important since conventional evaluation methods, although good indicators of the effectiveness of retrieval tools, often give results which cannot be predicted, or satisfactorily explained.

However, logic by itself is not sufficient. Uncertainty plays a very important role in the representation, access, and retrieval of information. For example, the extraction of index terms or any content representation 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. Therefore, in determining the relevance of a document to a query the truth value or the validity of a logical formula relating the two is not enough. It is necessary to take into account the uncertainty inherent in such a formulation.

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 the issue of providing effective and intelligent access to large information repositories 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. A selected number of accepted papers from the workshop, once expanded and revised, will be included in the Special Topic Issue of Journal of the American Society for Information Science, "Uncertainty and Logic in Information Access", published by John Wiley & Sons.

This will be the third 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). It was held at the University College London (UCL), in July 1999. The proceedings of the workshop are available online at www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/lumis99 and a review of the most significant issues addressed in the workshop has been published in the journal "The Knowledge Engineering Review", 15(2):171-179, published by Cambridge University Press. The second workshop was held as part of the 11th International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA 2000). The proceedings were published by IEEE Computer Society Press as proceedings of the DEXA 2000 workshops.

WORKSHOP CHAIRS:

      Fabio Crestani - University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
      Mounia Lalmas - Queen Mary, University of London, England, United Kingdom
      Jian-Yun Nie - University of Montreal,  Quebec,  Canada

PROGRAM COMMITTEE:

      Gianni Amati - Fondazione Ugo Bordoni, Roma, Italy
      Peter Bruza - Distributed Systems Technology Centre, Queensland, Australia
      Robert Demolombe - ONERA, Toulouse, France
      Anthony Hunter - University College London, England, United Kingdom
      Donald H. Kraft - Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, USA
      Laslo Koczy - Budapest University of Technology, Hungary
      Francois Lepage - University of Montreal, Quebec, Canada
      Amihai Motro - George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA
      Iadh Ounis - University of Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
      Gabriella Pasi - ITIM-CNR, Milan, Italy
      Stefan Rueger - Imperial College, London, England, United Kingdom
      Dominich Sándor - University of Veszprem, Hungary and Buckinghamshire College, England, United Kingdom
      Theo van der Weide - University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands
      Ronald Yager - Iona College, New Rochelle, NY, USA
      Yiyu Yao - University of Regina, Canada
 

SUBMISSION DETAILS:

Authors are invited to submit research contributions representing original, previously unpublished work. Submitted papers will be carefully evaluated based on originality, significance, and relevance to the workshop. All papers will be refereed by at least three members of the program committee. Accepted papers will be published by IEEE Computer Society Press as proceedings of the DEXA 2001 workshops. All submitted papers should not be longer than 5 pages (two columns; that means 10 "normal pages" or 5000 words). The IEEE author guidelines and formatting instruction can be found at http://computer.org/cspress/instruct.htm.

Authors should submit full papers electronically by email to mounia@dcs.qmw.ac.uk. The title page must include the name and email address of the contact author, and 3-4 relevant keywords. Your paper should reach us no later than 1 March 2001.

IMPORTANT DATES:

Deadline for submission of papers: 1 March 2001
Authors notified of program committee decision: 1 April 2001
Final submission of camera-ready copy: 1 May 2001

CORRESPONDENCE:

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

Dr. Fabio Crestani
Department of Computer Science
University of Strathclyde
Livingstone Tower
26 Richmond Street
Glasgow G1 1XH, Scotland, UK
Tel: +44 141 548 4303
Fax: +44 141 552 5330
Email: fabioc@cs.strath.ac.uk

Dr. Mounia Lalmas
Department of Computer Science
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road,
London E1 4NS, UK
Email: mounia@dcs.qmw.ac.uk
Tel: +44 20 7882 5200
Fax: +44 20 8882 6533

Dr Jian-Yun Nie
Département d'Informatique et recherche opérationnelle
Université de Montréal
CP 6128 succursale Centre-Ville
Montréal QC H3C 3J7, Canada
Email: nie@IRO.UMontreal.CA
Tel: +1 514 343-2263
Fax: +1 514 343-5834