[cfp] SemSearch10 Workshop @ WWW

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Second Call for Papers SEMSEARCH10

===================================

Fellow Researcher,

We are glad to announce the 3rd edition of the International Semantic
Search workshop to be held at World Wide Web (WWW 2010) in Raleigh,
USA.

In the past years, Semantic Search has attracted much interests, both
from industry and academia. After the success of the first the two
workshops held at ESWC 2008 and at WWW 2009, we are delighted to have
the opportunity to bring together the Information Retrieval and
Semantic Web communities once again to discuss both theoretical and
practical issues in implementing semantic search systems.

As with the previous events, the main directions of semantic search
under investigation are Semantic-driven Document Retrieval, Semantic
Data Retrieval, Interaction Paradigms for Semantic Search and Semantic
Search Evaluation.

Since we believe that the lack of benchmarks is one of the major
stumbling blocks to advances in the field of semantic applications and
semantic search in particular, this workshop will also offer an
evaluation challenge, focusing on answering entity queries over
structured data in RDF.

The Call for Papers and more details on the Evaluation of Entity
Search is found below.

We are looking forward to see you at SemSearch10 in Raleigh, NC!

Cheers,

Marko Grobelnik, Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia Peter
Mika, Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, Spain Thanh Tran Duc, Institute
AIFB, University of Karlsruhe (TH), Germany Haofen Wang, Apex Lab,
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China.




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Call for Papers SEMSEARCH10

Third International Semantic Search Workshop SemSearch10

April 26, 2010, Raleigh, NC, USA

Homepage: http://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/ws/semsearch10


Submission deadline for full papers: March 6th, 2010 (12.00 AM, GMT)

===================================


In recent years we have witnessed substantial exploitation of search
technologies, both at web and enterprise scale. However, the
representation of user queries and information in existing search
appliances is still almost exclusively achieved by simple syntax-based
descriptions (i.e. keyword queries matched against bag-of-words
document representation). While these systems have shown to work well
for many common search needs, they work on the basis of rough
approximations and usually fail to address more complex tasks such as
aggregation and information analytics.
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 at a high level of expressivity.
Semantic repositories and reasoning engines have now advanced to a
state where querying and processing of this knowledge can scale to
large-scale scenarios. As such, semantic technologies are posed to
provide significant contributions to IR problems. More expressive
descriptions of resources are achieved through the representation of
the resource content in terms of concepts and structured data (OWL,
RDF). The recent media interest around Wolfram Alpha, PowerSet
(acquired by Microsoft Bing) and Yahoo SearchMonkey show the
expectations regarding the impact of semantic search.

The other way around, we have also seen the successful adoption of
ideas from IR to the problem of search in semantic (Web) data, which
is due to the increasing size of the Semantic Web. Popular examples
include the Linking Open Data project, the large body of data in forms
of Microformats and RDFa data associated with text. Common to these
scenarios is that the search is focused not on a document collection,
but on semantic data (which may be possibly linked to or embedded in
textual information). Search and ranking large amount of semantic data
on the Web is another key topic addressed by this workshop.


-----------------------------------
Challenges
-----------------------------------

In this context, challenges for Semantic Search research will include,
among others:
- How can semantic technologies be applied to the IR problems?
- How to address scalability and effectiveness of data Web search (by
applying IR technologies)?
- How to allow web user to exploit the expressiveness of the semantic
data on the Web? I.e. how to lower the technical barriers for users to
ask complex questions and to interact with web data to obtain concrete
answers for complex needs?
- And most importantly, how can this new generation of search systems
that successfully exploit semantics for IR or for data Web search can
be evaluated and compared  (with standard IR systems or semantic
repositories)?


-----------------------------------
Topics of Interest
-----------------------------------

Semantic Search is defined through two main directions. First is
Semantic-driven IR, the application of semantic technologies to the IR
problem. The second is Semantic Data Search, which mainly deals with
the retrieval of semantic data. Main topics of interest for the
envisioned workshop contributions include (but are not limited to) the
following:


Semantic-driven IR
- Expressive Document Models
- Knowledge Extraction for Building Expressive Document Representation
- Matching and Ranking based on Expressive Document Representation
- Infrastructure for Semantic-driven IR


