ExploreDB 2014 - International Workshop on Exploratory Search in Databases and the Web (ExploreDB)

There is a need to develop novel paradigms for exploratory user-data interactions that emphasize user context and interactivity with the goal of facilitating exploration, interpretation, retrieval, and assimilation of information. A huge number of applications need an exploratory form of querying. Ranked retrieval techniques for relational databases, XML, RDF and graph databases, text and multimedia databases, scientific and statistical databases, social networks and many others, is a first step towards this direction. Recently, several new aspects for exploratory search, such as preferences, diversity, novelty and surprise, are gaining increasing importance. From a different perspective, recommendation applications tend to anticipate user needs by automatically suggesting the information which is most appropriate to the users and their current context. Also, a new line of research in the area of exploratory search is fueled by the growth of online social interactions within social networks and web communities. Many useful facts about entities (e.g. people, locations, organizations, products) and their relationships can be found in a multitude of semi-structured and structured data sources such as Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org), Linked Data cloud (http://linkeddata.org), Freebase (http://freebase.com), and many others. Therefore, novel discovery methods are required to provide highly expressive discovery capabilities over large amounts of entity-relationship data, which are yet intuitive for end-users. ExploreDB 2014 invites submissions of original research, practical experiences, evaluation results, or novel approaches and applications.