IKM4DR 2012 - First International Workshop on Information and Knowledge Management for Developing Regions

Several issues arise with management of content that is generated in developing regions. Some result from linguistic diversity (as in India and Africa), some result from content being available only in forms that are more difficult to computationally manipulate (e.g., handwriting, speech, and legacy digital text in nonstandard encodings), some result from underinvestment in language resources for the languages of these regions, and some result from increased contact between cultures that have different views regarding the proper use of information and information artefacts. Such issues warrant focussed attention if we are to optimally leverage information and knowledge management to the advantage of populations in developing regions.
This workshop aims to bring the data management, information retrieval, and knowledge management communities together around questions of technology support for societal development. Our twin goals are to help to identify new applications for existing information and knowledge management technologies in developing regions and to inspire new research on problems that arise in developing region contexts. We anticipate a mix of industrial and academic participation.
Call for Submissions
We envision three main themes for this workshop.
Components: Development of tools for low-resource languages that have the potential to transform information and knowledge management for those languages.
Applications: Ways of employing new and existing data management, information retrieval and knowledge management technology to novel and important challenges that arise in the context of developing regions.
Fostering adoption: Working together with partners from developing regions to craft solutions that embed societal expectations and values in ways that make it possible to achieve the envisioned impact.
The workshop seeks three types of contributions: position papers, early-work papers and full-papers. The position papers will be distributed in advance to participants to help participants prepare for the discussions at the workshop. Early work papers will be presented as posters and aim to target researchers who are new in this field. Full papers will be presented orally at the workshop and will demonstrate the technology depth in the area. Reviewing will not be blind: authors need to include the author names and affiliation at the time of submission. Each paper will be reviewed by members of the program committee for scope, novelty, technical depth, and expected interest among workshop participants. Papers should be of 4-8 pages in length in the ACM publication format. The LaTeX and Microsoft Word templates are available at the ACM Template site. All submissions should be in the PDF format and should be submitted electronically through the workshop submission web site, http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ikm4dr1....