The First International Workshop on 

Living Web: Making Web Diversity a true asset   

collocated with the 8th International Semantic Web Conference ISWC-2009
October 26, 2009: Westfields Conference Center, Washington DC., USA

The large diversity underlying the content creation process of the Web contributes a lot to the wealth and value of the Web. This diversity is a consequence of many factors (e.g., cultural background, opinion) and it has always been largely present in the Web. However, lately it has been further boosted by the success of Social Web applications. As a consequence, it has become more and more difficult to get a balanced view on a given subject using current search technology.

The goal of this workshop is to discuss and highlight the potentials that are inherent in diversity and that today are only marginally exploited, as well as the risk of biasing through the Web. Furthermore, it will discuss research ideas and results ? especially in the area of semantics but also multimedia and linguistic technologies - that are relevant for enabling "Living Web" Technology, i.e., technology that more systematically looks into diversity, helps identifying bias and different viewpoints, and ? in summary - leverages diversity for exploiting its full potential to the Web user.

The discussion and investigation of the topic diversity is of special interest at this point in time due to three factors:

•      Technologies that are required for creating effective and efficient diversity-aware have matured to a status that enables their application for this challenging task. This refers to the effectiveness of this technologies in achieving results of sufficient quality to enable deeper analysis such as looking for bias, diversity and opinion (e.g., NLP and extraction technology) as well as to the scalability of the technologies (e.g., large progress in technologies for semantic data management). These technologies provide a substantial foundation for creating diversity-aware technology.

•      The wide adoption of Social web application and the associated creation of high volumes of diverse user generated content and content annotation, produce a wealth of highly diverse content. This wealth makes the creation of diversity a rewarding opportunity at this point in time.

•      At the same time exactly the success of the social web applications as well as the general democratization of the publication process raise a growing need for the technology that helps in dealing with the partly biased and opinionated content in an adequate way to deliver adequate information for all kinds of decision making processes.

Prospective authors are invited to submit original technical papers of no more than 8 pages in the standard LNCS paper format. Paper should be submitted electronically in PDF format. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings as a volume of CEUR-WS. Prospective authors are expected to present their papers at the workshop. Selected papers of the workshop will be published in a special issue of a journal.

 Important Dates:

• extended to August 23, 2009:
  Deadline for the submission of papers.
• September 6, 2009:
  Deadline for the notification of acceptance/rejection.
• October 2, 2009:
  Workshop camera ready copy submission.
• October 26, 2009:
  Living Web: Making Web Diversity a true asset.

• On the interdisciplinary foundations of diversity

• Assessing Content Diversity in Medical Weblogs

• Image diversity analysis: context, opinion and bias

• Towards Multimedia Opinion Mining

• Current Approaches to Search Result Diversification

• A fair ranking method for image database retrieval

• Data mining, interactive semantic structuring, and collaboration: A
  diversity-aware method for sense-making in search

• Searching Annotated Collections: Example Applications
   

Organizing Committee:

• Giulia Boato (Workshop Co-Chair)
  Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento , Italy
  E-mail: boato [at] disi [dot] unitn [dot] it
• Claudia Niederee (Workshop Co-Chair)
  L3S Research Center, Germany
  E-mail: niederee [at] l3s [dot] de
• Hugo Zaragoza
  Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, Spain
• Fausto Giunchiglia
  Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento , Italy
• Wolfgang Nejdl
  L3S Research Center and Knowledge Based System Department, Leibnitz University Hannover, Germany
• Sreenivas Gollapudi
  Microsoft Search Labs, Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley, Mountain View, CA, USA
  

Technical Program Committee:

• Paolo Besana, University of Edinburgh, UK
• Paolo Bouquet, University of Trento, Italy
• Harry Chen, Siri Inc., USA
• Francesco G. B. De Natale, University of Trento, Italy
• Andrea De Polo, Alinari 24ore SpA, Italy
• Peter Fankhauser, L3S Research Center, Germany
• Gregory Grefenstette, Exalead, France
• Vasant Honavar, Iowa State University, USA
• Ramesh Jain, University of California, Irvine, USA
• Yannis Kompatsiaris, ITI, Greece
• Paul Lewis, University of Southampton, UK
• Vasileios Mezaris, ITI, Greece
• Alessandro Moschitti, University of Trento, Italy
• Vanessa Murdock, Yahoo! Research, Barcelona, Spain
• Kieron O?Hara, University of Southampton, UK
• Daniel Olmedilla, Telefonica R&D, Spain
• Dave Robertson, University of Edinburgh, UK
• Nicu Sebe, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Pavel Shvaiko, TasLab, Informatica Trentina S.p.A., Italy
   

Acknowledgements:

We appreciate support from the FP7 FET European Project Living Knowledge - Facts, Opinion and Bias in Time.