WISDOMS 2024: Workshop on Integrating the Semantics of Data, Ontologies, Moral and cultural values and their Societal impact

The growing influence of AI in our daily lives has transformed both the digital landscape and the way we extract, represent, and generate information. As a consequence, it highlighted the demand for ethical and reliable AI, supported by ethical guidelines and requirements recognized by governments, industry, the public, and academia. The surge in Large Language Models (LLMs) usage, in particular, has made it increasingly crucial to address the alignment of AI tools to moral and cultural human values, especially when hybridizing knowledge structures and semantic data with generative AI, following EU’s objective of realizing AI applications that are dependable, robust, explicable, ethically guided, and therefore trustworthy. The first edition of WISDOMS, the Workshop on Integrating the Semantics of Data, Ontologies, Moral and cultural values and their Societal impact, aims to provide an interdisciplinary crossroad for researchers, practitioners, and experts to explore the convergence of ethics, moral and cultural values, and socio-behavioral norms with hybrid knowledge structures and generative AI.

Given the last report about the 2023 state of AI, the matter of value alignment of AI is compelling, and demands satisfaction both from a theoretical and operational point of view. WISDOMS 2024 is poised to forge a connection across this divide, fostering collaboration and networking among the Semantic Web, Ethical AI, and Ontology communities engaged in the mission of integrating moral and cultural values into systematic, technological approaches. We foster any contribute related to Knowledge Representation and Extraction of moral, cultural and social values; Grounded World Models, with a particular focus on Ethics and Morality; Morally Informed Decision Making for autonomous agents or recommender systems; Generative models of moral behavior; Formal Representation of Socio-behavioral theories for Social and Legal Norms, as well as works exploiting semantic data regarding GELSI: Governace, Ethics, Legal and Social Implications of digital media and AI. We extend the invitation to scholars and practitioners dedicated to the construction and application of knowledge graphs that encapsulate morality and cultural values, the extraction and codification of these values from diverse semantic data sources, and the interlinking of disciplines through ontological frameworks.

Join us at WISDOMS 2024 to contribute to the pivotal discourse on encoding the essence of our values into the digital fabric of knowledge.

Submission Guidelines and Review Criteria

All papers must be original and not simultaneously submitted to another journal or conference. The following paper categories are welcome: Full Papers (10-15 pages including references), Short Papers (5-9 pages including references), Position Papers (3 pages excluding references, not included in the proceedings). We welcome any type of research, resource and application papers, as well as (short only) demonstration submissions.

Full papers are expected to showcase innovative and substantive research adopting Semantic Web technologies for the investigation of value and ethics, presenting results and evaluations.

Short papers may share intermediate results, ongoing research. Both full and short papers will undergo review based on the following criteria:

• Relevance to the workshop
• Grounding in the literature and related work
• Originality and soundness
• Potential influence and significance
• Reproducibility and availability of resources
• Design and execution of evaluation (for full papers)

Position papers should include motivation and description for positions and ideas within these fields, including controversial topics, and will be peer-reviewed, based on:

• Relevance to the workshop
• Grounding in the literature
• Potential significance and impact
• Clear presentation of ideas and positions

Extended Abstract of recently published papers (1-4 pages excluding references, not included in the proceedings)

After the workshop, the authors of short papers will be given the opportunity to extend their work to Full papers, and authors of position papers will be given the opportunity to extend their work to both Short of Full papers, to be included in the proceedings

Topic Areas

• Ethical dilemmas and theoretical foundations in value knowledge representation
• Development and methodology for value-centric vocabulary, schema, and ontology
• Formalization of ethical frameworks (e.g., Deontic, Utilitaristic, Social Contract, etc.) for moral reasoning
• Foundational ontologies (e.g., DOLCE, BFO, UFO, etc.) for modeling ethics and values
• Harmonization of moral and cultural value theories with ontological structures
• Formal approaches for values and ethics as embodied cognition structures
• Policy formalization with ontologies and knowledge graphs for ethical AI
• Values in time: Temporal knowledge graphs for value alignment
• Semantic web tools and applications for moral reasoning
• Cross-cultural values and norms representation
• Value-sensitive autonomous agents
• FAIR principles for knowledge graph construction and data curation
• Automated and semi-automated construction of knowledge graphs for values and norms
• Commonsense knowledge and value recognition via semantic technologies
• Automatic extraction of moral and cultural values from multimodal resources
• Innovative workflows and tools for ethical knowledge extraction
• Value-driven system design and explainability
• Standards, measures, and best practices for ontologies within ethical AI

Committees

Program Committee

• Aldo Gangemi, National Research Council, Italy
• Misael Mongiovì, University of Catania, Italy
• Nardine Osman, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA), Spain
• Valentina Presutti, University of Bologna, Italy
• Carles Sierra, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA), Spain
• Rossana Damiano, University of Turin, Italy
• Anna Sofia Lippolis, University of Bologna, Italy
• Guendalina Righetti, University of Oslo, Norway
• Andrea Poltronieri, University of Bologna, Italy
• Delfina Sol Martinez Pandiani, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, Netherlands
• Chiara Lucifora, University of Bologna, Italy

Organizing committee

• Stefano De Giorgis, National Research Council (ISTC-CNR), Italy
• Luana Bulla, University of Catania, Italy
• Maria Hedblom, University of Jönköping (JAIL), Sweden
• Luc Steels, Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (UPF-CSIC), Spain

Invited Speakers

• TBC

Venue

WISDOMS is an on-site event taking place on May 26 or May 27, 2024 in Hersonissos, Crete (Greece). The workshop is co-located with the 21st Extended Semantic Web Conference. ESWC is a major venue for discussing the latest scientific results and technology innovations around semantic technologies. Building on its past success, ESWC is seeking to broaden its focus to span other relevant related research areas in which Web semantics plays an important role. All workshop participants must register at ESWC to attend. Please have a look at the official ESWC 2024 webpage for detailed information on the conference, program, venue and registration.

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to wisdoms.publicity@gmail.com.