Call for Papers (CFP_EFW-2007.txt)

CfP 1st ExpertFinder Workshop, Berlin, Germany

Call for Position Papers:
1st ExpertFinder Workshop
Berlin, January 16, 2007
co-located with the KnowledgeWeb General Assembly

The ExpertFinder initiative is pleased to announce its first workshop focusing on research issues and application in the area of devising vocabulary extensions and best practices to annotate personal home pages, pages of institutions, conferences, publication indexes, etc. with adequate semantic metadata to find experts on particular topics.

We consider this area a highly relevant application field in the middle ground of Social Networking and Semantic Web technologies. Many efforts have already been put into devising related vocabularies and enabling technologies. In order to get closer to real-world applications and industrial uptake, alignment of these efforts is necessary, which is the mission of the ExpertFinder initiative, see also: http://www.rdfweb.org/topic/ExpertFinder

Introduction:

ExpertFinder is an international collaborative initiative with the aim of devising vocabulary and rule extensions (e.g. FOAF and SIOC) and best practices and recommendations towards standardization in order to annotate personal home pages, pages of institutions, conferences, publication indexes, etc. with adequate metadata to enable computer agents to find experts on particular topics.

With the present workshop we are seeking position papers from various organisations engaged in this area. In particular, we are looking for research contributions and practical applications which can address social and industrial needs by facilitating computer agents in the identification of and communication with relevant expertise and socially interlinking individuals, companies and public institutions.

Use cases for such technologies cover a wide range: generation and maintenance of institutional websites and metadata, human resource management, reviewer selection in scientific events, trust and security, enhancing technology platforms such as for instance CORDIS with metadata, and topic-based email addressing with intelligent filtering. (see also http://rdfweb.org/topic/ExpertFinderUseCases)

Submission Information:

We encourage the submission of Position Papers which should describe your organisation and interests or overlaps of interest with at least one of the following topics:

• Collaborative expert finding with semantic web technologies
• RDF vocabularies and Ontologies for social networking
• Enabling technologies such as rules extensions for interlinking metadata, recommendation algorithms, and semantic search engines. and their use in present projects and use cases (ideally related to the use cases mentioned above)
• Best practices and standardization for Semantic Web metadata annotation or enriched Web content in general (e.g. microformats, etc.).
• Possible impact of Social Networking and Semantic Web Technologies to Industry

Papers should try to answer the following three questions:

• What current research or applications relevant to the ExpertFinder idea are you pursuing?
• What future plans or vision do you share with ExpertFinder?
• What practical obstacles or research challenges are to be overcome to make ExpertFinder vision come real?

Full references should be provided as well as the names and email addresses of all authors. Submissions will be evaluated by the workshop organisers for relevance.

Registration and Important Dates:

For every accepted position paper at least one of the authors is expected to attend the workshop. A position paper is not required for participation, however due to limited space, registration will be required. Registration information will be announced on the workshop website once the number of accepted position papers is known.

The presenters of position papers will be asked to give a 10 min presentation highlighting their ideas. Both position papers and presentation slides will be published on the public website of the initiative.

Position papers are due by December 15, 2006 and should be submitted per email to expertfinderworkshop@ag-nbi.de

Notification of acceptance will be made by December 19, 2006.

Goals of the Workshop:

The aim of the workshop is for participants to present their work and ideas in the area and to discuss and agree on future directions and cooperations: Initiative members will present the background to the ExpertFinder initiative, an overview of the state of the art and propose directions for joint alignment of research, development and standardization efforts in the area to maximize value and achieve a critical mass.

Each accepted proposal will make a short presentation of their ideas and we will try to interactively gather relations and collect missing pieces to make the ExpertFinder vision become real. This means that most of the time will be allocated for open discussion among all participants or split into subgroups in order to work out a concrete research agenda and to consolidate and align current efforts.

Venue and Date:

The workshop will take place in Berlin, Germany on Tuesday, January 16 2007 parallel to the General Assembly of the EU Network of Excellence KnowledgeWeb. All KnowledgeWeb partners and Industry Board members will have the opportunity to attend the workshop. For travel information, see the General Assembly website

Organizers:

• Dr. Axel Polleres, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Spain
• Dr. Anna V. Zhdanova, University of Surrey, UK
• Lyndon J B Nixon, FU Berlin, Germany
• Malgorzata Mochol, FU Berlin, Germany
• Boanerges Aleman-Meza, University of Georgia, USA

The organizers are grateful for sponsorship by the EU NoE Knowledge Web and the Knowledge Nets project, which is part of the InterVal-Berlin Research Centre for the Internet Economy, funded by the German Ministry of Research (BMBF).