ESWC 2006 Workshop - Mastering the Gap: From Information Extraction to Semantic Representation

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 Well 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 ESWC 2006 workshop registration fee, as well as the conference fee.

Paolo Bouquet	University of Trento, Trento, Italy
Claudia Niederée	Fraunhofer IPSI, Darmstadt, Germany
Jean-Pierre Chanod	XEROX-XRCE, Grenoble, France
Roberto Brunelli	ITC-irst, Trento

George Demetriou	University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
Matthias Hemmje	University of Hagen, Hagen, Germany
Giovanni Semeraro	University of Bari, Bari, Italy
Rodolfo Stecher	Fraunhofer IPSI, Darmstadt, Germany
Heiko Stoermer	University of Trento, Trento, Italy
Luciano Serafini	University of Trento, Trento, Italy
Bernardo Magnini	ITC-irst, Trento, Italy
Boris Chidlovskii	XEROX-XRCE, Grenoble, France
Stefano Messelodi	ITC-irst, Trento, Italy

Elisabetta Fauri

fauri (at) dit.unitn.it