Events

SEALS to present evaluation results at ESWC 2012

SEALS is pleased to announce that the workshop Evaluation of Semantic Technologies (IWEST 2012) has been confirmed to take place at the leading semantic web conference, ESWC (Extended Semantic Web Conference) 2012, scheduled to take place May 27-31, 2012 in beautiful Crete, Greece.

This workshop will be a venue for researchers and tool developers, firstly, to initiate discussion about the current trends and future challenges of evaluating semantic technologies. Secondly, to support communication and collaboration with the goal of aligning the various evaluation efforts within the community and accelerating innovation in all the associated fields as has been the case with both the TREC benchmarks in information retrieval and the TPC benchmarks in database research.

2nd Call for Papers

International Workshop on Evaluation of Semantic Technologies (IWEST 2012)
Full-day Workshop held at the 9th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2012), Heraklion, Greece
http://oeg-lia3.dia.fi.upm.es/iwest2012/

*** BEST PAPER prize of €500 and FREE conference registrations for best student papers -- submit now! Deadline 4 March 2012 ***

The consistent evaluation of semantic technologies is critical not only for future scientific progress but also for their widespread industrial adoption. Such evaluation needs to address development quality (correctness or robustness) as well as deployment qualities (interoperability or scalability).

In addition, information (data and ontologies) is heterogeneous, distributed and is exponentially increasing in quantity and size. Capturing static versions of information is not always possible because of its highly dynamic nature or because of the associated costs. The evolution of standards and the development of new ones also make compatibility a major issue for legacy technology and information.

While the community is evolving towards a more thorough evaluation of semantic technologies, the dynamism mentioned above makes the evaluation of semantic technologies a difficult task: as previous evaluation methods and techniques become obsolete, new ones have to be developed as fast as semantic technologies evolve.

The aims of the IWEST workshop are twofold. Firstly, to initiate discussion about the current trends and future challenges of evaluating semantic technologies. Secondly, to support communication and collaboration with the goal of aligning the various evaluation efforts within the community and accelerating innovation in all the associated fields as has been the case with both the TREC benchmarks in information retrieval and the TPC benchmarks in database research.

In line with the goals of the workshop, we will also incorporate the results of the 2nd International Evaluation Campaign for Semantic Technologies - a wide-ranging evaluation campaign which has been organised by the Semantic Evaluation At Large Scale (SEALS) Initiative (http://www.seals-project.eu).

Submissions

High quality papers are invited from researchers interested in all aspects of formal evaluation and benchmarking with reference to semantic technologies. In addition, we also invite papers from participants of the 2nd International Evaluation Campaign for Semantic Technologies.

We invite contributions describing benchmarking approaches applied to semantic technologies including, but not limited to:

• Ontology Engineering Tools
• Semantic Search Tools
• Semantic Web Service Tools
• Ontology Matching Tools
• Ontology Storage and Reasoning Systems

We encourage full papers (max 12 pages), short papers (max 6 pages) and short demo papers (max 2 pages) describing significant work in progress, late breaking results or ideas / challenges for the domain.

Submissions must be in PDF and must be submitted using easychair (http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iwest2012). Submissions must be formatted in the style of the Springer Publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).

Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings.

The evaluation paper with the best reviews will receive a "Best Evaluation Paper" award of € 500 !!!

Furthermore, we will waive TWO student registrations to the lead author of the best student papers which are accepted, worth € 540 (conference + workshop). The lead author MUST be a Masters or PhD student at their institution and able to cover flight + hotel costs his/herself.

Important Dates

• Paper Submission Deadline: March 4, 2012 (23:59 GMT)
• Notifications: April 1, 2012 (23:59 GMT)
• Camera-ready Versions: April 15, 2012 (23:59 GMT)
• Workshop: May 27-28, 2012 (23:59 GMT)

Organizing Committee

Dr. Raúl Garcí­a Castro
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain

Dr. Lyndon Nixon
STI International, Austria

Dr. Stuart Wrigley
University of Sheffield, UK