Deadline Approaching: ESWC-08 Workshop on Collective Semantics: Collective Intelligence & the Semantic Web (CISWeb 2008)

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CALL FOR PAPERS
1st International Workshop on Collective Semantics: 
Collective Intelligence & the Semantic Web (CISWeb 2008) 
http://mklab.iti.gr/CISWeb/
Hosted by the 5th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC-08)
http://www.eswc2008.org/
June 1, 2008, Tenerife, Spain
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DESCRIPTION - SCOPE
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The Web 2.0 has introduced new style of information sharing platforms
favoring mass participation of users and resulting overall interestingness
over the individual quality of information content and information
organization. Dynamic knowledge emerges as the outcome of the interactions
of masses of users in social networks (over 40 million in facebook).
Thereby, the heterogeneity of data sources (e.g. multimedia, over 1 billion
photos in flickr; over 1 million streams/day from YouTube), the scale of
information (25% of network traffic is estimated to be YouTube related) and
the huge amount of knowledge (100 millions of postings in flickr),  pose
many difficulties in discovering relevant information and in arriving at a
larger picture of the available content. 
 
This gestalt of the problem opens up intriguing ways for the Semantic Web to
contribute, because the Semantic Web may:
 
* provide a language basis for integrating multiple platforms;
* support structuring help from distributed, ad-hoc ontologies;
* target specific topics and subgroups by introducing new ways of exploring
the information space.
 
Since purely manual approaches for information and knowledge
(re-)organization are doomed to fail because of the sheer size of the
problem, combining even a little semantics from manually and
semi-automatically built semantic web resources and semantic web languages
with the little structure of information sharing platforms, such as tags,
social acquaintances, or favorites, may carry a long way. Introducing
semantics can largely impact the way and the effectiveness in which IR can
be employed due to the fact that tasks such as semantic mining facilitates
searching. On the other hand, analysis of multimedia content (text, images,
video) in the social context of these platforms may add an important term
that is currently missing from the equation (e.g. with tags being only
weakly associated to content itself).
 
Despite the recent progress in content-based automatic extraction of
semantic metadata from multimedia, such techniques are far from being
perfect and generic applicable. This can be overcome by annotating the
resources taking also into account the social context in such a way that
best fits the users' points of view. In this way, handling of multimedia
data becomes also a tag-oriented procedure and the extraction of their
context (i.e. semantics) turns into a problem of analyzing the corresponding
tags in combination with signal-based content analysis techniques.  
 
This workshop targets this integration arising from the mining of Web2.0
information, multimedia content and knowledge with help of the Semantic Web.

 
TOPICS OF INTEREST
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The papers sought for this Workshop should include innovative (not
previously published) research work focusing on models, methodologies,
implementations and empirical studies. Topics include, but are not limited
to:
 
* Combining mining and Semantic Web technologies with Web 2.0 applications
in order to represent, extract and organize the user-contributed information
(e.g. rankings achieved by data mining with ontologies). 
* Combining the analysis of tagging systems with the analysis of multimedia
content based on Semantic Web technologies for metadata representation and
reasoning.
* Semantic user interfaces organizing information from Web2.0 platforms
* Clustering, classification and semantic mining for Web2.0 
* Reasoning in accessing Web2.0 resources
* Multimedia information retrieval in Web2.0 platforms
* Very lightweight collective ontology building
* Ontology learning from folksonomies
 
EXPECTED BENEFITS
-----------------
 
The Semantic Web community as a whole will benefit as the research
investigated in this workshop will open up a mass movement from Web2.0 for
using the Semantic Web. The participants in this workshop will benefit as
they will learn how to integrate knowledge of different granularity, i.e.
tags, social knowledge, multimedia structures, and ontologies, in order to
come up with a useful overall picture of user-generated content.
 
TARGET AUDIENCE
---------------
 
The workshop targets an integration of people from several communities, i.e.
Semantic Web, Web2.0, data mining, and multimedia, who have the common
objectives of improving knowledge structuring and access to user-generated
content. With new projects being started every day, this community is
growing significantly and we see it as particularly useful for the Semantic
Web community that lightweight approaches to information organization make
best use of available Semantic Web technologies.
 
WORKSHOP FORMAT
---------------
 
The workshop will be a one day session, with a mix of invited talks and
papers gathered following a call for papers and corresponding reviewing. Two
invited talks will target Web2.0 from the different perspectives of
lightweight semantics. Furthermore, an open space discussion will try to
sketch new ways for how to make light-weight semantics useful in Web2.0
environments.
 
We do not expect this workshop to be a simple recitation of early research
results, we anticipate some significant debate owing to differences in
opinions about approaches to take in solving the relevant problems, and we
hope for creative dissent which will lead to new research in this area.
 
IMPORTANT DATES
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* Paper submission: March 7, 2008
* Notification of acceptance: April 4, 2008
* Camera ready Paper submission: April 18, 2008
* Workshop: June 1, 2008
 
SUBMISSION
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We welcome submissions of up to 15 pages in length. Accepted papers will be
presented at the workshop. Additionally, some submissions may be accepted as
posters.
 
Submissions should be formatted in Springer LNCS format
(http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html) and submitted in PDF format.
The submission site can be reached through the workshop webpage
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cisweb2008
 
Please note that at least one author of an accepted paper must register for
the ESWC 2008 conference. 
 
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
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* Dr Yannis Avrithis - National Technical University of Athens, Greece
* Dr Yiannis Kompatsiaris - Informatics and Telematics Institute, Greece
* Prof Steffen Staab - University of Koblenz, Germany
* Prof Athina Vakali - Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
 
PROGRAM COMMITTEE (to be completed and confirmed)
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Noel E O'Connor, DCU
Stefan Rueger, Imperial College London
Thierry Declerck, Saarland University
John Smith, IBM
Shi-Fu Chang, Columbia University
Nozha Boujema, INRIA
Jose Maria Martínez, UAM
Bettina Hoser, University of Karlsruhe
Peter Mika, Yahoo Research, Barcelona
Andreas Hotho, University of Kassel
Bill Grosky, University of Michigan
Peter Hanappe, Sony CSL
Gerd Stumme, University of Kassel
Harith Alani, University of Southampton
Harry Halpin, University of Edinburgh
Susanne Boll, University of Oldenburg, Germany
Paul Lewis, University of Southampton, UK
Roelof van Zwol, Yahoo, Spain
Lyndon Nixon, Free University Berlin, Germany
Raphael Troncy, CWI, The Netherlands
Frank Nack, University van Amsterdam, The Netherlands