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1st Call for Papers SEMSEARCH'08

Semantic Search 2008 Workshop

June 01, 2008, Tenerife, Spain

(http://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/ws/semsearch08)

Submission deadline for full papers: March 14th, 2008 (12.00 AM, GMT)

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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.
In this context, several challenges arise for Semantic Search systems.
These include, among others:

* 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?

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Topics of Interest
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Main topics of interest in the areas of Semantic Search include but are
not limited to:
Tasks and Interaction Paradigms for Semantic Search

* 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)

Query Construction and Resource Modelling for Semantic Search

* 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
* NLP and Information Extractions for the Acquisition of Resource
Descriptions
* Semantic Web Mining and Semantic Network Analysis

Algorithms and Infrastructures for Semantic Search

* 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 of Semantic Search

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

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Organizers
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* Stephan Bloehdorn, Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe (TH), Germany
* Marko Grobelnik, Jo?ef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia
* Peter Mika, Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, Spain
* Thanh Tran Duc, Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe (TH), Germany

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Program Committee
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* 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
* Blaz Fortuna, Jo?ef 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
* Yiannis Kompatsiaris, Informatics and Telematics Institute, Greece
* Alexander Loeser, 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

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Submission and Proceedings
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Proceedings will be published for the workshop as part of the CEUR
Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073). We will pursue a
journal special issue with the topics of the workshop if we receive an
appropriate number of high-quality submissions.

Details on the proceedings and camera-ready formatting will be announced
upon notification of the authors.

For submissions, the following rules apply:

* Papers should be formatted according to the guidelines of the ESWC2008
conference, i.e. according to the Springer LNCS Style. More information
is available at (http://www.springer.com/comp/lncs/Authors.html).
* Regular research papers are limited to 15 pages.
* Additionally, we invite discussion papers, experimental contributions,
system and demo descriptions which are limited to 6 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 SemSearch2008 at
(http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=semsearch08)

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Important Dates
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Deadline for submissions: March 14th, 2008 (12.00 AM, GMT)

Notification of acceptance: April 11th, 2008

Camera-ready versions: May 2nd, 2008

ESWC'08 Conference: June 1st-5th, 2008

Workshop Day: June 1st, 2008

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Contact
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The organization committee can be reached via
semsearch08@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de.
For questions on submission, please contact Tran Duc Thanh via
dtr@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de.
Workshop website at (http://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/ws/semsearch08).