This WWW2013 Workshop focuses on new approaches to using structured data for improving Web search. Most Web documents and queries are about entities and the relationships between them, i.e., structured data with documented semantics. However, popular search engines have historically ignored structured data, instead relying on techniques that model the document and queries as a bag of words. Recent developments, most notably the dramatic increase in the use of structured data markup on web pages have lead to substantial interest from mainstream search engines. However, we are still in the very early stages in the evolution of how search engines use this structured data. Most of the current work is focussed on searching databases of facts about entities and presenting them either alongside the search results, or on annotating search results with additional data. The core problems of utilizing knowledge about entities for improving the ranking of documents, helping set the user context, etc. are still largely unexplored territories.

While the use of structured data is still limited in Web search engines, active research in this direction can be observed in many communities. Most notably, there is a broad range of solutions proposed by IR, database, and Semantic Web researchers for exploiting structured data for various search tasks. The goal of this Workshop is to bring these communities together to focus on the central question of how to make these solutions applicable to Web search engines. The central theme of the workshop is to explore new and novel ways for exploiting explicit representations of entities and the relationships between them to improve Web search.

Website

For latest status and updates, see the Workshop site at (http://dish2013.foaf-project.org/)

Important Dates

Workshop proceedings will be published through the ACM Digital Library, with associated tight production deadlines:

March 4th 2013: Workshop paper deadline (previously February 23rd)
March 15th 2013: Workshop paper notifications
April 2nd 2013: Workshop paper final copy
WWW2013 Conference: May 13-17th 2013, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Workshop day: May 13th 2013.

Topics

Three main directions of semantic search have emerged. The first is the use of structured data to augment traditional web search results and the search results page. The second is to use the structured data to directly deliver results to search requests and to answer questions. The third is to use knowledge about a domain to affect ranking of results. This workshop targets all these directions of semantic document retrieval and semantic data retrieval but puts special emphasis on the web search context. Possible topics for submission include, but are not limited to:

Structured data for Web document retrieval
Entity/relation aware document and query models
Entity/relation aware matching and ranking
Use of structured data for building vertical search engines
Web data retrieval
Searching structured data with textual queries
Novel applications of structured data to augment search results
Evaluation methodologies

Submissions

Workshop papers should be submitted by Feb 23rd 2013 using EasyChair (we are 'dish2013' there). The organizers can be contacted at dish-workshop-organizers@googlegroups.com in case of technical issues with the submission process. Due to the tight schedule, please don't ask for extensions!

Organization

We invite posters and papers of max. 6 pages presenting new ideas for how structured data can be used in search, preferably with working demos.

We plan to accept 8-12 papers and organize a full day event, roughly half devoted to each of the two approaches. Each session will have a significant time set aside for discussion. There will also be a poster session. Attendance will be open to the public (via WWW2013 Workshops registration - note that the WWW2013 conference does not offer a Workshops-only registration option). We plan to have one or two invited talks.

Advisory Board

Krisztian Balog, NTNU, Norway
Charlie Jiang, Bing, USA
Steve Macbeth, Bing, USA
Pavel Serdyukov, Yandex, Russia
Alexander Shubin, Yandex, Russia
Arjen P. de Vries, Delft University of Technology, Holland

Program Committee (in progress - awaiting further confirmations)

Vineet Gupta, Google, USA
Alon Halevy, Google, USA
Edgar Meij, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Eric Miller, Zepheira, USA
Libby Miller, BBC R&D, UK
Srikant Ramakrishnan, Google, USA
Gerhard Weikum, Max-Planck Institute, Germany
...


Organizers

Dan Brickley (Google), Peter Mika (Yahoo!), Thanh Tran Duc (Institute AIFB)

Sponsors

Thanks to Google for providing sponsorship in support of this event.

Contact: dish-workshop-organizers@googlegroups.com