Knowledge Engineering: Practice and Patterns

Knowledge is considered as the most important asset in our modern society. It has now penetrated all facets of computing practice: from the rise of knowledge management to the Semantic Web and from the blog culture to the knowledge economy. This penetration has made proper knowledge engineering a most - quired feature. This volume contains the papers presented at the 16th International C- ference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (EKAW 2008) held in Acitrezza, Sicily, Italy, September 29 to October 3 2008. EKAW 2008 is concerned with all aspects of eliciting, acquiring, modelling and managing knowledge, and their role in the construction of knowledge-intensive systems and services for the Semantic Web, knowledge management, e-business, natural language processing, intelligent integration information, etc. This year we paid special attention to the topic of 'knowledge patterns' that can be considered as good practice or models that are applied or reused throughout the knowledge engineering life cycle. Hence, beyond traditional t- icsofEKAW,wesolicitedpapersthatcoverresearchonhowtodescribe,classify, model, extract and apply knowledge patterns in the design of ontologies, app- cations and products. We have paid special attention to the description of ex- riences that involve the application and identi?cation of knowledge patterns in social network analysis, natural language processing, multimedia analysis, p- tern recognition, etc.