CALL FOR PAPERS: ESWC 2008 Workshop on Semantic Interoperability in the European Digital Library (SIEDL 2008)

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                  CALL FOR PAPERS

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1st International Workshop on Semantic Interoperability in the European
Digital Library (SIEDL 2008)

http://multimedia.semanticweb.org/siedl/

To be held as part of the 5th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC-08)

http://www.eswc2008.org/ 

June 1, 2008, Tenerife, Spain

 

Aims and Scope 

One of Europe’s current most important initiatives is the construction of
the European Digital Library (EDL), which aims at making Europe's diverse
cultural and scientific heritage (books, films, maps, photographs, music,
etc.) easy to access and use for work, leisure, or study. EDL will take
advantage of existing rich European heritage, including multicultural and
multilingual environments, of technological advances and of new business
models. It will generate a common multilingual access point to Europe’s
distributed digital cultural heritage, including all types of multimedia
cultural content, and all types of cultural institutions, including
libraries, museums, archives. The short-term objective of the European
Digital Library is to create a prototype within 2008, providing multilingual
access to over 2 million digital objects, focusing on libraries, while
including as many museums and archives it is possible. The long-term
objective, for 2010 is to increase the available digital content to over 6
million digital objects from all types of institutions, i.e., libraries,
museums, audiovisual organisations, archives. 

The EDLnet Thematic Network is the project approved by the European
Commission’s eContentPlus programme to prepare the ground for the
realisation of the European Digital Library. Consistent with this vision
about the European Digital Library, the project addresses particularly the
area of improving cross-domain accessibility to cultural content- a pillar
of the European Commission’s i2010 Digital Library initiative. EDLnet
tackles the fragmented European cultural heritage map, by bringing on board
the key European stakeholders to build consensus on creating the European
Digital Library. In this framework, interoperability has been defined as one
of the most crucial issues, with a specific EDLnet workpackage being devoted
to it. Semantic interoperability is one of the related key technological
issues, and for this reason it constitutes the topic of the Workshop. 

In particular: 

Cultural heritage collections are mostly indexed on the basis of strongly
divergent metadata standards. For example, Dublin Core is used for simple
discovery, SPECTRUM for rich collections information, AMICO for art museum
images, MARC for bibliographic records, IMS for instructional materials.
This severely hampers the combination and opening up of such collections.
Achieving semantic interoperability can be a key to face this problem. 

Several definitions of semantic interoperability have been proposed in the
literature, covering different application domains. In this Workshop, we
focus on how the late advances on Semantic Web technologies can facilitate
the way that European digital libraries exchange information within the
framework of the web. The key in the definition of semantic interoperability
is the common automatic interpretation of the meaning of the exchanged
information, i.e. the ability to automatically process the information in a
machine-understandable manner. 

The first step of achieving a certain level of common understanding is a
representation language that exchanges the formal semantics of the
information. Then, systems that understand these semantics, such as
reasoning tools, ontology querying engines, can process the information and
provide web services like searching, retrieval etc. Semantic Web
technologies provide the user with a formal framework for the representation
and processing of different levels of semantics. Such technologies include
W3C standards like RDF, OWL, SKOS, ontology editing, reasoning and mapping
tools. 

The Workshop aims at presenting works that exploit Semantic Web technologies
to semantically link European Cultural content for the realisation of the
European Digital Library. 

Topics 

The workshop invites contributions on all topics related to Semantic
Interoperability in the framework of the European Digital Library. We
anticipate some significant discussion owing to differences in opinions
about approaches to take in solving the relevant joint problems, and we
invite you to join the workshop to give your views on the following, but no
limited to, topics: 

Knowledge Representation, Mapping and Alignment 

            • Ontologies, Vocabularies, Metadata Standards and Thesauri. 

            • Ontology Mapping, Merging and Alignment. 

            • Thesauri alignment and metadata enrichment. 

            • Use of Ontology Reasoning and Semantic Web Rule technologies. 

            • Use of Semantic Web Standards, such as RDF, OWL & SPARQL. 

            • Use of upcoming Semantic Web Standards, OWL1.1, RIF, SKOS. 

            • Combination of structural and semantic interoperability
methodologies. 

            • Ontology modularisation. 

            • Digital object modeling, Persistent identifiers and packaging
standards. 

