The ExpertFinder Initiative

3rd International ExpertFinder Workshop: PICKME2008
(Personal Identification and Collaborations - Knowledge Mediation and Extraction),

27th October 2008, Karlsruhe, Germany

co-located with the 7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2008)

The Semantic Web, Social Networks and other emerging technology streams promise to enable finding experts more efficiently on a Web scale across boundaries. To leverage synergies among these streams, the ExpertFinder initiative started in 2006 with the aim of devising vocabularies, rule extensions (for e.g. FOAF and SIOC) and best practices to annotate and extract expertise-relevant information from personal and organizational web pages, blogs, wikis, conferences, publication indexes, etc. Following two previous workshops - EFW and FEWS - we solicit new research contributions from the Semantic Web community towards the tasks of formally representing and reusing knowledge of skills and collaborations on the Web and consequently finding people according to their expertise. The goal of PICKME2008 is to discuss:

• the feasibility of a Web-scale infrastructure for the creation, publication and use of semantic descriptions of experts and their collaborations on the Web,
• concrete application scenarios such as group management, disaster response, recruitment, team building, problem solving and on-the-fly consultation (Such scenarios can be found at http://wiki.foaf-project.org/ExpertFinderUseCases),
• enabling technologies such as annotation, knowledge extraction, ontology engineering, reasoning, ontology mediation, social network and interaction analysis.

Topics of Interest
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We welcome all research contributions that contribute one or more of the following topics:

• Specification of vocabularies and reuse of existing standards/taxonomies to describe experts to capture knowledge about people, their expertise and collaborations with other people,
• Extraction of descriptions of persons and collaborations from loosely structured data (e.g. Web pages) and databases,
• Use of microformat to express and extract knowledge about persons and collaborations,
• International and cross-organizational heterogeneity issues in personal descriptions,
• Algorithms for expert & expertise finding and recommendation (e.g. mining of social networks),
• Expressivity extensions (in logics, rules) to support expertise extraction from knowledge about collaborations,
• Tools for the intuitive creation and maintenance of personal and organizational descriptions and associated rules,
• Web infrastructures for the publication and sharing of personal and organizational descriptions (storage, access, querying, rule execution, coordination, communication),
• Extension of collaborative tools, e.g. blogs and wikis, to capture knowledge about persons and collaborations,
• Security, trust and privacy aspects of expert & expertise finding, and
• Deployment of these areas in business scenarios and requirements for the industrial uptake of these applications.

Event Information
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The workshop will take place during the 7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008). For every accepted paper at least one of the authors must attend the workshop and must register for the workshop and the main conference.

Submission Information
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We invite submissions of full papers no longer than 12 pages or position papers no longer than 2 pages (both including figures, references and appendices). Paper submissions must be formatted in the style of the Springer Publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).

Guidelines and templates are available at http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-2-72376-0.

Papers need to be submitted electronically through the EasyChair system (http://www.easychair.org/conferences?conf=pickme2008). Both full and position papers will be published in accompanying online proceedings (CEUR).

Important Dates
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• August 11, 2008: Submission of papers (EXTENDED DEADLINE!!!)
• September 05, 2008: Notification of acceptance
• September 26, 2008: Camera-ready versions due
• October, 27, 2008: Workshop