Spatial and temporal context are increasingly important as users rely more on mobile devices to access information on the Web. Although information access applications are becoming more context-savvy, users' expectations are far ahead of current capabilities. For example, users expect a given application to understand the nature of their current immediate surroundings, while many systems have trouble drawing an accurate map of a city, or assigning a geographic and temporal scope to a web document. Successfully incorporating spatial and temporal context into the retrieval and user models for a system opens up a universe of hyperlocal scenarios.

Users provide an unprecedented volume of detailed, and continuously updated information about where they are, what they are doing, who they are with, and what they are thinking and feeling about their current activities. The provision of this stream creates an informal contract between the user and the information access application that the user will provide the information, but the application must provide results that are contextually relevant. Many of the research questions about how to understand and employ usercontext have yet to be answered.

In this workshop we explore spatial and temporal context in dynamic geotagged collections, such as Wikipedia, and traditional news sources, as well as social media sites such as Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook and Flickr. To ground the workshop, and provide a locus for discussion of the two aspects of user context, we focus on event detection and recommendation. Events are a natural theme around which to center discussions of spatial and temporal context because events are defined by their time and place. We aim to bring together practitioners and researchers to discuss their recent breakthroughs and the challenges with addressing spatial and temporal information access, both from the algorithmic and the architectural perspectives. This workshop would be a successor to the successful SIGIR 2012 and 2013 Workshops on Time Aware Information Access (#TAIA2012 & #TAIA2013). The 2012 edition was the first to bring together a broad set of academic and industrial researchers around the topic of time-aware information access. The specific focus of the 2013 workshop was on the many time-aware benchmarking activities in 2013. The focus this year will be spatial and temporal information, around the locus of event detection and recommendation.

Important Dates

Submission Deadline: Monday, May 19th 2014 (23:59UTC-11; Samoa time zone)
Acceptance Notifications: Monday, June 9th 2014
Camera-ready Deadline: Friday, June 20th 2014
Workshop: Friday, July 11th 2014

Organizers

Fernando Diaz (Microsoft)
Claudia Hauff (Delft University of Technology)
Vanessa Murdock (Microsoft)
Maarten de Rijke (University of Amsterdam)
Milad Shokouhi (Microsoft)