SMER 2011 - First International Workshop on Search & Mining Entity-Relationship data (SMER 2011)

Data complexity and its diversity have been rapidly expanding over the last years, spanning from large amounts of unstructured and semi-structured data to semantically rich available knowledge, and driven by ever increasing sophistication in data management requirements. Numerous applications in various domains such as social-media, healthcare, telecommunication, e-commerce and web analytics, business intelligence, and cyber-security, require new methods and tools for collecting and extracting entities and their relationships from unstructured and heterogeneous data sources to be transformed into useful knowledge and provide insights. While lots of useful facts are being added on a daily basis on multitude web and enterprise data sources, they are still hidden behind barriers of language constraints, data heterogeneity and ambiguity, and the lack of proper query interfaces. In addition, novel search and data mining methods are required to provide expressive and powerful discovery capabilities, yet intuitive enough, for exploring the large amounts of entity-relationship data.

Objective
http://sysrun.haifa.il.ibm.com/hrl/smer2011/

This workshop shall serve as an open forum for discussing the new research challenges in search and mining of large scale ER data extracted from multitude of unstructured and semi-structured data sources, driven by recent industry trends and requirements in various domains and increasing academic interest. The workshop will bring together researchers from different communities working on similar problems in the context of ER and other semantic data, allowing for cross-fertilization between areas. During the workshop, we will identify common problems and their various solution approaches in DB, KM, and IR.