1st Call for Papers SEMSEARCH'09 (Semantic Search Workshop located at WWW 2009)

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1st Call for Papers SEMSEARCH'09 
Semantic Search 2009 Workshop 
Located at the 18th Int. World Wide Web Conference WWW2009 
April 21, 2009, Madrid, Spain 
http://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/ws/semsearch09 
Submission deadline for full papers: March 1st, 2009 (12.00 AM, GMT) 
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In recent years we have witnessed tremendous interest and substantial 
economic exploitation of search technologies, both at web and 
enterprise scale. However, the representation of user queries and 
resource content in existing search appliances is still almost 
exclusively achieved by simple syntax-based descriptions of the 
resource content and the information need such as in the predominant 
keyword-centric paradigm (i.e. keyword queries matched against bag of 
words document representation). 
On the other hand, recent advances in the field of semantic 
technologies have resulted in tools and standards that allow for the 
articulation of domain knowledge in a formal manner at a high level of 
expressivity. At the same time, semantic repositories and reasoning 
engines have only now advanced to a state where querying and 
processing of this knowledge can scale to realistic IR scenarios. 
In parallel to these developments, in the past years we have also seen 
the emergence of important results in adapting ideas from IR to the 
problem of search in RDF/OWL data, folksonomies, microformat 
collections or semantically tagged natural text. Common to these 
scenarios is that the search is focused not on a document collection, 
but on metadata (which may be possibly linked to or embedded in 
textual information). Search and ranking in metadata stores is another 
key topic addressed by the workshop. 
As such, semantic technologies are now in a state to provide 
significant contributions to IR problems. 
In this context, several challenges arise for Semantic Search systems. 
These include, among others: 
* How can semantic technologies be exploited to capture the 
information need of the user? 
* How can the information need of the user be translated to expressive 
formal queries without enforcing the user to be capable of handling 
the difficult query syntax? 
* How can expressive resource descriptions be extracted (acquired) 
from documents (users)? 
* How can expressive resource descriptions be stored and queried 
efficiently on a large scale? 
* How can vague information needs and incomplete resource descriptions 
be handled? 
* How can semantic search systems be evaluated and compared with 
standard IR systems? 
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Topics of Interest 
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Main topics of interest in the areas of Semantic Search include but 
are not limited to: 
Tasks and Interaction Paradigms for Semantic Search 
* Information Retrieval Tasks on the Semantic Web 
* Incentives and Interaction Paradigms for Resource Annotation 
* Interaction Paradigms for Semantic Search 
* Collaborative Aspects of Semantic Search (Wikis, Social Networks) 
Query Construction and Resource Modeling for Semantic Search 
* Semantic Technologies for Query Interpretation, Refinement and 
Routing 
* Natural Language Interfaces for Semantic Web Repositories 
* Modeling Expressive Resource Descriptions 
* Ontology and Metadata Standards for Expressive Resource Descriptions 
* Natural Language Processing and Information Extractions for the 
Acquisition of Resource Descriptions 
* Semantic Web Mining and Semantic Network Analysis 
Algorithms and Infrastructures for Semantic Search 
* Scalable Reasoners, Repositories and Infrastructures for Semantic 
Search 
* Crawling, Storing and Indexing of Expressive Resource Descriptions 
* Fusion of Semantic Search Results on the Semantic Web 
* Algorithms for Matching Expressive Queries and Resource Descriptions 
* Algorithms and Reasoning Procedure to Deal With Vagueness, 
Incompleteness and Inconsistencies in Semantic Search 
Evaluation of Semantic Search 
* Evaluation Methodologies for Semantic Search 
* Standard Datasets and Benchmarks for Semantic Search 

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Organizers 
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* Marko Grobelnik, Jo?ef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia 
* Peter Mika, Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, Spain 
* Thanh Tran Duc, Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe (TH), 
Germany 
* Haofen Wang, Apex Data & Knowledge Management Lab, Shanghai Jiao 
Tong University, China 
----------------------------------- 
Program Committee 
----------------------------------- 
* Wray Buntine, NICTA Canberra, Australia 
* Pablo Castells, Universidad Autónonoma de Madrid, Spain 
* Alistair Duke, British Telecom, UK 
* Blaz Fortuna, Jo?ef Stefan Institute, Slovenia 
* Norbert Fuhr, Universit?t Duisburg-Essen, Germany 
* Lise Getoor, University Maryland, USA 
* Rayid Ghani, Accenture Labs, USA 
* Peter Haase, Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, Germany 
* Andreas Harth, DERI, Galway, Ireland 
* Andreas Hotho, University of Kassel, Germany 
* Yiannis Kompatsiaris, Informatics and Telematics Institute, Greece 
* Li Ma, IBM Research, Beijing, China 
* Eduarda Mendes Rodrigues, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK 
* Yuzhong Qu, Southeast University, Nanjing, China 
* Sergej Sizov, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany 
* Nenad Stojanovic, FZI Karlsruhe, Germany 
* Rudi Studer, Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe, Germany 
* Cao Hoang Tru, HCMC University of Technology, HCMC, Vietnam 
* Michael Witbrock, Cycorp, USA and Cycorp Europe, Slovenia 
* Yong Yu, Apex Lab, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China 
* Ilya Zaihrayeu, University of Trento, Italy 
* Hugo Zaragoza, Yahoo! Research Barcelona, Spain 
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Submission and Proceedings 
----------------------------------- 
Proceedings will be published for the workshop as part of the CEUR 
Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org, ISSN 1613-0073). We will pursue a 
journal special issue with the topics of the workshop if we receive an 
appropriate number of high-quality submissions. 
Details on the proceedings and camera-ready formatting will be 
announced upon notification of the authors. 
For submissions, the following rules apply: 
* Papers should be formatted according to the guidelines of the 
WWW2009 conference, i.e. according to the ACM Proceedings Style. More 
information is available at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html. 
* Regular research papers are limited to 10 pages. 
* Additionally, we invite discussion papers, experimental 
contributions, system and demo descriptions which are limited to 2 
pages. In this case, please indicate the type of the contribution as 
subtitle. 
* Please use the following link to the submission system to submit 
your paper: Easychair Submission System for SemSearch2009 at 
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=semse2009. 
 
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Important Dates 
----------------------------------- 
Deadline for submissions: March 1st, 2009 (12.00 AM, GMT) 
Notification of acceptance: April 1st, 2009 
Camera-ready versions: April 10th, 2009 
WWW'09 Conference: April 20th-24th, 2009 
Workshop Day: April 21st, 2009 

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Contact 
----------------------------------- 
The organization committee can be reached via semsearch09@aifb.uni- 
karlsruhe.de. 
For questions on submission, please contact Tran Duc Thanh via 
dtr@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de. 
Workshop website at http://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/ws/semsearch09.