Semantic Search 2009 Workshop

Objectives

In recent years we have witnessed tremendous interest and substantial economic exploitation of search technologies, both at web and enterprise scale. 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 (i.e. keyword queries matched against bag‐of‐words document representation).

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 expressivity. At the same time, semantic repositories and reasoning engines have only now advanced to a state where querying and processing of this knowledge can scale to realistic IR scenarios.

In parallel to these developments, in the past years we have also seen the emergence of important results in adapting ideas from IR to the problem of search in RDF/OWL data, folksonomies, microformat collections or semantically tagged natural text. Common to these scenarios is that the search is focused not on a document collection, but on metadata (which may be possibly linked to or embedded in textual information). Search and ranking in metadata stores is another key topic addressed by the workshop.

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
• Incentives and Interaction Paradigms for 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
• Modeling 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, Storing and Indexing 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, Incompleteness and Inconsistencies in Semantic Search

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

Organizers

• Marko Grobelnik, Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia
• Peter Mika, Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, Spain
• Thanh Tran Duc, Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe (TH), Germany
• Haofen Wang, Apex Data & Knowledge Management Lab, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China

Program Committee

• Stephan Bloehdorn, Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
• Wray Buntine, NICTA Canberra, Australia
• Pablo Castells, Universidad Autónonoma de Madrid, Spain
• 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 Harth, DERI, Galway, Ireland
• Andreas Hotho, University of Kassel, Germany
• Yiannis Kompatsiaris, Informatics and Telematics Institute, Greece
• Li Ma, IBM Research, Beijing, China
• Eduarda Mendes Rodrigues, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK
• Yuzhong Qu, Southeast University, Nanjing, China
• Sergej Sizov, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
• Kavitha Srinivas, IBM Research, Hawthorne, USA
• Nenad Stojanovic, FZI Karlsruhe, Germany
• Rudi Studer, Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
• Cao Hoang Tru, HCMC University of Technology, HCMC, Vietnam
• Giovanni Tummarello, DERI, Galway, Ireland
• 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

For submissions, the following rules apply:

• Papers should be formatted according to the guidelines of the WWW2009 conference, i.e. according to the ACM Proceedings Style. More information is available here.
• Regular research papers are limited to 10 pages.
• Additionally, we invite discussion papers, experimental contributions, system and demo descriptions which are limited to 2 pages. In this case, please indicate the type of the contribution as subtitle.
• Please use the following link to the submission system to submit your paper:
  Easychair Submission System for SemSearch2009

Contact

The organization committee can be reached via semsearch09@lists.uni-karlsruhe.de.