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 "e;knowledge patterns"e; 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.