Semantic Search 2008 Workshop

Objectives

In recent years we have witnessed tremendous interest and substantial economic exploitation of search technologies. However, the representation of user queries and resource content in existing search appliances is still almost exclusively achieved by simple syntax-based descriptions of the resource content and the information need such as in the predominant keyword-centric paradigm.

On the other hand, recent advances in the field of semantic technologies have resulted in tools and standards that allow for the articulation of domain knowledge in a formal manner at a high level of expressiveness. At the same time, semantic repositories and reasoning engines have advanced to a state where querying and processing of this knowledge can scale to realistic IR scenarios.

As such, semantic technologies are now in a state to provide significant contributions to IR problems.

• How can semantic technologies be exploited to capture the information need of the user?
• How can the information need of the user be translated to expressive formal queries without enforcing the user to be capable of handling the difficult query syntax?
• How can expressive resource descriptions be extracted (acquired) from documents (users)?
• How can expressive resource descriptions be stored and queried efficiently on a large scale?
• How can vague information needs and incomplete resource descriptions be handled?
• How can semantic search systems be evaluated and compared with standard IR systems?

Program

Topics of Interest

Main topics of interest in the areas of Semantic Search include but are not limited to:

• Information Retrieval Tasks on the Semantic Web
• Interaction Paradigms for Expressive Resource Annotation
• Interaction Paradigms for Semantic Search
• Collaborative Aspects of Semantic Search (Wikis, Social Networks)

• Semantic Technologies for Query Interpretation, Refinement and Routing
• Natural Language Interfaces for Semantic Web Repositories
• Modelling Expressive Resource Descriptions
• Ontology and Metadata Standards for Expressive Resource Descriptions
• Natural Language Processing and Information Extractions for the Acquisition of Resource Descriptions
• Semantic Web Mining and Semantic Network Analysis

• Scalable Reasoners, Repositories and Infrastructures for Semantic Search
• Crawling, Indexing and Storage of Expressive Resource Descriptions
• Fusion of semantic search results on the semantic web
• Algorithms for Matching Expressive Queries and Resource Descriptions
• Algorithms and Reasoning procedure to deal with Vagueness in Semantic Search

• Evaluation Methodologies for Semantic Search
• Standard Datasets and Benchmarks for Semantic Search

Organizers

• Stephan Bloehdorn, Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe (TH), Germany
• Marko Grobelnik, Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia
• Peter Mika, Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, Spain
• Thanh Tran Duc, Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe (TH), Germany

Program Committee

• Bettina Berendt, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
• Paul Buitelaar, DFKI Saarbrücken, Germany
• Wray Buntine, NICTA Canberra, Australia
• Pablo Castells, Universidad Autónonoma de Madrid, Spain
• Fabio Ciravegna, University of Sheffield, UK
• Alistair Duke, British Telecom, UK
• Blaz Fortuna, Jožef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
• Norbert Fuhr, Universität Duisburg-Essen, Germany
• Lise Getoor, University Maryland, USA
• Rayid Ghani, Accenture Labs, USA
• Peter Haase, Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
• Andreas Hotho, University of Kassel, Germany
• Esther Kaufmann, University of Zurich, Switzerland
• Christoph Kiefer, University of Zurich, Switzerland
• Yiannis Kompatsiaris, Informatics and Telematics Institute, Greece
• Alexander Löser, SAP Research, CEC Dresden, Germany
• Eduarda Mendes Rodrigues, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK
• Sergej Sizov, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
• Nenad Stojanovic, FZI Karlsruhe, Germany
• Rudi Studer, Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
• Raphael Volz, FZI Karlsruhe, Germany
• Haofen Wang, Apex Lab, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
• Michael Witbrock, Cycorp, USA and Cycorp Europe, Slovenia
• Yong Yu, Apex Lab, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
• Ilya Zaihrayeu, University of Trento, Italy
• Hugo Zaragoza, Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Spain

Submission and Proceedings

Proceedings for the workshop are published as part of the CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073). The proceedings are now online at CEUR-WS.org/Vol-334.

We will consider a journal special issue with the topics after the workshop.

Contact

The organization committee can be reached via semsearch08@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de.