place during the event. This preface for the proceedings of the first international workshop on Modular Knowledge (MK2022) presents the content of the workshop and reports on the results of the interactive sessions that took The dramatic increase in the amount of open and linked data and the increasing semantification of such data make clear that knowledge is not monolithic, static or uniform. This requires a renewed push for dealing with heterogeneous and distributed knowledge as a constellation of modules. Each module stores a portion of knowledge about one particular subdomain, described in a specific schema, and valid under a set of circumstances. In such a scenario we need well-founded conceptual approaches and practical techniques for modular knowledge management, for example, to recognize relevant partitions of a monolithic knowledge source, but also to define a modularized vision of the domain qualifying the knowledge with a given situation or agent, integrating heterogeneous modules of knowledge, including knowledge represented in sub-symbolic models. The discussion of such modularity notions and techniques, their development and exploitation are the focus of the proposed Modular Knowledge workshop.
CEUR
This first edition, which took place on 29th May 2022 and was co-located with ESWC 2022,
combined presentations with time for extensive discussions between the participants. Out
of 6 submitted papers, 4 papers were accepted for presentation, based on the evaluation of 4
reviewers per paper:
• Module merging in PURO visual modeling, presented by Marek Dudáš [
Three presentations were given online, and part of the audience was remotely connected. To help keeping track of the questions and reactions to the talks, we shared an online document, editable by everybody, which improved interactivity, while at the same time crystalize the ideas shared in the moment.
Additionally, Denny Vrandečić gave an invited keynote talk with the title “Why knowledge must be modular for an Abstract Wikipedia” where he presented the Abstract Wikipedia project that makes use of a language-independent notation to describe abstract pieces of knowledge in a modular and reusable way. Further, 12 lightning talks were presented by workshop participants on topics as diverse as project presentations, theoretical challenges, tools, and call for collaborations. Discussions were initiated via a “speed dating session” in which participants were paired up to network and identify common interests, which were subsequently assembled into the map that surveys the area of Modular Knowledge (to the extent represented by the participants) shown in Figure 1.
The map lists the academic institutions and companies mentioned in the discussions (primarily the afiliations of participants) in addition to a broad range of topics, application areas, and diferent perspectives (“viewpoints”) for modular knowledge. The topics are the most developed part of the map, showing that the workshop participants were interested in both the technical aspects of representing and managing modular knowledge (e.g., contextual reasoning, module extraction), but also in how a modular view of knowledge can be interpreted and used in diferent areas (e.g., learning, modular ontology design patterns). Application areas mentioned include tasks where a modular approach can be adopted (e.g., NLP query answering, structured query answering) as well as domains where knowledge modularization have been used or are currently under development (e.g., environmental data, chemistry, legal text). Additionally, the map lists some specific events, tools and projects that were mentioned by the workshop participants during the discussions.
As a result of the highly interactive sessions, participants reported in the end that the bidirectional exchange of ideas (as opposed to communication directed from a speaker to an audience) was very enjoyable and fruitful.
Organizing Committee • Loris Bozzato, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy • Valentina Anita Carriero, University of Bologna, Italy • Torsten Hahmann, University of Maine, USA • Antoine Zimmermann, École des Mines de Saint-Étienne, France
Program Committee • Grigoris Antoniou, University of Huddersfield, UK • Stefano Borgo, Laboratory for Applied Ontology, ISTC-CNR, Trento, Italy • Anastasia Dimou, KU Leuven, Belgium • Aaron Eberhart, Kansas State University, USA • Thomas Eiter, Vienna University of Technology, Austria • Catherine Faron-Zucker, Université Côte d’Azur, France • Alba Fernández Izquierdo, BASF Digital Solutions, Spain • Karl Hammar, Jönköping AI Lab, Jönköping University, Sweden • Maria M. Hedblom, Jönköping University, Sweden • Nathalie Hernandez, IRIT, France • Megan Katsumi, University of Toronto, Canada • Adila A. Krisnadhi, Universitas Indonesia, Indonesia • Oliver Kutz, KRDB Research Centre, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy • Francisco Martin-Recuerda, SINTEF, Norway • Till Mossakowski, University of Magdeburg, Germany