We invite the submission of short research papers to the Second International Workshop on Decentralized Search and Recommendation (DESERE 2025), to be held in conjunction with CIKM 2025 at Seoul, Korea on 14 November 2025. Building on the success of the inaugural DESERE workshop at The Web Conference 2024, this edition continues to advance the discourse on decentralized information access, with a particular focus on privacy-preserving infrastructures and retrieval algorithms for user-controlled data.

As data ecosystems shift toward decentralization, traditional paradigms in search and recommendation face new challenges. The rise of infrastructures such as Personal Online Datastores (PODs), federated learning frameworks, and semantic interoperability standards demands a rethinking of how information is accessed, managed, and recommended—placing user agency, privacy, and data ownership at the core.

DESERE 2025 provides a platform for researchers and practitioners from information retrieval, recommender systems, data management, semantic web, privacy-aware AI, and distributed systems to present and discuss their latest findings, innovative solutions, and emerging use cases. We welcome interdisciplinary contributions that address theoretical foundations, system design, algorithmic advances, and real-world deployments of decentralized systems. Application areas may include, but are not limited to, domains where user agency, data privacy, and trustworthy information access are critical.

Topics of Interest
We invite original short research papers on topics including (but not limited to):

Decentralized infrastructures for information retrieval and recommendation
Privacy-preserving algorithms and federated learning in decentralized settings
Retrieval models and ranking algorithms for distributed data sources
Semantic interoperability in decentralized systems
Access control, consent management, and transparency mechanisms for user data
Personal Online Datastores (e.g., Solid, Dataspaces) and related architectures
Standards and protocols for decentralized data integration and exchange
Personalization, user modeling, and contextual relevance in decentralized environments
Evaluation methodologies and benchmarks for decentralized IR and recommendation systems
User modeling and personalization in decentralized environments
Submission Information
Submitted papers must follow the CIKM guidelines for submissions (see https://cikm2025.org/calls/workshops).

Paper submissions must conform to the “double-blind” review policy. All papers will be peer-reviewed by experts in the field. Acceptance will be based on relevance to the workshop, scientific novelty, and technical quality. Manuscripts should be submitted to the (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=desere25) site in PDF format, using the ACM sigconf template, see https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template. Submissions should be in 2-column sigconf format. Short papers cannot exceed 4 pages, including an appendix, plus unlimited pages for the GenAI Usage Disclosure section and references (paper content is limited to 4 pages, which means that if you have an appendix, then it should be included within that page limit. It is also ok if you do not have an appendix and instead 4 pages of content).

Submission site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=desere25

Important dates
Paper submission deadline: August 31, 2025
Notification to authors: September 30, 2025
Camera-ready deadline: October 20, 2025
Workshop date: November 14, 2025