Conference Notes: Google and Yahoo Officials to Keynote the Second Workshop on The Future of Web Search

Two events to alert you to.

1)

This workshop is a follow-up of the highly successful meeting by the
same name that took place in May of last year in Barcelona.

The workshop will bring together several well-known researchers in the
field to discuss interesting problems at the frontier of current web
(re)search. The workshop represents a unique opportunity for Ph.D.
students to be exposed to the current trends in the area of web search.

There will be several 25 minutes invited presentations and two keynote
speeches, each 50 minutes long. Preston McAfee, an economist of renown
from Yahoo! Research and Thomas Hofmann, director of Google
Zuerich, will be the two keynote speakers.

The workshop will take place in Bertinoro from June 17 (arrivals) to
June 20 (departures). The Future of Web Search will take place at
Bertinoro Castle, a wonderfully restored XII century castle situated in
the beautiful Italian countryside not far from the towns of Forlì and
Ravenna.

2)
The Fifth Semantic Web Challenge

We invite submissions to the fifth annual Semantic Web Challenge, the premiere event for demonstrating practical progress towards achieving the vision of the Semantic Web.

The central idea of the Semantic Web is to extend the current human-readable web by
encoding some of the semantics of resources in a machine-processable form. Moving beyond syntax opens the door to more advanced applications and functionality on the Web. Computers will be better able to search, process, integrate and present the content of these resources in a meaningful, intelligent manner. The core technological building blocks are now in place and widely available: ontology languages, flexible storage and querying facilities, protocols, reasoning engines, etc. Guidelines for best practice are being formulated and disseminated by the W3C.

GOALS
—–
The overall goal of this event is to advance our understanding of how semantic technologies can be exploited to produce useful applications for the Web. Semantic Web applications should integrate, combine, and deduce information from various sources to assist users in performing specific tasks.

Following last year’s event, the 2007 Semantic Web Challenge has the specific goal to encourage applications that not only reuse data and services of other applications, but support the serendipitous reuse of their own data and services in situations that have not been foreseen by the original authors.

To achieve this, participants should provide standards-compliant web interfaces to the data and services provided by their applications. For example, these could take the form of RSS feeds, SPARQL endpoints, REST or Web Services interfaces.

Minimal Requirements
——————–

As in previous years, submissions for the Semantic Web Challenge must meet the following minimum requirements:

* The meaning of data has to play a central role.
o Meaning must be represented using formal descriptions.
o Data must be manipulated/processed in interesting ways to derive useful information and
o this semantic information processing has to play a central role in achieving things that alternative technologies cannot do as well, or at all;
* The information sources used
o should be under diverse ownership or control
o should be heterogeneous (syntactically, structurally, and semantically), and
o should contain substantial quantities of real world data (i.e. not toy examples).
* It is required that all applications assume an open world, i.e. that the information is never complete.

Although we expect that most applications will use RDF, RDF Schema, or OWL this is not a requirement. What is more important is that whatever semantic technology is used, it plays a central role in achieving interesting new levels of functionality or performance.

Much more information and requirements here.

SWC Co-Chairs
————-

Jennifer Golbeck (University of Maryland, College Park)
Peter Mika (Yahoo! Research Barcelona)

SWC Advisory Board
——————

Dean Allemang (TopQuadrant)
Ju”gen Angele (Ontoprise)
Mike Dean (BBN Technologies)
Stefan Decker (DERI, Galway)
Je’ro^me Euzenat (INRIA Rhone-Alpes)
Ian Horrocks (University of Manchester)
Atanas Kiryakov (OntoText)
Michel Klein (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam)
Deborah McGuinness (Stanford University)
Rob Shearer (University of Manchester)
Amit Sheth (Wright State University)
York Sure (University of Karlsruhe)
Hideaki Takeda (National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo)
Ubbo Visser (University of Bremen)

Contact:
——–

Peter Mika
Yahoo! Research Barcelona
Ocata 1
08001 Barcelona, Spain
Tel: +34 935 421 165
Fax: +34 935 421 150
Email: pmika at yahoo-inc.com
Web: http://www.cs.vu.nl/~pmika/

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 12:21 am and is filed under Info Management and Retrieval, Information Science, Search News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.