FoIKS 2004 - Call for Papers

Third International Symposium on Foundations of Information and Knowledge Systems (FoIKS 2004) Hotel/Castle Wilhelminenberg, Vienna (Austria), February 17 - 20, 2004 supported by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and the Association for Symbolic Logic (ASL)

The goal of the FoIKS symposia, which take place once every two years, is to bring together researchers working on the theoretical foundations of information and knowledge systems and to attract researchers working in mathematical fields such as discrete mathematics, combinatorics, logics and finite model theory who are interested to apply their theories to research on database and knowledge base theory.

FoIKS took up the tradition of the conference series Mathematical Fundamentals of Database Systems (MFDBS) which enabled East-West collaboration in the field of database theory.
The first FoIKS symposium was held in Burg/Spreewald (Germany) in 2000, and the second FoIKS symposium was held in Schloß Salzau near Kiel (Germany) in 2002. Former MFDBS conferences were held in Dresden (Germany) in 1987, Visegrad (Hungary) in 1989 and in Rostock (Germany) in 1991.

The FoIKS symposium is intended to be a forum for intensive discussions. For this reason there are time slots for long and for short contributions; the long contributions will be significantly longer than usual contributions at conferences. Furthermore, participants are asked in advance to prepare as correspondents to a contribution of another author.

Topics

FoIKS 2004 solicites contributions dealing with any foundational aspect of information and knowledge systems. Typical, but not exclusive topics of interest are:

• Mathematical Foundations: discrete methods, boolean functions, finite model theory
• Database Design: formal models, dependency theory, schema translations, desirable properties
• Query Languages: expressiveness, computational and descriptive complexity, query languages for advanced data models, classifications of computable queries
• Semi-Structured Databases and WWW: models of web databases, querying semi-structured databases, web transactions and negotiations
• Security in Data and Knowledge Bases: cryptography, steganography, information hiding
• Integrity and Constraint Management: verification, validation, and enforcement of consistency, triggers
• Information Integration: heterogenous data, views, schema dominance and equivalence
• Database and Knowledge Base Dynamics: models of transactions, models of interaction, updates, consistency preservation, concurrency control
• Intelligent Agents: multi-agent systems, autonomous agents, foundations of software agents, cooperative agents
• Logics in Databases and AI: non-classical logics, spatial and temporal logics, probabilistic logics, deontic logic, logic programming
• Knowledge Representation: planning, description logics, knowledge and belief, belief revision and update, non-monotonic formalisms, uncertainty
• Reasoning Techniques: theorem proving, abduction, induction, constraint satisfaction, common-sense reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, reasoning about actions

Submission of Papers

Authors are cordially invited to submit an abstract by August 08, 2003 and a paper by August 15, 2003. Connect to http://foiks.massey.ac.nz/foiks04/ and follow the instructions there.

Papers should not exceed 15 pages (single-spaced, 11pt, US letter or A4 paper) for long presentations, and 10 pages for short presentations, respectively. The submissions will be judged for scientific quality and for suitability as a basis for broader discussion. The proceedings will be published by Springer-Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series and will be available at the workshop. The proceedings of FoIKS 2000 and FoIKS 2002 have been published as LNCS vol. 1762 and LNCS vol. 2284, respectively.
After the symposium authors of selected papers will be asked to prepare extended versions of their papers for publication in a special issue of the Journal Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence.

For further questions please contact Dietmar Seipel (seipel@informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de) or Jose-Maria Turull-Torres (J.M.Turull@massey.ac.nz).

Invited speakers

Georg Gottlob (Vienna University of Technology, Austria)
Yuri Gurevich (Microsoft Research, Redmond, USA)

Funding

The conference will be supported by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and by the Association for Symbolic Logic (ASL). There are limited ASL travel funds which students who are ASL members can apply for (provided that the ASL is able to continue to make these funds available in 2004).

Important Dates

Submission of Abstract:	August 08, 2003
Submission of Paper:	August 15, 2003
Notification of Acceptance/Rejection:	October 17, 2003
Camera Ready Version:	November 21, 2003
Symposium:	February 17-20, 2004

Program Committee Co-Chairs

• Dietmar Seipel (University of Würzburg, Germany)
  seipel@informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de
• Jose-Maria Turull-Torres (Massey University, New Zealand)
  J.M.Turull@massey.ac.nz

Program Committee

• Leopoldo Bertossi (Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada)
• Joachim Biskup (University of Dortmund, Germany)
• François Bry (University of Munich, Germany)
• Jürgen Dix (University of Manchester, UK)
• Samir Chopra (University of New South Wales, Australia)
• Thomas Eiter (Vienna University of Technology, Austria)
• Jörg Flum (Univesity of Freiburg, Germany)
• Burkhard Freitag (University of Passau, Germany)
• Stephen J. Hegner (Umeå University, Sweden)
• Lauri Hella (University of Tampere, Finland)
• Sven Hartmann (Massey University, New Zealand)
• Gyula Katona (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary)
• Gabriele Kern-Isberner (FernUniversität Hagen, Germany)
• Hans-Joachim Klein (University of Kiel, Germany)
• Alberto Mendelzon (University of Toronto, Canada)
• Jack Minker (University of Maryland, USA)
• Kotagiri Ramamohanarao (University of Melbourne, Australia)
• Vladimir Sazonov (University of Liverpool, UK)
• Klaus-Dieter Schewe (Massey University, New Zealand)
• Thomas Schwentick (University of Marburg, Germany)
• Dietmar Seipel (University of Würzburg, Germany)
• Jose-Maria Turull-Torres (Massey University, New Zealand)
• Bernhard Thalheim (University of Technology at Cottbus, Germany)

Organization

Thomas Eiter (Vienna University of Technology, Austria)