Semantic Data Search
- Crawling, Storage and Indexing of Semantic Data
- Semantic Data Search and Ranking
- Data Web Search: Search in Multi-Data-Source, Multi-Repository Scenarios
- Dealing with Vague, Incomplete and Dirty Semantic Data
- Infrastructure for Searching Semantic Data on the Web


Interaction Paradigms for Semantic Search
- Natural Language Interfaces
- Keyword-based Query Interfaces
- Hybrid Query Interfaces (A Combination of NL, Keywords, Forms,
Facets, and Formal Queries)
- Visualization of Semantic Data and Expressive Document
Representation on the Web


Evaluation of semantic search
- Evaluation Methodologies for Semantic Search
- Standard Datasets and Benchmarks for Semantic Search
- Infrastructure for Semantic Search Evaluation


-----------------------------------
Evaluation for Entity Search Track
-----------------------------------


Our ultimate goal is to develop benchmarks for analysing and comparing
semantic search systems in a systematic fashion. Clearly, semantics
can be used for different tasks (document vs. data retrieval) and can
be exploited throughout the search process (for more usable query
construction, for better matching and ranking, for richer results
presenation etc). Hence, such a suite of benchmarks should eventually
allow to study separately different aspects of semantic search
systems.

For this workshop, we will intially focus on the task of matching and
ranking in the semantic data search scenario. In particular, we aim to
analyze the effectiveness, efficiency and robustness of the most basic
functionality of semantic search systems that is ready to be applied
to the Web today: the capability to answer queries related to real
world entities.


The details of the evaluation will be posted soon on our website at
http://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/ws/semsearch10/#eva



-----------------------------------
Organizers
-----------------------------------

* Marko Grobelnik, Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia
* Peter Mika, Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, Spain
* Thanh Tran Duc, Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe (TH), Germany
* Haofen Wang, Apex Lab, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China.


-----------------------------------
Program Committee
-----------------------------------

* Bettina Berendt, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
* Paul Buitelaar, DFKI Saarbrücken, Germany
* Wray Buntine, NICTA Canberra, Australia
* Pablo Castells, Universidad Autónonoma de Madrid, Spain
* Gong Cheng, Nanjing University, China
* Mathieu D'aquin, KMI, Open University, England* Miriam Fernandez,
KMI, Open University, England
* Blaz Fortuna, Jozef Stefan Institute, Slovenia
* Norbert Fuhr, Universität Duisburg-Essen, Germany
* Lise Getoor, University Maryland, USA
* Rayid Ghani, Accenture Labs, USA
* Peter Haase, Fluid Operations, Waldorf, Germany
* Harry Halpin, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
* Andreas Harth, Institute AIFB, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
* Michiel Hildebrand, Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science
Amsterdam, Netherlands
* Guenter Ladwig, Institute AIFB, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
* Alexander Löser, SAP Research, CEC Dresden, Germany
* Yuzhong Qu, Nanjing University, China
* Sergej Sizov, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
* Nenad Stojanovic, FZI Karlsruhe, Germany
* Rudi Studer, Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
* Kavitha Srinivas, IBM Research, Hawthorne, USA
* Cao Hoang Tru, HCMC University of Technology, HCMC, Vietnam
* Giovanni Tummarello, Deri, Galway, Ireland
* Michael Witbrock, Cycorp, USA and Cycorp Europe, Slovenia
* Yong Yu, Apex Lab, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
* Ilya Zaihrayeu, University of Trento, Italy
* Valentin Zacharias, FZI, Germany
* Hugo Zaragoza, Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Spain


-----------------------------------
Submission and Proceedings
-----------------------------------
For submissions, the following rules apply:

1. Full technical papers: up to 10 pages in ACM format

2. Short position or demo papers: up to 5 pages in ACM format


Submissions must be formatted using the WWW2010 templates available at
http://www2010.org/www/authors/submissions/formatting-guidelines/.
Submissions will be peer reviewed by three independent reviewers.
Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop and included in the
workshop proceedings.
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.
Please use the following link to the submission system to submit your
paper: Easychair Submission System for SemSearch10 at
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=semsearch10


-----------------------------------
Important Dates
-----------------------------------

Deadline for submissions: March 6th, 2010 (12.00 AM, GMT)

Notification of acceptance: March 28th, 2010

Camera-ready versions: April 6nd, 2010

WWW'10 Conference: April 26th-30th, 2010


Workshop Day: April 26th, 2010


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Contact
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The organization committee can be reached using contact data available
at their web pages.
See website http://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/ws/semsearch10.