[CfP] Modularity and Splitting Techniques (MoST) @ KR 2026
Hahn, Alexander
Dear colleagues,
We are excited to invite submissions to the workshop on "Modularity and Splitting Techniques for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning" (MoST) which will take place on July 18th, 2026, as part of KR 2026 in Lisbon, Portugal.
[Apologies for cross-posting this announcement.]
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First Call for Papers: MoST @ KR 2026
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* Submissions until: April 20th, 2026 (AoE / UTC-12)
* Website: https://most.cs.tu-dortmund.de/
* Workshop: July 18th, 2026
* Location: Lisbon, Portugal
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Motivation
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The field of knowledge representation and reasoning (KR) has brought forth a great variety of sophisticated approaches to represent knowledge and beliefs of humans and agents, and to reason from such representations. While many KR formalisms are explicitly designed to model real-life scenarios including commonsense knowledge, the complexity of such situations often poses a severe challenge to reasoning efficiently in these formalisms.
A key to break up the complexity of information is to represent and reason in local contexts. Ideally, these local contexts should contain all information relevant to a specific aspect of the problem under consideration, abstracting from irrelevant details, such that the outcomes of local reasoning procedures after merging coincide with what would have been obtained theoretically in the global picture.
Examples of such techniques appear in many subareas of KR. In nonmonotonic reasoning and belief revision, syntax splitting is used to reduce the reasoning space subjects of active research. In modular answer set programming, modules take the role of local contexts addressing specific subproblems. Graph structures can be utilized to compose the global picture from local contexts, like in probabilistic networks. Interestingly, humans perform quite well in their everyday lives by recognizing relevant information quickly and reason from local contexts successfully with their limited resources. Therefore, also cognitive aspects of knowledge representation and reasoning are relevant to the investigation of modularity and splitting techniques.
The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers from different (sub)fields in KR and related to KR to discuss modularity and splitting techniques for knowledge representation and reasoning. We invite papers addressing these issues from all aspects of KR, being based on different methodologies using symbolic, qualitative, or quantitative approaches. Discussing modularity and splitting in a broad scientific context shall help understand its underlying mechanisms better and foster collaborations across scientific domains.
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Topics of Interest
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We consider modularity and splitting techniques to be a cross-cutting issue being basically relevant for all subareas of KR, in the tradition of divide-and-conquer methodologies. In particular, researchers from nonmonotonic reasoning and belief revision and from answer set programming might be interested in this topic, but we also welcome submissions from more classical subfields like description logics, or using quantitative (e.g., probabilistics) and network-based methodologies.
Topics of the workshop include, but are not limited to
* Modular representations of knowledge and belief bases
* Syntax splitting and semantic splittings
* Global vs. local knowledge representation and reasoning
* Decomposition and composition
* Merging of knowledge and beliefs
* Graph- and network-based representations
* Relevance and independence
* Forgetting and abstraction
* KR and cognition
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Important Dates
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Paper submission: April 20, 2026
Notification: May 28, 2026
Workshop: July 18, 2026
Deadlines are "anywhere on earth" (AoE / UTC-12).
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Submissions
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We welcome both contributions of full papers containing novel results (up to 14 pages, excluding references), as well as extended abstracts of already-published results (up to 3 pages, excluding references). Please note that we also welcome submissions of preliminary work.
Submissions should be formatted in CEURART one-column style. For details, please see:
https://most.cs.tu-dortmund.de/submission.html
We intend to publish accepted papers via CEUR-WS. If you do not wish to make your paper public, you will be able to opt-out.
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Organization
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Workshop Chairs:
* Christoph Beierle (FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany)
* Alexander Hahn (TU Dortmund University, Germany)
* Gabriele Kern-Isberner (TU Dortmund University, Germany)
* Lars-Phillip Spiegel (FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany)
Program Committee:
* Claudia d'Amato (University of Bari, Italy)
* Tanya Braun (University of Münster, Germany)
* James Delgrande (Simon Fraser University, Vancouver Canada)
* Florence Dupin de Saint-Cyr (Bannay University of Toulouse, France)
* Thomas Eiter (TU Wien, Austria)
* Eduardo Fermé (University of Madeira, Portugal)
* Marcel Gehrke (University of Hamburg, Germany)
* Jonas Haldimann (University of Cape Town, South Africa)
* Jesse Heyninck (Open Universiteit Heerlen, Netherlands)
* Kristian Kersting (TU Darmstadt, Germany)
* Matthias Knorr (NOVA University Lisbon, Portugal)
* Nicholas Leisegang (University of Cape Town, South Africa)
* Thomas Meyer (University of Cape Town & CAIR, South Africa)
* Emilia Oikarinen (University of Helsinki, Finland)
* David Pearce (University of Madrid, Spain)
* Zeynep Saribatur (TU Wien, Austria)
* Kai Sauerwald (FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany)
* Andre Thevapalan (University of Mainz, Germany)
* Matthias Thimm (FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany)
* Emil Weydert (University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg)
* Marco Wilhelm (Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Germany)
* Stefan Woltran (TU Wien, Austria)
(to be extended)
The MoST workshop is affiliated with the 23rd International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2026), which is a part of the Federated Logic Conference 2026 (FLoC 2026).