CfP 1st ExpertFinder Workshop, Berlin, Germany

*apologies if you get multiple copies*

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                        Call for Position Papers:

                        1st ExpertFinder Workshop
                        Berlin, January 16, 2007
               co-located with the KnowledgeWeb General Assembly
  ===========================================================

  The ExpertFinder initiative is pleased to announce its first workshop focusing
  on research issues and application in the area of devising
vocabulary extensions
  and best practices to annotate personal home pages, pages of institutions,
  conferences, publication indexes, etc. with adequate semantic metadata to find
  experts on particular topics.

  We consider this area a highly relevant application field in the
middle ground of
  Social Networking and Semantic Web technologies. Many efforts have
already been put
  into devising related vocabularies and enabling technologies. In order
  to get closer to real-world applications and industrial uptake, alignment
  of these efforts is necessary, which is the mission of the ExpertFinder
  initiative, see also:

                http://www.rdfweb.org/topic/ExpertFinder

  Introduction:
  -------------
  ExpertFinder is an international collaborative initiative with the aim of
  devising vocabulary and rule extensions (for e.g. FOAF and SIOC) and best
  practices and recommendations towards standardization in order to annotate
  personal home pages, pages of institutions, conferences, publication indexes,
  etc. with adequate metadata to enable computer agents to find experts on
  particular topics.

  With the present workshop we are seeking position papers from
various organisations
  engaged in this area. In particular, we are looking for research contributions
  and practical applications which can address social and industrial needs by
  facilitating computer agents in the identification of and communication with
  relevant expertise and socially interlinking individuals, companies and public
  institutions.

  Use cases for such technologies cover a wide range: generation and maintenance
  of institutional websites and metadata, human resource management, reviewer
  selection in scientific events, trust and security, enhancing technology
  platforms such as for instance CORDIS with metadata, topic-based email
  addressing with intelligent filtering, etc.
  (see also http://rdfweb.org/topic/ExpertFinderUseCases )


  Submission Information:
  -----------------------
  We encourage the submission of Position Papers which should describe your
  organisation and interests or overlaps of interest with at least one of the
  following topics:

   * Collaborative expert finding with semantic web technologies
   * RDF vocabularies and Ontologies for social networking
   * Enabling technologies such as rules extensions for interlinking metadata,
     recommendation algorithms, semantic search engines, etc. and their use
     in present projects and use cases (ideally related to the use cases
     mentioned above)
   * Best practices and standardization for Semantic Web metadata annotation
     or enriched Web content in general (e.g. microformats, etc.).
   * Possible impact of Social Networking and Semantic Web Technologies
     to Industry.

  Papers should try to answer the following three questions:
   * What current research or applications relevant to the ExpertFinder
     idea are you pursuing?
   * What future plans or vision do you share with ExpertFinder?
   * What practical obstacles or research challenges are to be
     overcome to make ExpertFinder vision come real?

  Full references should be provided as well as the names and email addresses
  of all authors. Submissions will be evaluated by the workshop organisers
  for relevance.


  Registration and Important Dates:
  ---------------------------------
  For every accepted position paper at least one of the authors is expected
  to attend the workshop. A position paper is not required for participation,
  however due to limited space, registration will be required. Registration
  information will be announced on the workshop website once the number of
  accepted position papers is known.

  Papers should be crisp (no more than three pages at 12pt text) and can be
  submitted in PDF or HTML format.

  The presenters of position papers will be asked to give a 10 min presentation
  highlighting their ideas.  Both position papers and presentation slides will
  be published on the public website of the initiative.

  Position papers are due by December 15, 2006 and should be submitted
per email to

         expertfinderworkshop@ag-nbi.de

  Notification of acceptance will be made by December 19, 2006.

  Goals of the Workshop:
  ----------------------
  The aim of the workshop is for participants to present their work and ideas in
  the area and to discuss and agree on future directions and cooperations:
  Initiative members will present the background to the ExpertFinder initiative,
  an overview of the state of the art and propose directions for joint
alignment of
  research, development and standardization efforts in the area to
maximize value
  and achieve a critical mass.

  Each accepted proposal will make a short presentation of their ideas
and we will
  try to interactively gather relations and collect missing pieces to
make the ExpertFinder
  vision become real. This means that most of the time will be
allocated for open discussion
  among all participants or split into subgroups in order to work out
a concrete research
  agenda and to consolidate and align current efforts.


  Venue and Date:
  ---------------
  The workshop will take place in Berlin, Germany on Tuesday, January
16 2007 parallel
  to the General Assembly of the EU Network of Excellence
KnowledgeWeb. All    KnowledgeWeb partners and Industry Board members
will have the opportunity to attend the workshop. For travel
information, see the General Assembly website:
http://www.ag-nbi.de/conf/KWEB07/

  Organizers:
  -----------
  Dr Axel Polleres, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
  Dr Anna V. Zhdanova, University of Surrey, UK
  Lyndon J B Nixon, FU Berlin, Germany
  Malgorzata Mochol, FU Berlin, Germany

  The organizers are grateful for sponsorship by the EU NoE Knowledge Web and
  the Knowledge Nets project, which is part of the InterVal-Berlin
Research Centre
  for the Internet Economy, funded by the German Ministry of Research (BMBF).

Received on Wednesday, 22 November 2006 10:11:06 UTC