ESWC 2018: Call for Challenges

[Apologies for multiple postings.]


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Overview
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The ESWC organizers are glad to announce that the Challenges Track will be included again in the program of ESWC 2018. Five challenges were held last year [1] and allowed the ESWC2017 conference to attract a broader audience beyond the Semantic Web community, also spanning across disciplines such as Recommender Systems or Knowledge Extraction. 

For the 2018 edition, a call for challenges is open in order to allow the selection of challenges to be held at the conference. The purpose of challenges is to showcase the maturity of state of the art methods and tools on tasks common to the Semantic Web community and adjacent disciplines, in a controlled setting involving rigorous evaluation.
Semantic Web Challenges are an official track of the conference, ensuring significant visibility for the challenges as well as participants. Challenge participants are asked to present their submissions as well as provide a paper describing their work.  These papers must undergo a peer-review by experts relevant to the challenge task, and will be published in the challenge proceedings.
Next to the publication of proceedings, challenges at ESWC2018 will benefit from high visibility and direct access to the ESWC audience and community.

[1] https://2017.eswc-conferences.org/call-challenges <https://2017.eswc-conferences.org/call-challenges> 

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Challenge Proposals
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Challenge organizers are encouraged to submit proposals adhering to the following criteria:

- At least one task involving semantics in data. 
The task(s) should be well defined and related to the Semantic Web but not necessarily confined to it. It is highly encouraged to consider tasks which involve other, highly related communities, such as NLP, Recommender Systems, Machine Learning or Information Retrieval. If multiple tasks are provided the tasks should be independent so that participants may choose which to participate in.

- Task descriptions are likely to be interesting to a wider audience. 
We encourage the challenge organizers to propose at least one basic task that can be addressed by a larger audience from their community. Engaging with your challenge audience and obtaining feedback from your target group on the task design might be helpful for shaping the task and ensuring sufficient number of participants.

- Clear and rigorous definition of the tasks. 
For each task, you should define a deterministic and objective way to verify if the goal of the task has been achieved, and to which extent it has been achieved (if applicable). The best way is usually to provide detailed examples of input data and expected output. The examples must cover all the possible situations that can occur while performing the task, and should leave no place to ambiguity about whether in a particular case the task is done or not.

- Valid dataset (if applicable). 
If accepted, you should find or create a dataset that will be used for the challenge. In any case, you must specify the provenance of the dataset (if it contains human annotation – how were those obtained). You must make sure you have the right to use/publish this dataset and clearly state the license for its use within the challenge. The dataset should be split at least in two parts – the training part, and the evaluation part. The training part contains the data, and the results that should be obtained when performing the task. As for the evaluation part, you should only publish the data, and make sure that the correct results have not previously been available to the participants. When proposing the challenge you must provide details on the dataset and on the way it is/will be created – the dataset can be made available later.

- Challenge Committee. 
Composed of at least 3 respected researchers with experience in the tasks of the challenge. They help evaluate the papers submitted by the participants, and also validate the evaluation procedure.

- Evaluation metrics and procedure. For each task there must be at least two objective criteria (metrics) (e.g. precision and recall). The evaluation procedure and the way in which the metrics will be calculated must be clearly specified and made transparent to participants (having in the website of the challenge evaluation scripts available for participants would be a good practice to use).
Among the selection criteria for choosing the supported challenges are:
-- Potential number to interested participants
-- Rigor and transparency of the evaluation procedure
-- Relevance for the Semantic Web community
-- Endorsements (from researchers working on the task, from industry players interested in results, from future participants)

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Important Dates
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- Challenges proposals due: Friday December 22th, 2017 - 23:59 Hawaii Time
- Challenges chosen/merged – notification to organizers sent: Friday December 29th, 2017
- Training data ready and challenges Calls for Papers: Friday January 12th, 2018
- Challenge papers submission deadline (5 pages document): Friday March 9th, 2018
- Challenge paper reviews: Thursday April 5th, 2018
- Notifications sent to participants and invitations to submit task results: Monday April 9th, 2018
- Test data (and other participation tools) published: Monday 16 April 7th, 2018
- Camera ready papers for the conference (5 pages document): Monday April 23rd, 2018
- Submission of challenge results: free choice of organizers
- Proclamation of winners: During ESWC2018 closing ceremony
- Camera ready paper for the challenge post proceedings (15 pages document): Friday July 6th, 2018 (tentative deadline)

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Submission Details
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The challenges proposals should contain at least the following elements:
- A summary description of the challenge and tasks
- How the training/testing data will be built and/or procured
- The evaluation methodology to be used, including clear evaluation criteria and the exact way in which they will be measured. Who will perform the evaluation and how will transparency be assured?
- The anticipated availability of the necessary resources to the participants
- The resources required to prepare the tasks (computation and annotation time, costs of annotations, etc.)
- The list of challenge committee members who will evaluate the challenge papers (please indicate which of the listed members already accepted the role)

In case of doubt, feel free to send us your challenge proposal drafts as early as possible – the challenges chairs will provide you with feedback and answers to questions you may have.
Please submit proposals via Easychair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=challengeeswc2018 <https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=challengeeswc2018> as soon as possible and no later than *22 December 2017*.