            • Combination of Visual and Physical Collections 

            • Crosswalk of Metadata Standards. 

            • Applications based on CIDOC-CRM. 

            • Combination of E-Learning and Cultural Heritage Standards. 

            • Semantic Interoperability approaches followed in past and
ongoing European Projects. 

Applications 

            • The European Digital Library. 

            • Museums, Libraries, Archives. 

            • Audiovisual and Film Archives. 

            • Television Heritage and Broadcasting. 

            • E-culture. 

            • E-learning. 

            • E-tourism. 

Access & Presentation 

            • Storage, query and presentation in the European Digital
Library. 

            • Personalised access and context enabled presentation. 

            • Searching methodologies. 

            • Facet browsing methodologies. 

            • Scalable and Robust knowledge management. 

            • Rights management. 

            • Trust and proof issues. 

 

Benefits 

The Semantic Web and the European Digital Library Communities will benefit
as the research investigated in this workshop will bring closer these two
communities. The aim of this workshop is to investigate and provide cues to
the participants on how to use Semantic Web technologies in order to
semantically link the European Cultural content. 

Target Community 

The workshop targets the communities of Semantic Web and European Digital
Library. In particular, it targets researchers that use Semantic Web
technologies in the application of digital libraries, museums and
audiovisual archives (including TV and broadcasting companies). Special
attention will be paid to ongoing European projects that deal with this
subject. A lot of them have tackled the problem of achieving structural and
semantic interoperability in cultural collections that are indexed on the
basis of divergent metadata standards. 

Invited Talks 

The workshop will have one day duration. There will be two invited talks:
the first in the area of Semantic Interoperability and the second in the
area of the European Digital Library. Finally, a panel discussion will try
to open the way on how to use Semantic Web technologies in the Digital
Libraries application area. 

Submission

Potential workshop participants will be required to submit a short position
paper or a full research paper to be invited to the workshop. 

This will allow the workshop organizers to determine which topics to
schedule on the agenda. 

The presentations during the workshop will be fewer than the number of
participants to leave time for discussion amongst the different fields. 

The presentations will be selected based on the quality of the submissions. 

SIEDL 2008 welcomes the submission of two kind of papers: 

*	short position paper (6 pages maximum in Springer LNCS format):
briefly states participants background (industrial or academic) and their
main motivation for attending the workshop;
*	full papers (12 pages maximum in Springer LNCS format): good
original research and application papers dealing with all aspects of
semantic interoperability in the European Digital Library, particularly
those relating to the subject areas indicated by the topics. We encourage
theoretical, methodological, empirical and applications papers.


Papers must be submitted in PDF format in the following submission site Easy
<http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=siedl08>  Chair SIEDL Submission
Site, prior to the paper submission deadline. 

Paper submissions must be formatted in the style of the Springer
Publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). For
complete details, see Information
<http://www.springeronline.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,11855,5-164-2-72376-0,00.
html>  for LNCS Authors. 

All papers accepted to the SIEDL 2008 workshop will be presented during the
workshop and published in the specific workshop proceedings.

 

Workshop Organizers and Chairs 

Stefanos Kollias – National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece 

Jill Cousins – Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), The Netherlands 

 

Important Dates 

Deadlines: March 7, 2008 

Notifications: April 4, 2008 

Camera ready: April 18, 2008 

Workshop Notes Due: May 1, 2008 

 

Programme Committee 

Stefan Gradmann, University of Hamburg, Germany 

Carlo Meghini, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Itally 

Guus Schreiber, Free University Amsterdam, the Netherlands 

Jacco van Ossenbruggen, Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), The
Netherlands 

Antoine Isaac, Free University Amsterdam, the Netherlands 

Miles Alistair, e-Science Centre, UK 

Carole Goble, University of Manchester, UK 

Giorgos Stamou, National Technical University of Athens, Greece 

Vassilis Tzouvaras, National Technical University of Athens, Greece 

Yannis Ioannidis, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece 

Stavros Christodoulakis, Technical University of Crete, Greece 

Lora Aroyo, Free University Amsterdam, The Netherlands 

Eero Hyvönen, Helsinki University of Technology, Finaland. 

Johan Oomen, Sound and Vision, The Netherlands 

Emmanuelle Bermes, Bibliothèque nationale de France, France 

Jeff Z. Pan, University of Aberdeen, UK