Oliver Kutz
Workshop held at the
Editors Shape, Form, and Structure are some of the most elusive notions within diverse disciplines ranging from humanities (literature, arts) to sciences (chemistry, biology, physics etc.) and within these from the formal (like mathematics) to the empirical disciplines (such as engineering and cognitive science). Even within domains such as computer science and arti cial intelligence, these notions are replete with commonsense meanings (think of everyday perception and communication), and formalisations of the semantics and reasoning about shape, form, and structure are often ad hoc. Whereas several approaches have been proposed within the aforementioned disciplines to study the notions of shape, form and structure from di erent standpoints, a comprehensive formal treatment of these notions is currently lacking and no real interdisciplinary perspective has been put forward.
The workshop series SHAPES provides an interdisciplinary platform for the discussion of all topics connected to shape (broadly understood): perspectives from psycho-linguistics, ontology, computer science, mathematics, aesthetics, and cognitive science, amongst others, are welcome to contribute and participate in the workshops. We seek to facilitate a discussion between researchers from all disciplines interested in representing shape and reasoning about it. This includes formal, cognitive, linguistic, engineering and/or philosophical aspects of space, as well as their application in the sciences and in the arts.
We also welcome contributions on the relationship of shape representations at di erent levels of detail (e.g. 2D, 3D) and in di erent logics, and with respect to di erent qualitative and quantitative dimensions, such as topology, distance, symmetry, orientation, etc.
Within the philosophy and practice of design, the ontological notions of shape, form and structure have a further role of constraining function, malfunction, and behaviour of things. In this perspective, the decision-making process in design is a trade-o between physical, logical and cognitive laws and constraints that intertwine shapes and functionalities. Here, the spatio-linguistic, conceptual, formal, and computational modeling of shape serves as a crucial step towards the realization of functional a ordances. This line of thought extends to several other disciplines concerned not only with the design of technical systems, but also with the understanding of biological as well as socio-technical systems. For instance, in biochemistry the shape of molecular entities (proteins, small molecules) has a direct e ect on their interactions which give rise to the capacities they can manifest and, in turn, to the processes of life and death. Representing and reasoning about the shapes and realizable functionalities of these entities is essential to understand basic biological processes. Of special importance, in this as well as other contexts, is the understanding of shape complementarity, that is, categorising the shapes of holes as well as the shapes of the entities that can t into those holes, which can either facilitate or block the functionality of the overall system. The results of this workshop will stimulate and facilitate an active exchange on interdisciplinary applications, ideas, approaches, and methods in the area of modelling shape, form, pattern and function. The format of the workshop combined invited speakers, peer-reviewed full contributions, as well as short position and demo papers, and allowed ample time for open discussions amongst the participants. Topics covered included: Linguistics / Philosophy shape and form in natural language; di erences between shape, form, structure, and pattern; shape in natural and arti cial objects. Cognition shape perception and mental representation; gestalt vs. structuralist understanding of shape cognition; perception and shape (e.g. identifying objects from incomplete visual information); a ordances, dispositions, and shape.
Logics, Spatial Representations formal characterisations of shape and form; logics for shape: e.g. fuzzy, modal, intensional; logics for topology, symmetry, shape similarity; design semantics, spatial semantics; shape and 3D space; shape and space in cognitive assistance systems.
Ontology ontologies and classi cations of shapes; ontological relations among shape, objects and functions; patterns as shapes of processes; forms and patterns in ontology.
Applications Biology & Chemistry : molecular shapes, shape in anatomy and phenotype de nitions, shape complementarity between objects and holes, shape in medical image analysis and annotation.
Visual Art and Aesthetics: shape in Film and Photography; shape in computational creativity.
Naive Physics and Geography: e.g. qualitative classi cations of shapes of geographic objects.
Design & Architecture: shape grammars; CAD, symmetry and beauty in architectural design.
Engineering: formal shape analysis in engineering processes.
The workshop SHAPES 2.0 followed a successful rst event held at CONTEXT 2011 in Karlsruhe, Germany.1 SHAPES 2.0 grew signi cantly in its second installment2, running as a full twoday workshop, and attracting a total of 23 contributed submissions of which we selected 14 for presentation at the workshop, with an additional 5 invited contributions. We thank all the speakers for their great presentations, and the audience for generating very lively and fruitful discussions.
1See http://cindy.informatik.uni-bremen.de/cosy/events/shapes/ for the workshop website. The proceedings have been published as Vol. 812 of the CEUR workshop proceedings, edited by Janna Hastings, Oliver Kutz, Mehul Bhatt, and Stefano Borgo, see http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-812/. 2See http://cindy.informatik.uni-bremen.de/cosy/events/shapes2/ for the workshop website
We would like to thank the program committee members and the additional reviewers for their timely reviewing. We thank our invited keynote speakers|Roberto Casati, Roberto M. Cesar Jr, Simon Colton, Antony Galton, and Barbara Tversky|for their support and contributions. We also thank the UniLog conference, in particular Jean-Yves Beziau, for hosting the second edition of SHAPES, and for generously providing free conference registration to our keynote speakers and workshop organisers.
SHAPES 2.0 has been generously sponsored by the following organisations:
CAPES { Coordination for the improvement of Higher-level Personnel (www.capes.gov.br) CNPq { National Council for Scienti c and Technological Development (www.cnpq.br) International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA) (www.iaoa.org) SHAPES is an initiative of the IAOA Special Interest Group: Design Semantics (www.designsemantics.org) Mehul Bhatt and Oliver Kutz acknowledge support of the German Research Foundation (DFG) via the Spatial Cognition Research Center (SFB/TR 8) co-located at the University of Bremen, and the University of Freiburg, Germany (http://www.sfbtr8.spatial-cognition.de). Oliver Kutz
Spatial Cognition Research Center (SFB/TR 8) University of Bremen, Germany Cognitive Systems (CoSy), and Spatial Cognition Research Center (SFB/TR 8) University of Bremen, Germany Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA), ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy Arti cial Intelligence in Automation group, Centro Universitrio da FEI
Sao Paulo, Brazil Additional Reviewers
The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland University of Toronto, Canada University of Sao Paulo, Brazil University of Sao Paulo, Brazil University of Sao Paulo, Brazil University of Sao Paulo, Brazil Geekie Software, Brazil Universidade Federal do ABC, Brazil Universidade Federal do ABC, Brazil