SemSearch 2011 - SemSearch 2011 : Fourth Semantic Search Workshop

1st Call for Papers SEMSEARCH11
Fourth Semantic Search Workshop SemSearch11

March 26 or March 27, 2011, Hyderabad, India

Homepage: http://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/ws/semsearch11

Submission deadline for full papers: February 26th, 2010 (12.00 AM, GMT)

In recent years we have witnessed substantial exploitation of search
technologies, both at web and enterprise scale. However, the representation
of user queries and information in existing search appliances is still
almost exclusively achieved by simple syntax-based descriptions
(i.e. keyword queries matched against bag-of-words document
representation). While these systems have shown to work well for many common
search needs, they work on the basis of rough approximations and usually
fail to address more complex tasks such as aggregation and information
analytics.

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 at a high level of expressivity. Semantic repositories and
reasoning engines have now advanced to a state where querying and processing
of this knowledge can scale to large-scale scenarios. As such, semantic
technologies are posed to provide significant contributions to IR
problems. More expressive descriptions of resources are achieved through the
representation of the resource content in terms of concepts and structured
data (OWL, RDF). The recent media interest around Wolfram Alpha, PowerSet
(acquired by Microsoft Bing) and Yahoo! SearchMonkey show the expectations
regarding the impact of semantic search.

The other way around, we have also seen the successful adoption of ideas
from IR to the problem of search in semantic (Web) data, which is due to the
increasing size of the Semantic Web. Popular examples include the Linking
Open Data project, the large body of data in forms of Microformats and RDFa
data associated with text. Common to these scenarios is that the search is
focused not on a document collection, but on semantic data (which may be
possibly linked to or embedded in textual information). Search and ranking
large amount of semantic data on the Web is another key topic addressed by
this workshop.

Challenges


In this context, challenges for Semantic Search research will include, among
others:
- How can semantic technologies be applied to the IR problems?
- How to address scalability and effectiveness of data Web search (by
applying IR technologies)?
- How to allow web user to exploit the expressiveness of the semantic data
on the Web? I.e. how to lower the technical barriers for users to ask
complex questions and to interact with web data to obtain concrete answers
for complex needs?
- And most importantly, how can this new generation of search systems that
successfully exploit semantics for IR or for data Web search can be
evaluated and compared (with standard IR systems or semantic repositories)?

Topics of Interest

Semantic Search is defined through two main directions. First is
Semantic-driven IR, the application of semantic technologies to the IR
problem. The second is Semantic Data Search, which mainly deals with the
retrieval of semantic data. Main topics of interest for the envisioned
workshop contributions include (but are not limited to) the following:

Semantic-driven IR
- Expressive Document Models
- Knowledge Extraction for Building Expressive Document Representation
- Matching and Ranking based on Expressive Document Representation
- Infrastructure for Semantic-driven IR

Semantic Data Search
- Crawling, Storage and Indexing of Semantic Data
- Semantic Data Search and Ranking
- Data Web Search: Search in Multi-Data-Source, Multi-Repository Scenarios
- Dealing with Vague, Incomplete and Dirty Semantic Data
- Infrastructure for Searching Semantic Data on the Web

Interaction Paradigms for Semantic Search
- Natural Language Interfaces
- Keyword-based Query Interfaces
- Hybrid Query Interfaces (A Combination of NL, Keywords, Forms, Facets, and Formal Queries)
- Visualization of Semantic Data and Expressive Document Representation on the Web

Evaluation of semantic search
- Evaluation Methodologies for Semantic Search
- Standard Datasets and Benchmarks for Semantic Search
- Infrastructure for Semantic Search Evaluation

Organizers

* Marko Grobelnik, Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia
* Peter Mika, Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, Spain
* Thanh Tran Duc, Institute AIFB, University of Karlsruhe (TH), Germany
* Haofen Wang, Apex Lab, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China.

Program Committee

TBD

Submission and Proceedings

For submissions, the following rules apply:
1. Full technical papers: up to 10 pages in ACM format
2. Short position or demo papers: up to 5 pages in ACM format

Submissions must be formatted using the WWW2011 templates.

Submissions will be peer reviewed by three independent reviewers. Accepted
papers will be presented at the workshop and included in the workshop
proceedings.

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.

Please use the following link to the submission system to submit your paper:
EasyChair Submission System for SemSearch11 at
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=semsear...

Important Dates

Deadline for submissions: February 26th, 2011 (12.00 AM, GMT)
Notification of acceptance: March 6th, 2011
Camera-ready versions: March 16th, 2011
WWW'11 Conference: March 28th - April 1st, 2011
Workshop Day: March 26th or March 27th, 2011

Contact

The organization committee can be reached using contact data available at
their web pages.

Workshop website at http://km.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de/ws/semsearch11.