Call for Papers: AAAI-2015 Spring Symposium - Structured Data for Humanitarian Tech (#SD4HumTech15)

Dear colleagues,

We are happy to inform you about AAAI-2015 symposium focused on
bridging the gap of using structured data and advanced computing
technologies in the humanitarian space. Here is the call for
participation, and we invite both position papers and technical
papers.

Given the expertise and insights this community in linked data, we
hope for your valuable participation.

Thanks,
Lalana, Hemant and Oshani

=========================================================
CALL FOR PAPERS
AAAI 2015 Spring Symposium
Structured Data for Humanitarian Technologies: Perfect fit or Overkill?
March 23–25, 2015 • Palo Alto, California
http://www.knoesis.org/hemant/symposium/aaai2015
=========================================================

Technology is playing an increasingly important role in all aspects of
humanitarian operations including search and rescue, early warning,
and coordination of relief logistics. However, applications that
support humanitarian operations often consume data stored in
standalone databases, or in spreadsheets requiring manual steps for
data merging and management. Moreover, the data structure is driven by
schemas developed in isolation as opposed to ontological structures
supported by the community such as Humanitarian eXchange Language
(HXL) and Management Of A Crisis (MOAC). Consequently, the
increasingly unorganized and scattered information becomes noise in
the overall system, slowing down decision making processes.

The goal of this symposium is to assess the role of Structured Data
(SD) standards such as Linked Data, which can be quickly reused,
integrated and extended, in the humanitarian space. Using SD would
permit effective integration of and analysis over data generated by
multiple parties, including informal communities i.e. the "crowd",
relief organizations, and more formally by government agencies.
However, there are several important challenges that prevent its
widespread adoption such as the lack of data sources, lack of mature
libraries, and lack of standards across different humanitarian
sectors. This symposium proposes to investigate the role of SD in the
humanitarian relief domain. Is the technology mature enough to warrant
further investigation or do the disadvantages outweigh the utility of
SD for this domain?

The symposium will take place March 23-25, 2015. Stanford University,
Palo Alto, CA, USA and will include a mixture of invited talks, paper
presentations, panels, system demonstrations, and discussions. The
symposium will include a panel discussion that will bring together
experts in Structured Data standards with those in Crisis Informatics
to debate the role of such standards in humanitarian technologies. For
more information, please see
 http://knoesis.org/hemant/symposium/aaai2015

Topics:
===================
We invite position papers (upto 5 pages including references)
discussing these issues as well as technical papers (upto 8 pages
including references) that demonstrate the effective use of Structured
Data in the humanitarian domain or where another comparable technology
has been used to address the reuse and integration issues. We invite
papers on various research topics in the context of extracting,
organizing, and using structured data in the applications for
humanitarian relief, including but not limited to the following:
* Data schemas/ontologies for disaster management
* Data schemas/ontologies for need/offer to assist coordination
* Schemas/ontologies for humanitarian response and recovery operations
* Applications of SD in humanitarian technologies
* Use cases for SD in humanitarian operations at various levels-
field, regional and headquarters

Submission:
===================
Papers must be prepared in AAAI format and submitted using the
easychair site.  All accepted papers will be published in a
proceedings issued as a AAAI technical report. Late breaking ideas are
encouraged as the subject of short papers.

Important Dates:
===================
* October 24, 2014: Submissions due
* November 21, 2014: Author notifications
* December 1, 2014: Accepted camera-ready copy due to AAAI
* March 23-25, 2015: Symposium

General symposium information:
===================
General information on the 2015 AAAI Spring Symposia is available from
the AAAI Website.  This includes information about registration,
location, transportation, and hotel accommodations.

Program Committee:
===================
* Ken Anderson (University of Colorado, USA)
* Marcos Borges (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
* Carlos Castillo (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar)
* Tina Comes (Center for Integrated Emergency Management, Norway)
* Carsten Keßler (The City University of New York, USA)
* Patrick Meier (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar)
* Andrés Monroy-Hernández (Microsoft Research, USA)
* Kate Starbird (University of Washington, USA)
* Bartel van de Walle (Tilburg University, Netherlands)
* Sarah Vieweg (Qatar Computing Research Institute, Qatar)
* [TBA ...]

Organizers:
===================
* Lalana Kagal (MIT, lkagal@csail.mit.edu)
* Hemant Purohit (Kno.e.sis - Wright State U, hemant@knoesis.org)
* Oshani Seneviratne (MIT, oshani@csail.mit.edu)

Received on Tuesday, 30 September 2014 19:16:24 UTC