Appel: Human Language Technology for the Semantic Web and Web Services

Wed May 7 16:32:50 UTC 2003

                          SECOND CALL FOR PAPERS

     Human Language Technology for the Semantic Web and Web Services

            http://gate.ac.uk/conferences/iswc2003/index.html

                          Workshop at ISWC 2003
                  International Semantic Web Conference
                Sanibel Island, Florida, 20-23 October 2003

                           Hamish Cunningham
                            Atanas Kiryakov
                               Ying Ding

The Semantic Web aims to add a machine tractable, re-purposeable layer
to compliment the existing web of natural language hypertext. In order
to realise this vision, the creation of semantic annotation, the
linking of web pages to ontologies, and the creation, evolution and
interrelation of ontologies must become automatic or semi-automatic
processes.

In the context of new work on distributed computation, Semantic Web
Services (SWSs) go beyond current services by adding ontologies and
formal knowledge to support description, discovery, negotiation,
mediation and composition. This formal knowledge is often strongly
related to informal materials. For example, a service for multi-media
content delivery over broadband networks might incorporate conceptual
indices of the content, so that a smart VCR (such as next generation
TiVO) can reason about programmes to suggest to its
owner. Alternatively, a service for B2B catalogue publication has to
translate between existing semi-structured catalogues and the more
formal catalogues required for SWS purposes. To make these types of
services cost-effective we need automatic knowledge harvesting from
all forms of content that contain natural language text or spoken
data.

Other services do not have this close connection with informal
content, or will be created from scratch using Semantic Web authoring
tools. For example, printing or compute cycle or storage services. In
these cases the opposite need is present: to document services for the
human reader using natural language generation.

This workshop will provide a forum for workers in the field of human
language technology for the Semantic Web and for Semantic Web Services
to present their latest results. The aim is to provide a snapshot of
the state of the art, dealing with a wide range of issues, including
but not limited to:

  * automatic and semi-automatic annotation of web pages;
  * semantic indexing and retrieval of documents, combining the
    strengths of IE and IR;
  * integration of data about language in language processing components
    with ontological data;
  * robustness across genres and domains;
  * ease of embedding in Semantic Web applications;
  * ontology learning, evolving and merging;
  * automatic web service description augmentation;
  * automatic semantic structure documentation;
  * language technology for automatic Web service discovery;
  * adaptation of generation techniques to SWS applications.

The themes of the workshop have partly emerged from the Special Interest
Group on Language Technologies and the Semantic Web (SIG5), part of the
OntoWeb thematic network (http://ontoweb-lt.dfki.de/).

Audience:

The issues addressed by the workshop are at the core of the Semantic
Web enterprise. The killer applications that demonstrate the potential
of this technology to a mass market have yet to emerge, and will
likely not do so until a much larger amount of data is available. The
techniques covered by this workshop are one of the most important
routes to generating this data. The workshop is relevant to:

  * researchers from the Human Language Technology areas;
  * researchers from the Ontology and Knowledge Acquisition and
    Management areas;
  * industrial technology providers involved in Knowledge Management,
    Information Integration, Information and Library Science, Web
    Services.

Organizing Committee:

Dr. Hamish Cunningham -
  http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~hamish, hamish at dcs.shef.ac.uk
Atanas Kiryakov - http://www.sirma.bg/ak.htm, naso at sirma.bg
Dr. Ying Ding - http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ying, ying.ding at uibk.ac.at

May 15th 2003           deadline for submission of papers
June 20th 2003          notification of acceptance
July 15th 2003          final copy due
20-23 October 2003      conference

The fee for the workshop will be $50. Participants will be required to
register for the main ISWC2003 conference.

Submissions:

Submissions should be sent electronically in PDF format to the
organising committee:

    hamish at dcs.shef.ac.uk naso at sirma.bg ying.ding at uibk.ac.at

Submitted papers should be formatted in the style of the Springer
publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS):
    http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html
The emphasis during reviewing will be on content, not format,
however.

Programme Committee:

Alexander Maedche, Robert Bosch Gmbh, Germany
Asun Gomez-Perez, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain
David Harper, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK
Diana Maynard, University of Sheffield, UK
Dieter Fensel, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Dieter Merkl, TU Vienna, Austria
Fabio Crestani, University of Strathclyde, UK
Jan Paralic, Technical University Kosice, Slovakia
John Davies, British Telecom, UK
John Tait, University of Sunderland, UK
Kalina Bontcheva, University of Sheffield, UK
Maria Vargas-Vera, Open University, UK
Marin Dimitrov, OntoText Lab, Bulgaria
Paul Buitelaar, DFKI, GE
Robert Engels, CognIT, Norway
Steffen Staab, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
Vojtech Svatek, University of Economics, Prague, Czech Republic
Wim Peters, University of Sheffield, UK
York Sure, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
Yorick Wilks, University of Sheffield, UK
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