Report on the First International Conference on Knowledge Capture

AI Magazine Volume 23 Number 4 (2002) (© AAAI)

Workshop Reports

capture different forms of knowledge. Report on the The conference started off with three invited tutorials and a work- First International shop program that represented these different approaches. Frank van Harmelen, Dieter Fensel, and Heiner Conference on Stuckenschmidt talked about the semantic web as a vehicle for knowledge capture, representation, and rea- Knowledge Capture soning. They described ongoing work on standards and technologies for se- (K-CAP) mantic markup. A workshop on the same topic included presentations on tools for capturing such semantic annotations of content and services on Yolanda Gil, Mark Musen, and Jude Shavlik the web. Henry Lieberman surveyed successful techniques for programming by example, an approach where end users teach procedures to computers by demonstrating a sequence of ac- tions on concrete examples as they he First International Confer- how to accomplish it. In knowledge use an interface. The computer can ence on Knowledge Capture (K- engineering, modeling techniques generalize from these examples CAP) was held from 21 to 23 and design principles have been pro- T through a combination of machine October 2001 in Victoria, British posed for knowledge-based systems, learning techniques and interface task Columbia (Gil, Musen, and Shavlik often exploiting commonly occur- representations. This tutorial includ- 2001). This new conference series ring domain-independent inference ed practical exercises and illustrated promotes multidisciplinary research structures and reusable domain-spe- the concepts with applications, in- on tools and methodologies for effi- cific ontologies. In planning and pro- cluding creation of animation and ciently capturing knowledge from a cess management, mixed-initiative games, automation of text editing variety of sources and creating repre- systems acquire knowledge about a and graphic editing tasks, and com- sentations that can be (or eventually can be) useful for reasoning. The puter-aided design and manufactur- conference attracted researchers from ing. A workshop on interactive tools ■ diverse areas of AI, including knowl- The International Conference on for knowledge capture discussed tech- edge representation, knowledge ac- Knowledge Capture (K-CAP) is a new niques for acquiring procedural forum for multidisciplinary research quisition, intelligent user interfaces, knowledge as well as ontologies. Gu- on capturing knowledge from a vari- us Schreiber and Hans Akkermans problem solving and reasoning, plan- ety of sources and creating represen- gave a tutorial on COMMONKADS, a ning, agents, text extraction, and tations that are useful for reasoning. widely known methodology for machine learning. This article describes the first confer- Knowledge acquisition has been a ence series, held in October 2001, knowledge engineering and manage- challenging area of research in AI, and presents an invitation to the AI ment. It covered some of the main with its roots in early work to devel- community to participate in K-CAP ideas behind the methodology, in- op expert systems. Driven by the 2003. cluding reusable task models, infer- modern internet culture and knowl- ence and domain knowledge, and or- edge-based industries, the study of ganizational context. The tutorial knowledge capture has a renewed user’s goals by taking commands or included a valuable discussion on practical experiences with the importance. Although there has been accepting advice regarding a task. In methodology in industrial settings as considerable work over the years in natural language processing, tools well as knowledge-based techniques the area, activities have been dis- can process text and create represen- tributed across several distinct re- for non-AI audiences. A related work- tations of its knowledge content for search communities. In machine shop discussed industrial applications uses such as question answering. All learning, learning apprentices ac- of knowledge-oriented approaches quire knowledge by nonintrusively these approaches are related in that relevant to electronic business. watching a user perform a task. In they acquire information and orga- Three invited speakers pointed the the human-computer interaction nize it in knowledge structures that attendees to promising directions for community, programming-by-dem- can be used for reasoning. They are knowledge capture. Ken Forbus, of onstration systems learn to perform a complementary in that they use dif- Northwestern University, talked task by watching a user demonstrate ferent techniques and approaches to about the need for large knowledge

