Workshop on Social and Collaborative

Construction of Structured Knowledge

at 16th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2007)

Banff, Canada, May 8, 2007

Workshop Proceedings are published as a CEUR volume

Workshop results are discussed in a technical report

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Invited talk

Workshop Description

Have you ever tried developing a schema or ontology, or creating other structured knowledge? Have you tried doing this task collaboratively with your colleagues? How about with many of your colleagues as well as people you've never met? Or anyone else in the world? Have you found the tools that support these tasks? Do you have a list of requirements for such tools or has your group developed tools to support collaborative acquisition of structured knowledge in general and ontologies and schemas in particular?

We are soliciting contributions to the workshop on Social and Collaborative Construction of Structured Knowledge. The great success of Web 2.0 is mainly fuelled by an infrastructure that allows web users to easily create, share, tag, and connect content and knowledge. Although the general topic of integrating Web 2.0 with the Semantic Web has been and will be the focus of high profile conference panels, we are still far from understanding how the two topics relate to each other. In this workshop, we would like to explore how the power of creating web content in a social environment can be used to acquire, formalize and structure knowledge. The workshop will address the topic of web-based collaborative construction of structured knowledge in general, and ontology development in particular. So far, most of the tools for ontology development and knowledge acquisition are stand-alone tools, or tools designed to support work of small well-coordinated teams. This workshop will investigate how best to use the “wisdom of the crowd” to reduce time and cost of constructing and maintaining knowledge structures in any language and level of complexity. We will discuss tools that support various steps of the life cycle in the “open” collaborative development of ontologies, from collective “brainstorming” to evaluation, maintenance and extension of existing ontologies.

We solicit three types of contributions:

1. Research papers analyzing the process of collaborative knowledge acquisition, requirements for tool support, and case studies of collaborative ontology-development projects. The topics relevant to this discussion include issues related to collaborative construction of structured knowledge and ontologies:
• collaborative creation and editing of structured knowledge
• requirements for collaborative tools
• user-specific views of ontologies
• extracting structure and ontologies from tags and annotations
• evaluation of collaborative tools
• collaborative evaluation of ontologies
• user interfaces for collaborative tools for creating structured knowledge
• trust in collaborative construction of knowledge
• case studies of collaborative ontology-development project.
2. Demos and working prototypes of systems that support social collaborative construction of structured knowledge. The systems should fall under the general description above. Furthermore, participants in the demo session must commit to supporting the evaluation (see the next item). This support will include working with the workshop organizers to develop a set of tasks for the evaluation, instrumenting their tools to log basic usage and contribution information. Please contact workshop co-chairs for more information. For practical reasons, not all demos will be selected to take part in the evaluation.
3. Evaluation of system demos submitted to the workshop. We expect that all workshop participants (and, in particular paper and demo authors) will participate in a formative evaluation of the demos submitted to the workshop. The developers of the demo systems will make their systems available to the workshop participants. The workshop organizers, together with the demo developers, will create a list of tasks to use for the demo evaluation and other details. Depending on the number and type of demo submissions, we expect that the list of tasks will apply to all or some of the demos. Note that for practical reasons, and based on demo suitability for the selected evaluation tasks, some demos may not be chosen to take part in the evaluation. The evaluation will run for 2 or 3 weeks before the workshop and a good part of the workshop will be devoted to the discussion of the evaluation, and a prize will be handed out to the most informative review.

Accepted papers and demo descriptions will appear in the workshop proceedings and will be included in the WWW2007 conference CD.

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper submission: 12 February 2007 (extended)
Notification of paper acceptance: 9 March 2007
Camera-ready papers: 26 March 2007

Demo submission: 19 February 2007 (extended)
Notification of demo acceptance: 9 March 2007
Camera-ready demo description: 26 March 2007

Evaluation: 1-30 April 2007
Workshop: 8 May 2007

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

• Research papers: up to 10 pages. Deadline is 12 February 2007.
• Demos: descriptions of up to 4 pages. Deadline is 19 February 2007. If you are planning to submit a demo, then please email the workshop chairs as soon as possible and let them know about your demo.


All submissions need to be in PDF, and follows the WWW2007 format. Submissions are to be made via the workshops submission web site.

Organizing committee

• Natasha Noy (co-chair), Stanford University
• Harith Alani (co-chair), University of Southampton
• Gerd Stumme, University of Kassel
• Peter Mika, Free University, Amsterdam
• York Sure, University of Karlsruhe
• Denny Vrandecic, University of Karlsruhe

Program Committee

Questions?