The focus of the Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web workshop (URSW) is to address the challenge of reasoning and representing uncertain information in the context of Semantic Web development.
The first objective of the workshop will be the identification of the kinds of information management challenges that would benefit most from mechanisms for reasoning under uncertainty and those that have already so benefited. These discussions should also analyze why or whether uncertainty reasoning is the best way to address such challenges and determine why particular approaches to uncertainty reasoning may be preferable to others. Subgoals of this session include consideration of uncertainty as it relates to web services and how probabilistic reasoning techniques could help deal trust issues.
The second objective of the workshop is the consideration of implementation process and challenges. This will involve the exploration of candidate standardization solutions for uncertainty reasoning in the Semantic Web. In part, this will also involve an exploration of the possibility and feasibility of layering uncertainty reasoning with extented Semantic Web reasoning languages and the extent to which existing editors, parsers and reasoning tools can be updated or re-implemented for the representation and reasoning of uncertainties.
This would likely involve consider of a candidate syntax and semantics for probabilistic extensions to OWL. This would include tools for simple uncertainties, probability distributions and Bayesian networks. Some focus would also be placed on the implementation of probabilistic inference tools for these challenges and determining the extent to which key existing Semantic Web tools, such as parsers and editors, can be implemented or re-implemented for purposes of implementing uncertainty reasoning.
