ISWC2007 Workshop "Mastering the Gap"

Automating the process of semantic annotation of content objects is a crucial step for bootstrapping the Semantic Web. This process requires a complex flow of activities which combines competences from different areas. The Workshop will focus precisely on the interface between the information extracted from content objects (e.g., using methods from NLP, image processing, text mining, etc.) and the semantic layer in which this information is explicitly represented in the form of ontologies and their instances. The workshop will provide an opportunity for: discussing adequate methods, processes (pipelines) and representation formats for the annotation process; reaching a shared understanding with respect to the terminology in the area; discussing the lessons learned from projects in the area, and putting together a list of the most critical issues to be tackled by the research community to make further progress in the area.

Some of the possible challenges to be discussed at the workshop are:

• How can ontological/domain knowledge be fed back into the extraction process?
• How can the semantic layer be extended by the results of information extraction (e.g. ontology learning)?
• What are the steps of an annotation process, which steps can be standardized for higher flexibility? Which parts are intrinsically application-specific?
• What are the requirements towards formats for representing semantic annotations?
• Where is the borderline of automation and how can it be further pushed?
• How can the linking with the semantic layer be supported on the concept/schema level as well as on the instance level?
• How can knowledge extracted from different sources with different tools and perhaps different reference ontologies (interoperability) be merged (semi-)automatically?
• How can extraction technologies for different media (e.g. text and images) be combined and how can the merged extraction results be represented in order to create synergies?

The Workshop will be a mixture of short paper presentation and open discussions on a number of topics related to mastering the gap between information extraction and semantic representation including (but not restricted to):

• Annotation representation formats
• Approaches to semantic integration
• Approaches to semantic elicitation
• From lexical entities to entities in the domains
• From extracted features to entities in the domain

All members of the Semantic Web community are invited to submit papers (of max 15 pages length) reporting on original work in these and related areas. Submissions should be formatted according to the Springer LNCS style and will be selected for inclusion based on reviews by domain experts. At least one author of each accepted submission must attend the workshop and all workshop participants must pay the ISWC 2007 workshop registration fee, as well as the conference fee.

The ISWC submission system is open at the following address:
https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/ISWC2007/default.aspx.
Please select the track "Workshop: Mastering the Gap 2007"

Paolo Bouquet	University of Trento, Trento, Italy
Heiko Stoermer	University of Trento, Trento, Italy
Claudia Niederée	L3S Research Center, Hannover, Germany
Jean-Pierre Chanod	XEROX-XRCE, Grenoble, France
Roberto Brunelli	Fondazione Bruno Kessler-irst, Trento

Florence Amardeilh	University of Paris IV, France
Yiannis Avrithis	IVML-NTUA, Greece
Marco De Gemmis	University of Bari, Italy
George Demetriou	University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
Siegfried Handschuh	DERI, Ireland
Dominic Heutelbeck	Fernuniversität Hagen, Germany
Yiannis Kompatsiaris	ITI, Greece
Pasquale Lops	University of Bari, Italy
Bernardo Magnini	Fondazione Bruno Kessler-irst, Trento, Italy
Véronique Malaisé	Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Stefano Messelodi	Fondazione Bruno Kessler-irst, Italy
Giovanni Semeraro	University of Bari, Italy
Luciano Serafini	University of Trento, Italy
Rodolfo Stecher	L3S Research Center, Hannover, Germany

Paolo Bouquet
Tel: +39 0461 88 3383 / 2088
email: bouquet (at) dit (dot) unitn (dot) it
skype: paolobouquet