The Australasian Ontology Workshop series was initiated in 2005, and AOW 2012 is the eighth in the series. In 2012, AOW was held on the 4th of December 2012 in Sydney, Australia. Like most of the previous events AOW 2012 was held as a workshop of the Australasian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence celebrating its 25th anniversary as AI2012.
Out of papers submitted, we accepted 5 full papers and 4 short papers on the basis of three or four reviews submitted by our Program Committee of international standing. The submissions covered an interesting balance of topics with papers on fundamental research in ontologies, to ontology applications. We were pleased to note that we again attracted international authors. As in previous years, an award of $250 AUD was made available for the best paper, sponsored this year by CAIR 1 (the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research in South Africa). In 2012 the best paper prize was awarded to Giovanni Casini and Alessandro Mosca for their paper "Defeasible reasoning in ORM2". AOW 2012 was the last AOW in its current form. From 2013 AOW will be replaced by the Australasian Semantic Web Conference (ASWC). The 12th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) and the 1st Australasian Semantic Web Conference (ASWC) will be held 21-25 October 2013 in Sydney, Australia and from 2014 onwards, ASWC will be a free-standing conference. Many individuals contributed to this workshop. We thank our contributing authors and dedicated international Program Committee for their careful reviews in a tight time frame. We also thank CAIR for sponsoring the memory keys containing the proceedings. We acknowledge the EasyChair conference management system, which was used in all stages of the paper submission and review process and also in the collection of the final camera-ready papers, as well as the Yola web authoring system for our website available at http://aow2012.yolasite.com. We hope that you found this eighth Australasian Ontology Workshop to be informative, thought provoking, and most of all, enjoyable! Kerry Taylor (CSIRO ICT Centre, Australia) (co-chair) Aurona J. Gerber (CAIR, South Africa) (co-chair) Tommie Meyer (CAIR, South Africa) (co-chair) Mehmet A. Orgun (Macquarie University, Australia) (co-chair)
1 http://www.cair.za.net/
TU Dresden UNSW Meraka Institute, CSIR CAIR (CSIR and UKZN) SUNY at Buffalo CSIRO Universidad Politécnica de Madrid Süleyman Demirel University Ege University TWC/RPI Dept. of Archive and Library Science, Ionian University School of ITEE, The University of Queensland Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), National University of Ireland, Galway University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland FHNW SAP Research School of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa Curtin University, Australia National ICT Australia and University of New South Wales