Ontological Modelling of Socio-Technical Systems @ FOIS 2014

-----------------------------------
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
-----------------------------------

João-Paulo Almeida (Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil)

-----------------------------------
DEFINITION AND SCOPE
-----------------------------------

Socio-Technical Systems (STS) are complex systems that embed human and
artificial agents, material and institutional artefacts and resources, in
which agents' behaviour and practices are partly constrained by norms. The
design and the investigation of the property of STS is a challenging topic
for a number of communities such as organisation sciences, multiagent
systems, AI, sociology, economics, just to name a few. As a guiding example
of STS, one can imagine an airport in which human agents playing different
roles, as operators, policemen, crew, passengers... are constrained by
institutional and social norms and interact with each other and with
artificial agents such as sensors, surveillance cameras, monitors, biometric
devices, visual scanners for the luggage, automated air traffic control
system, etc.

The contribution of ontologies to the understanding, modelling, designing of
STS is crucial, as their role is to provide a clear and unambiguous
interpretation of the language used to represent the heterogeneous pieces of
information that are intertwined in STS. Moreover, since STS involve both
human and artificial agents, what is needed is a means of representation
that is fairly understandable by humans and implementable in machines.
Ontologies that are built on a solid foundational analysis are aimed at
making explicit hidden assumptions and thus enhance understanding. On the
other hand, their expression in a formal language favour implementability.
STS pose a number of challenges to ontological modelling at various levels.
From a foundational point of view, the very concept of system, of
human-machine interaction, of artefact, of norm-based behaviour demand an
ontologically aware approach that integrates these complex concepts and
knowledge of the environment. From an applied perspective, we need clever
tools to organise the complex layers of information (normative, technical,
social, behavioural) involved in STS and describe their mutual entanglement.
In particular, due to the heterogenous nature of the system, very expressive
languages seem to be needed in order to treat such type of information;
however, expressive languages usually come with the price of complexity, and
pose serious challenges to implementation.
The aim of this workshop is
to gather a number of contributions that focus on theoretical aspects of the
ontological modelling of STS as well as on the application of ontologies to
actual STS (such as airports, hospitals, service systems and complex
organisations in general).

------------------------------
TOPICS OF INTEREST
------------------------------

Topics include, but are not limited to:

* Foundational investigation about STS (ontological analysis of concepts of system, interaction, artefacts, roles, functions, organisations...).

*Methodological investigations about modelling STS.
* Representing and reasoning about norms in STS.
* Representing and reasoning about interaction in STS. Representing and reasoning about organisations.
* Modelling institutional and technical artefacts.
* Modelling crisis, adaptivity and resilience of STS.
* Modelling rules in STS.
* Expressivity of ontologies.

* Ontology for multi-agent systems.

* Modelling disagreement and conflict in STS.

* Interfacing sensor information and symbolic information (e.g. vision-semantics...)
* Interdisciplinary approaches to STS: ontologies in computer vision, organization sciences, law, economics etc.)

* Ontology learning for adaptive STS.  

--------------------------------------------
WORKSHOP ORGANISATION
--------------------------------------------

Workshop Chairs:

Roberta Ferrario (ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy)
Daniele Porello (ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy)

Program Committee (to be completed):

  Stefano Borgo (ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy)
  Emanuele Bottazzi (ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy)
  Massimiliano Carrara (University of Padova, Italy)
  Marco Cristani (University of Verona, Italy)
  Fabiano Dalpiaz (Utrecht University, the Netherlands)
  Nicola Guarino (ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy)
  Giancarlo Guizzardi (Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil)
  Claudio Masolo (ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy)
  Alessandro Oltramari (Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
  Renata Silva Souza Guizzardi (Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil)
  Nicolas Troquard (ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy)
  Gerd Wagner (Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus-Senftenberg,
Germany)
  Hans Weigand (Tilburg University, the Netherlands)  

Email: [email protected]
http://fois2014.inf.ufes.br/p/accepted-workshops.html#OMSS