Copyright © 2002, American Association for Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved. 0738-4602-2002 / $2.00 WINTER 2002 107 Conference Reports bases to build intelligent systems that learning. The needs and application Yolanda Gil is associate have the flexibility and breadth of of knowledge capture are many and division director for re- human reasoning and discussed anal- continue to grow in science, govern- search for the Intelligent ogy and sketching as promising ment, and industry. The first edition Systems Division at the Information Sciences In- knowledge capture techniques for of the conference had over 80 atten- stitute and a research as- bootstrapping intelligent systems. dees from 5 continents. The confer- sistant professor in the Steve Lawrence, of NEC Research In- ence attracted a large number of re- Computer Science De- stitute, described the design, imple- searchers that traditionally attended partment at the University of Southern mentation, and operation of RE- the Banff series of knowledge acquisi- California. She is principal investigator for SEARCHINDEX (also known as CITESEER), tion workshops that was held from the EXPECT Project, with a research focus a digital library of scientific literature October 1986 to 1999. on interactive acquisition tools that help built automatically through text-ex- As conference cochairs, we would end users develop and maintain large knowledge bases, apply them in problem- traction techniques over the web that like to acknowledge our sponsors and other people that contributed to the solving contexts, and exploit knowledge is used daily by many researchers and through the semantic web. She received institutions. John McCarthy, of Stan- conference. The Association of Com- her Ph.D. in computer science from ford University, discussed the need puting Machinery (ACM) provided fi- Carnegie Mellon University and her un- for data mining that goes beyond nancial sponsorship and produced dergraduate degree from the Polytechnic finding relations among data and in- the proceedings. ACM’s SIGART, the University of Madrid. She recently stead finds relations between the American Association for Artificial In- cochaired the new conference on knowl- phenomena that give rise to the data. telligence, and IFIP TC 12 supported edge capture and was program chair of the In this phenomenal data mining, re- the event. Funding for the conference 2002 conference on intelligent user interfaces. lations are established among entities was provided by the Air Force Office and facts that arise from those obser- of Scientific Research, the Defense Mark A. Musen is an as- vations in a process that requires Advanced Research Projects Agency, sociate professor of me- dicine (medical informat- common sense and domain knowl- the Office of Naval Research, and STRICOM. John Gennari handled our ics) and computer edge. science at Stanford Uni- finances and coordinated with ACM’s The K-CAP 2001 proceedings are versity and is head of the available online from the ACM Digi- sponsorship program. Rob Kremer Stanford Medical Infor- tal Library.1 They include papers on proposed a wonderful location for matics Laboratory. He many important topics for the con- the conference, the relaxing Laurel conducts research related to knowledge ference, including ontologies and Point Inn, and handled the local ar- acquisition for intelligent systems, knowl- knowledge representation, interactive rangements together with Tim Men- edge system architecture, and medical decision support. He has directed the PRO- acquisition tools, collaborative and zies. Fensel organized an excellent TÉGÉ project since its inception in 1986, distributed knowledge acquisition, workshop program. The Second International Confer- emphasizing the use of explicit ontologies information extraction, knowledge and reusable problem-solving methods to ence on Knowledge Capture will be management, semantic markup, task- build robust knowledge-based systems. He oriented knowledge and problem held 23 to 25 October 2003 at Sanibel has an M.D. from Brown University and a solving, adaptive user interfaces, and Island in Florida. It will be collocated Ph.D. from Stanford. with the Second International Se- learning from examples. Jude Shavlik is a profes- 2 The future of knowledge capture is mantic Web Conference. We look sor of computer sciences vibrant and well funded. There is a forward to the future of the knowl- and of biostatistics and large community of researchers and edge capture conference and its re- medical informatics at practitioners interested in the vision search community. the University of Wiscon- sin at Madison. His re- of a semantic web that will contain search focuses on ma- annotations that can be used to rea- chine learning, especially son about web content and services. Note its application to bioinformatics and com- This vision, initially brought forward puter security. He received his Ph.D. in 1. portal.acm.org. by the World Wide Web consortium, 1988 from the University of Illinois at Ur- 2. A call for papers and other conference is motivating many AI researchers to bana/Champaign for his work on expla- details will be posted at www.k-cap.org. look at the technology that will en- nation-based learning. From 1996 to For any inquiries, please e-mail info@k- 1999, he served as editor in chief of the AI able the expression and capture of cap.org. such annotations and is prompting Magazine. Besides helping organize KCAP- 2001, he was the chair of the 1998 Inter- new challenges for knowledge repre- Reference national Conference on Machine Learn- sentation and capture. Funding agen- Gil, Y.; Musen, M.; and Shavlik, J., eds. ing, was the cochair of the 1993 cies actively support a wide range of Proceedings of the First International International Conference on Intelligent relevant work on knowledge base de- Conference on Knowledge Capture. New Systems for Molecular Biology, and is the velopment, user-centered planning York: Association of Computing Machin- conference chair of the 2003 IEEE Data- and decision aids, agent-based assis- ery. Mining Conference. tants, and knowledge-based machine

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