CFP - SAAW2006 Semantic Authoring and Annotation Workshop at ISWC-2006

                       FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

        SAAW2006 - Semantic Authoring and Annotation Workshop
                http://saaw2006.semanticweb.org/

workshop to be held at the 5th International Semantic Web Conference,
               Athens, GA, U.S.A. November 5-9 2006
                 http://iswc2006.semanticweb.org/


SUMMARY

The workshop aims to combine the "traditional" paradigm of Semantic Web (SW)
annotation with SW technologies in the authoring domain (e.g. Blogs and
Wikis, Semantic Word, etc). Together with the popular collaborative tagging
paradigm, these three application domains make up what can collectively be
called Semantic Authoring and Annotation.

IMPORTANT DATES:

   July 24, 2006  	-   Abstract submissions due
   August 1, 2006 	-   Paper submissions due
   September 5, 2006 	-   Acceptance Notification
   September 18, 2006 	-   Camera-ready papers due
   November 6, 2006 	-   Workshop date

MOTIVATION, AIM AND SCOPE

The "traditional" paradigm of Semantic Web (SW) annotation - annotating
existing web sites with the help of external tools - has been established
for a number of years now, e.g. in the form of tools such as OntoMat or
tools based on Annotea, and is continuously being developed and improved.

At the same time, core technologies of the SW - the common, open data-model
of the Resource Description Framework and the use of shared vocabularies -
are now gradually being introduced into mainstream publishing and authoring
channels such traditional online publications or office software, as well as
in new and "hip" technologies such as Blogs and Wikis. Regardless of the
medium, SW technologies in the authoring domain aim at aiding human content
producers to author, structure, annotate and publish text and other media
right from the start, rather than enriching them with metadata at a later
stage.

The collaborative tagging paradigm, which has its roots in social
bookmarking and folksonomies, is now becoming popular. Unfortunately, it is
often very centralized and does not take users needs for different levels of
sharing into account. Many services would benefit their users by offering
them SW based bookmarks and topics such as in Annotea bookmarking and topic
framework.

Together these three application domains make up what can collectively be
called Semantic Authoring and Annotation, the result of which are documents
with formal, machine-understandable semantics, partly created by authors and
partly by collaborators examining the work in different angles and in
different contexts. An important aspect in all these technologies is that
they are human-centric, target non-computer experts and aim at making
various kinds of content more visible, better accessible, easier to find,
reuse, share, organize, and examine from different viewpoints. Furthermore,
Semantic Annotation and the introduction of SW technologies into mainstream
authoring domains will result in an increased amount of relevant SW data,
and help to achieve a broader success of the SW.

Finally, various technologies to implement semantic annotation and the
authoring of semantic documents (e.g. GRDDL for deriving formal metadata or
RDFa and Microformats for embedding it) have entered the scene recently, and
are being endorsed by standards bodies such as the W3C.

The SAAW workshop will be organized as a half-day workshop and will
investigate technical and methodological, as well as social issues
surrounding all aspects of Semantic Web Authoring and Annotation.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

     * Semantic Authoring and Annotation tools - Semantic Blogs,
       Semantic Wikis, etc. - that allows human users to produce
       content and publish it on the web:
          * Usability - As SW techonologies enter the mainstream,
            the end-users (authors) of authoring tools will often
            not have formal computing background, which is why
            simple and intuitive user interfaces are becoming
            increasingly important.
          * Context - Knowing the context of the authoring and
            publishing process - where and when is an author
            producing content, for which audience, etc. - can be
            exploited in aiding and guiding human users.
          * Integration and Aggregation - Many tasks require
            authors to draw on various often not integrated
            sources. An important goal must therefore be to find
            ways to enable this integration and aggregation
            process.
     * Formats and standards for embedding formal metadata in
       documents (e.g. RDFa or Microformats), or for deriving such
       metadata from documents (e.g. GRDDL):
          * Assessment of such standards - are they sufficient,
            what is still missing?
          * Examples of the use of such technologies (e.g.
            Microformats in Structured Blogging)
     * Semantic Authoring and Annotation for scientific
       publications:
          * What would users (readers) need from and gain by
            semantically authored and annotated documents?
          * What would authors be willing to submit?
          * To what extent can scientific papers be structured?
          * Are current authoring/browsing tools able to handle
            these needs, if not what is the next step?
          * Enabling Semantic Conference Proceedings: Conceptual
            Structures for Publication
          * Cost and benefit of "going semantics" for a large
            (publishing) organization
     * The impact of the Social Semantic Desktop on Semantic
       Authoring and Annotation - the Next generation collaboration
       infrastructure:
          * Means to author and annotate Semantic Documents on the
            Desktop
     * General descriptions of semantic annotation
     * (Common) semantic annotation strategies for upgrading the
       web to the Semantic Web (including multimedia content):
          * Semantic annotation of static vs. dynamic web documents
          * Manual and/or automated semantic annotation of the
            current Web
          * Multimedia semantic annotation (e.g. with adoptions of
            MPEG-7)
     * Collaborative tagging and annotation
          * Relations between tagging systems and full-fledged
            semantic annotation
          * Deriving formal semantics from flat tagging systems
            (tag clustering, etc.)
     * All topics related to the evaluation of authoring and
       annotation for Semantic Web applications
     * Vocabularies and Ontologies for Semantic Authoring and
       Annotation

SUBMISSIONS

   Format requirements for the submission of papers are:

     * Maximum 10 pages, including title page and bibliography for
       technical papers.
     * Maximum 4 pages, including title page and bibliography for
       short position papers.

Although not required for the initial submission, we recommend following the
ACM format guidelines <http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html>,
as this will be the required format for accepted papers. Also please note
that papers in ACM format tend to have fewer pages, compared to the same
paper in other styles.


ORGANISING COMMITTEE

    * Knud Möller, DERI/NUI Galway (Ireland)
    * Anita de Waard, Elsevier Publishing (Netherlands)
    * Steve Cayzer, HP Labs, Bristol (United Kingdom)
    * Marja-Riitta Koivunen, Annotea.org (USA)
    * Michael Sintek, DFKI (Germany)
    * Siegfried Handschuh, DERI/NUI Galway (Ireland)

Received on Wednesday, 14 June 2006 15:10:11 UTC