Last call for extended abstracts PhD symposium ESWC 2007

[Apologies if you receive multiple copies]

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         LAST CALL FOR EXTENDED ABSTRACTS

   KWEPSY2007
  KnowledgeWeb PhD Symposium
       Innsbruck, Austria
        6th June, 2006
      http://ontoworld.org/wiki/KWEPSY2007

    at the 4th Annual European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC)
     http://www.eswc2007.org/
     
Executive Summary
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The Knowledge Web PhD Symposium aims at bringing together doctoral students within the Semantic Web community to open their work up to discussion in a European forum, and to obtain valuable feedback from leading scientists in the field. However, in contrast with other similar initiatives, participants to the symposium will not only receive constructive comments with respect to topic-specific research issues; they will also be assisted in formulating a coherent research narrative for their doctoral work. In particular, students will be asked to submit an extended abstract, structured in accordance to a pre-defined template, which has been designed to highlight the key methodological components required for a sound research narrative. Generally speaking, priority will be given to 1st/2nd year PhD students (because they are still in the process of defining the scope of their research). However, all PhD students are welcome and encouraged to apply. 

Just as in 2006 (http://www.l3s.de/kweb/kwepsy2006/), the 2nd Symposium will be co-located with the 4th Annual European Semantic Web Conference ESWC2007. It is scheduled for the 6th of June 2007. 

Important Dates (GMT)
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-- Deadline for paper submissions: March 2, 2007 
-- Notification of acceptance: April 2, 2007 
-- Camera-ready versions: April 13, 2007 
-- Symposium: June 6, 2007 

Call for Contributions
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Though organized under the umbrella of KnowledgeWeb (http://knowledgeweb.semanticweb.org/), the symposium is open to all PhD students carrying out research on topics related to the Semantic Web. The applicants are required to send an extended abstract of their doctoral work, which should address the following aspects: 

-- Describe the research problem of the PhD thesis and argument its relevance for the Semantic Web area. 
-- Describe the state of the art, emphasizing the need for improvement and the feasibility of their approach. 
-- Summarize the expected contributions and outline the real-world use cases (applications, target audience) which will mainly benefit from their work. 
-- Sketch the research methodology that they have adopted (or are planning to adopt), in particular the approach to evaluating/validating the results. 
-- Describe the proposed approach, clearly differentiating between the results achieved so far, the remaining work and the (planned) evaluation. 
-- Compare and contrast their approach with other existing approaches, in particular highlighting the shortcomings of other approaches and the way they are dealt with in the present work. 
-- Conclude with a summary and an outline of the planned future work. 

Papers should not exceed 5 pages. They should be formatted according to the LNCS format (http://www.springer.com/east/home/computer/lncs?SGWID=5-164-7-72376-0) and submitted as PDF documents per mail to Elena Simperl simperl at inf.fu-berlin.de. Applicants should also specify how long they have worked on their doctoral work. 

All papers will be peer-reviewed by at least two members of the scientific advisory board. The submissions will be reviewed against the following criteria (in this order): 

-- Conformance of the submitted abstract to the given template. 
-- Novelty and originality of the research work.
-- Rigorousness and scientific soundness of the overall approach and of the results so far. 
-- Clarity of the presentation. 
-- Relevance of the work with respect to the Semantic Web field. 

The selected participants will be given the opportunity to open their work up to discussion in front of other students and an expert audience (either in a regular presentation session or in a poster session, this will be decided by the reviewers). Each accepted contribution will be assigned to a scientific advisor, who will provide extended feedback to the presented research achievements and to the accuracy of the applied methodology, and will attend the symposium. A template for structuring the paper presentations will be provided after the final program of the symposium has been set up. 

Topics
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Topics of interest to the symposium include (but are not restricted to): 

-- Ontology management (e.g. creation, evolution, evaluation) 
-- Ontology alignment (e.g. mapping, matching, merging, alignment, mediation and reconciliation) 
-- Ontology learning 
-- Ontology population 
-- Business-oriented aspects of ontology engineering (costs, business measurements, cost benefit analysis) 
-- Semantic Web-based multimedia 
-- Semantic annotation of data 
-- Semantic Web trust, privacy, security and intellectual property rights 
-- Semantic Web representation and query languages 
-- Reasoning on the Web (e.g. scalability, fuzziness, distribution) 
-- Searching, querying, visualizing, navigating and browsing the Semantic Web 
-- Personalization and user modelling 
-- User interfaces and Semantic Web 
-- Semantic Grid and Middleware 
-- Semantic Web Services (e.g. description, discovery, invocation, composition) 
-- Semantic Web Applications for knowledge management, eBusiness, eCulture, eGovernment, eHealth, eLearning, eScience etc. 
-- Database technologies for the Semantic Web 
-- Semantic interoperability 
-- Semantic data integration 
-- Semantic Web mining 

Organisation Committee
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Elena Simperl (Free University of Berlin, Germany)
Joerg Diederich (L3S Hannover, Germany)
Guus Schreiber (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands)


Scientific Advisors (provisional list)
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Alain Leger (France Telecom, France)
Anupriya Ankolekar (University of Karlsruhe, Germany)
Axel Polleres (DERI Innsbruck, Austria)
Carole Goble (University of Manchester, UK)
Daniel Olmedilla (University of Hannover, Germany)
Diana Maynard (University of Sheffield, UK)
Dieter Fensel (DERI Innsbruck, Austria)
Elena Simperl (Free University of Berlin, Germany)
Enrico Franconi (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy)
Enrico Motta (The Open University, UK) 
Fabien Gandon (INRIA Sophia-Antipolis, France)
Fausto Giunchiglia (University of Trento, Italy)
Frank van Harmelen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Guus Schreiber (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Heiner Stuckenschmidt (University of Mannheim, Germany)
Holger Wache (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Ilya Zaihrayeu (University of Trento, Italy)
Jeff Z. Pan (University of Aberdeen, UK)
Jerome Euzenat (INRIA Rhone-Alpes, France)
Joerg Diederich (University of Hannover, Germany)
John Breslin (NUIG Galway, Irland)
John Davies (BT, UK)
Lora Aroyo (Technical University of Eindhoven, Netherlands)
Lyndon Nixon (Free University of Berlin, Germany)
Marco Ronchetti (University of Trento, Italy)
Martin Dzbor (The Open University, UK)
Michal Zaremba (DERI Innsbruck, Austria)
Pavel Shvaiko (University of Trento, Italy)
Peter Haase (University of Karlsruhe, Germany)
Richard Benjamins (iSOCO, Spain)
Robert Meersman (Free University of Brussels, Belgium)
Robert Shearer (University of Manchester, UK)
Robert Tolksdorf (Free University of Berlin, Germany)
Rose Dieng (INRIA, France)
Rudi Studer (University of Karlsruhe, Germany)
Sergio Tesaris (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy)
Stefan Decker (NUIG Galway, Irland)
Steven Willmott (UPC, Spain)
Tomas Vitvar (NUIG Galway, Irland)
Valentina Tamma (University of Liverpool, UK)
Walter Binder (L'Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH)
Wolfgang Nejdl (University of Hannover, Germany)
Yiannis Kompatsiaris (CERTH, Greece)
Ying Ding (DERI Innsbruck, Austria)
York Sure (University of Karlsruhe, Germany)

Contact
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Please contact Elena Simperl (simperl at inf.fu-berlin.de) if you have any questions regarding this event.