exploreWeb 2011 - First International Workshop on Search, Exploration and Navigation of Web Data Sources

The goal of this workshop is to gather researchers and practitioners in the diverse fields related to exploration and navigation of search results and web data sources.
http://exploreweb.search-computing.org
The joint application of the data integration, hypertext navigation, concept exploration, and exploratory search techniques is not trivial, because the new Web datasources are characterized by some peculiar features that need to be considered, including: rank awareness of results, partial retrieval of result lists from data sources, partial or approximate match between values, and so on. This imposes new requirements both to the data integration and navigation applications, which cannot solely rely on past solutions. The workshop will represent a unique venue for discussing all the aspects related to navigation and exploration of new Web data sources.

Organizers
Marco Brambilla
Politecnico di Milano, Italy
http://home.dei.polimi.it/mbrambil
mbrambil-AT-elet.polimi.it

Piero Fraternali
Politecnico di Milano, Italy
http://home.dei.polimi.it/fraterna
fraterna-AT-elet.polimi.it

Daniel Schwabe
PUC Rio, Brasil
http://www-di.inf.puc-rio.br/schwabe/
dschwabe-AT-inf.puc-rio.br

Context and motivation
Recent years are witnessing an exponential growth of data providers available on the Web. These providers offer a plethora of different ways of accessing their datasources, spanning from APIs (e.g., Google APIs, location based APIs, and so on) to proprietary query languages (such as Yahoo! Query Language, YQL) to endpoints accessible through standard query languages (e.g., SPARQL). This trend is associated with the increased tendency to labeling, tagging, and semantic linking of data, as pushed also by social networking applications (e.g., social bookmarking, user networks, and so on).

These datasources expose their data as semi-structured information (e.g., JSON, XML, ...) and an increasing number also provide the information as linked in the so called Linked Data cloud, with uri-based references between the resources. This is a major change of paradigm with the respect to traditional web publishing. On one side, this enormously facilitates access and querying of information with respect to the old-fashioned page based Web paradigm. On the other side, though, this challenges the current approaches to Web navigation and information collection by end users. With the growth of the available open data, the need arises for effective mechanisms targeted to human users for searching, exploring, and consuming such data.

At this purpose, cross fertilization between different disciplines is mandatory: exploratory search approaches should be merged with usability and cognitive science at the purpose of identifying the best interaction paradigms on such new data sources; Web engineering approaches should be extended with data integration and semantic web /linked data-based practices (such as knowledge exploration tools) at the purpose of connecting linked and non linked data, and providing proper navigational applications to the end users.

Topics of interest
The topics of interest for this workshop include (but are not limited to):

Deep web information exploration
Orchestration and choreography for data access and search services on the Web
Information navigation in Enterprise Search applications
Navigation interfaces for web data
Visualization and visual interaction over web data
Data journalism experiences and practices on the web
Best practices, methodologies, and experiences on information exploration and navigation interfaces on the Web
Domain specific applications of exploratory search and information navigation
Search result manipulation and integration
Interaction between backend search services and user interfaces
Exploitation of public APIs for search and data access (e.g., Google APIs, Yahoo Query Language ? YQL) for information exploration
Implementation and design issues of navigational applications upon ranked, ordered, and paged Web data sources
Exploitation of standard query languages (including SQL, SPARQL, XQuery) in exploratory search and navigation
User interfaces and tools for Linked Data navigation and exploration
Submission guidelines
The workshop will accept:

Full research papers (maximum lenght: 8 pages)
Experience papers (maximum lenght: 6 pages)
Vision papers (maximum lenght: 4 pages)
Ongoing works (maximum lenght: 4 pages)
All the submissions must be formatted according to the LNCS guidelines.
Submissions will be accepted only through the submission site through EasyChair at:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=explor...

Importand dates
Abstract submission deadline: April 19, 2011
Papers submission deadline: April 26, 2011
Notification of papers acceptance: May 26, 2011
Papers camera-ready version: June 10, 2011
Workshop date: June 20-21, 2011 (to be decided)
The deadlines for the submission are strict. Please don't expect extensions or delays.

Workshop Proceedings
The workshop proceedings will be published in the ICWE workshop proceedings (as a volume in the Springer LNCS series).

Furthermore, a collection of best papers will be selected for extended publication in a post-proceedings book published by Springer together with a collection of best papers from other workshops on search-related topics. The volume publication has been already approved by Springer.

A journal special issue on the topics of the workshop is under investigation.

Program Committee
Alessandro Bozzon, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Sven Casteleyn, University of Valencia, Spain
Stefano Ceri, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Tommaso di Noia, Politecnico di Bari, Italy
Florian Daniel, Università di Trento, Italy
Oscar Diaz, University of the Basque Country, Spain
Alan Dix, Talis
Peter Dolog, Aalborg University, Denmark
Federico M. Facca, Create-Net, Italy
Dragan Gasevic, University of Athabasca, Canada
Michael Grossniklaus, Portland University, USA
Gerti Kappel, Technical University of Vienna, Austria
Nora Koch, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München & Cirquent GmbH, Germany
Tiziana Margaria, University of Potsdam
Maristella Matera, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Santiago Meliá, University of Alicante, Spain
Oscar Pastor, Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain
Michalis Petropoulos, SUNY Buffalo, USA
Gabriella Pasi, Università Mi- Bicocca, Italy
Cesare Pautasso, Università di Lugano, Switzerland
Fernando Sanchez Figueroa, University of Extremadura, Spain