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=0-164-6
793341-0).

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)