An interdisciplinary approach is necessary to discover and match meaning dynamically in a world of 
increasingly large data sources. This will be a half-day workshop which will bring together 
practitioners from academia, industry and government to participate in discussion and debate.  
It will involve

*  A panel discussion focussing on these issues from an industrial and governmental point of view.
 Membership to be confirmed, but we expect a representative from Scottish Government and from 
Google, as well as others.
* Short presentations grouped into themed panels, to stimulate debate not just about individual 
contributions but also about the themes in general.

This is a continuation of the LHD-11 workshop (http://dream.inf.ed.ac.uk/events/lhd-11/).


Workshop Description

The problem of semantic alignment - that of two systems failing to understand one another when 
their representations are not identical - occurs in a huge variety of areas: Linked Data, database 
integration, e-science, multi-agent systems, information retrieval over structured data; anywhere, 
in fact, where semantics or a shared structure are necessary but centralised control over the 
schema of the data sources is undesirable or impractical. Yet this is increasingly a critical 
problem in the world of large scale data, particularly as more and more of this kind of data is 
available over the Web.

In order to interact successfully in an open and heterogeneous environment, being able to 
dynamically and adaptively integrate large and heterogeneous data from the Web "on the go" is 
necessary. This may not be a precise process but a matter of finding a good enough integration 
to allow interaction to proceed successfully, even if a complete solution is impossible.

Considerable success has already been achieved in the field of ontology matching and merging, 
but the application of these techniques- often developed for static environments - to the dynamic 
integration of large-scale data has not been well studied.

Presenting the results of such dynamic integration to both end-users and database administrators 
- while providing quality assurance and provenance - is not yet a feature of many deployed systems.
To make matters more difficult, on the Web there are massive amounts of information available 
online that could be integrated, but this information is often chaotically organised, stored in 
a wide variety of data-formats, and difficult to interpret.

This area has been of interest in academia for some time, and is becoming increasingly important in
industry and - thanks to open data efforts and other initiatives - to government as well. The aim 
of this workshop is to bring together practitioners from academia, industry and government who are 
involved in all aspects of this field: from those developing, curating and using Linked Data, to 
those focusing on matching and merging techniques.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Integration of large and heterogeneous data
* Machine-learning over structured data
* Ontology evolution and dynamics
* Ontology matching and alignment
* Presentation of dynamically integrated data
* Incentives and human computation over structured data and ontologies
* Ranking and search over structured and semi-structured data
* Quality assurance and data-cleansing
* Vocabulary management in Linked Data
* Schema and ontology versioning and provenance
* Background knowledge in matching
* Extensions to knowledge representation languages to better support change
* Inconsistency and missing values in databases and ontologies
* Dynamic knowledge construction and exploitation
* Matching for dynamic applications (e.g., p2p, agents, streaming)
* Case studies, software tools, use cases, applications
* Open problems
* Foundational issues
Applications and evaluations on data-sources that are from the Web and Linked Data are particularly
encouraged.

Submission

LHD-12 invites submissions of papers of no more than 8 pages. Position papers of 2-3 pages are also
encouraged.  Papers will be accepted on the basis of interesting content that will stimulate 
discussion, and are not required to describe work that is completed or extensively evaluated, 
though such work is also encouraged.

All accepted papers will be published as part of the ISWC workshop proceedings, and will be 
available online from the workshop website. The previous workshop resulted in a special issue of 
the Artificial Intelligence Review, and we will consider another special issue following this 
workshop.

All contributions should be in pdf format and should be uploaded via 
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=lhd12. Authors should use the LNCS style 
http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6793341-0


Important Dates
Submission: July 31, 2012
Notification: August 31, 2012
Camera ready: September 10, 2012
Early registration: TBA
Late registration: TBA
Workshop: November 11 or 12, 2012

Organising Committee:
Fiona McNeill (University of Edinburgh)
Harry Halpin (Yahoo! Research)
Andriana Gkaniatsou (University of Edinburgh)

Program committee:
Krisztian Balog (University of Amsterdam) Alan Bundy (University of Edinburgh) Vinay Chaudri (SRI) 
James Cheney (University of Edinburgh) Oscar Corcho (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) Jerome 
Euzenat (INRIA Grenoble Rhone-Alpes) Eraldo Fernandez (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de 
Janeiro) Pascal Hitzler (Wright State University) Tom McCutcheon (Dstl) Shuai Ma (Beihang 
University) Adam Pease (Articulate Software) David Roberston (University of Edinburgh) Peter 
Winstanley (Scottish Government)