Too many topics, too little time

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

May 31st 2003 deadline for submission of papers
June 30th 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@dcs.shef.ac.uk naso@sirma.bg ying.ding@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
Christopher A. Welty, IBM Watson Research Center, USA
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
Jon Patrick, Univeristy of Sydney, Australia *
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

* to be confirmed