about-k-cap.html

<TITLE>About the K-CAP Conference Series</TITLE>

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<H1>
<A HREF="http://www.isi.edu/k-cap">
International Conferences on Knowledge Capture</A>
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<H1><A HREF="http://www.isi.edu/k-cap">
(K-CAP)</A></H1>
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<h2>
June 15, 2000
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<P><HR>
<h3>
Aims and Topics of K-CAP
</h3>

<P>
In today's Web-linked and data-rich world, there is a growing need to
manage burgeoning amounts of information effectively.  Although indexing
and linking documents and other information sources is an important
step, capturing the knowledge contained within these diverse sources is
crucial for the effective use of large information repositories.
Knowledge acquisition has been a challenging area of research in
artificial intelligence, with its roots in early work to develop expert
systems.  Driven by the modern Internet culture and by knowledge-based
industries, the study of knowledge acquisition has a renewed importance.

<P>
Although there has been considerable work in the area of knowledge
capture, activities have been distributed across several distinct
research communities.  In machine learning, learning apprentices acquire
knowledge by nonintrusively watching a user perform a task.  In the
human-computer interaction community, programming-by-demonstration
systems learn to perform a task by watching a user demonstrate how to
accomplish it.  In knowledge engineering, modeling techniques and design
principles have been proposed for knowledge-based systems, often
exploiting commonly occurring domain-independent inference structures
and reusable domain-specific ontologies.  In planning and process
management, mixed-initiative systems acquire knowledge about a user's
goals by taking commands or accepting advice regarding a task.  In
natural language processing, tools can process text and create
representations of its knowledge content.  All of these approaches are
related in that they acquire information and organize it in knowledge
structures that can be used for reasoning.  They are complementary in
that they use different techniques and approaches to capture different
forms of knowledge.

<P>
The aim of K-CAP is to provide a forum in which to bring together
disparate research communities whose members are interested in
efficiently capturing knowledge from a variety of sources and in
creating representations that can be (or eventually can be) useful for
reasoning.  This conference series promotes multidisciplinary research that
could result in a new generation of tools and methodologies for
knowledge capture.

<P><HR>

<h3>
History of the Group and Research Communities of Interest
</h3>

<P>
The First International Conference on Knowledge Capture 
was held in October 21-23, 2001 in Victoria, British Columbia.
The conference attracted researchers from diverse areas of AI,
including knowledge representation, knowledge acquisition, 
intelligent user interfaces,
problem solving and reasoning, 
planning, agents, text extraction,
and machine learning.

<P>
A series of Knowledge Acquisition Workshops (KAW) was held from
October 1986 every eighteen months until 1999.  KAW was always held in Banff
(Alberta, Canada) and was hosted by Brian Gaines of the Univerity of
Calgary. Brian Gaines retired in 2000, and announced that KAW-99 (its
eleventh edition) would be the last one he would host.  At that
workshop, the KAW community reopened discussions about possibly starting
a conference.  With Brian Gaines, the co-chairs of the last few editions
of KAW were Mark Musen and Rob Kremer and they are both are part of the
organizing committee of K-CAP.  In addition, a number of people who
traditionally attended KAW are part of the program committee, including
the KAW steering committee members.  We believe that K-CAP is in a good
position to attract the KAW community to this new conference.  More
details on the KAW workshop series can be found at
http://ksi.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/KAW/.  A parallel series of European
Knowledge Acquisition Workshops commenced with EKAW87 in London, England
in September 1987. The EKAW series has continued on an annual basis in
various European cities. The 11th EKAW was held at Schloss Dagstuhl in
Germany, May 26-29, 1999.  Similarly to the KAW series, the EKAW
community decided to turn the workshop series into a conference. 
EKAW'2000, the 12th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering
and Knowledge Management, was held October 2-6, 2000 in France
(http://www-sop.inria.fr/acacia/ekaw2000/).  EKAW'2002 will be held 
October 1-4 in Siguenza, Spain (http://babage.dia.fi.upm.es/ekaw02/ekaw02.htm).

<P>
Several AAAI Symposia have been organized that are related to the topics
of the conference.  In 1996, a AAAI Spring Symposium on "Acquisition,
Learning, and Demonstration: Automating Tasks for Users", co-chaired by
Yolanda Gil, brought together researchers from hte knowledge acqusition,
machine learning, and intelligent user interfaces communities.  In 1997,
a AAAI Spring Symposium on Artificial Intelligence in Knowledge
Management (http://ksi.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/AIKM97/), co-chaired by Mark
Musen and Brian Gaines, brought together knowledge acqusition and
knowledge representation researchers interested in acquiring adn
managing organizational knowledge.  A Fall Symposium on "Learning How to
Do Things" was also held in November 2001.

<P>
In recent years, DARPA has funded several major programs on topics
related to Knowledge Capture.  The High Performance Knowledge Bases
(HPKB) program funded research on knowledge acquisition tools, text
extraction, and ontology reuse to support rapic development of large
knowledge bases.  More recently, the Rapid Knowledge Formation (RKF)
program is continuing that work with a focus on tools to enable subject
matter experts to author knowledge bases.  
The Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD program) funds knowledge 
representation and machine learning research to derive relational information
from factual data.  The DARPA/Rome Laboratory
Planning Initiative (ARPI) and the more recent Active Templates (AcT)
program, funded several projects on user-centered planning and decision
aids.  
The Control of Agent-Based Systems (CoABS) examines relevant topics in 
agent-based frameworks.  
The DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) program is developing 
technology to produce semantic markup of Web content.
There are many research groups in major research institutions
involved in these programs, and the K-CAP
conference offers a common forum for presenting their work.  

<P>
A strong interest in these topics is motivated by the existence of the
Internet itself.  There is a large community of researchers and
practitioners interested in the vision of a Semantic Web where Web
resources will contain annotations that can be used to reason about
their content and offered services.  This vision, initially brought
forward by the World Wide Web consortium
(http://www.w3c.org/DesignIssues/Semantic.html), is motivating many AI
researchers (see http://www.semanticweb.org and http://www.daml.org) to
look at the technology that will enable the expression and capture of
such annotations.  The K-CAP conference provides a forum where this
community will be able to share techniques and tools for knowledge
authoring and extraction with AI researchers in other areas.




<P><HR>
<h3> K-CAP Steering Committee</h3>

<P>
Ken Forbus, Northwestern University

<P>
Yolanda Gil, USC/Information Sciences Institute

<P>
Mark Musen, Stanford University

<P>
Jude Shavlik, University of Wisconsin at Madison

<P>
Derek Sleeman, University of Aberdeen


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<i>For more information about k-cap.org, send email to <A HREF=mailto:info@k-cap.org>info@k-cap.org</A></i>