SWARCH-DL

Aims and Scope

In the past few years great and continually increasing scientific interest is paid towards the efficient dissemination and management of the world’s cultural assets. As more and more cultural heritage institutions tend to exploit World Wide Web’s technologies in order to render their collections globally available, integrated access to this vast amount of content has become an imperative need. In Europe only, we can count enough projects (e.g., Europeana, ATHENA, MICHAEL, MultimediaN, STERNA) that aim to smoothly bring cultural institutions in to the digital era, by both providing a unified integration method and a common access point for their collections.

Digital libraries serve as the World Wide Web infrastructure for collecting and managing digital objects. Despite their many capabilities, they often appear with several weaknesses. Till recently, the main requisite when integrating diverse resources was to achieve syntactic interoperability. But this is not enough, especially in a more knowledge-intensive world, where a number of powerful techniques offered by the today’s Semantic Web promise knowledge retrieval instead of mere data exchange. Hence, the most essential component in the process of disseminating and integrating large digital cultural collections is to consider, and not to overlook, the semantics of the underlying content. In particular, Semantic Web reasoning over data has been proven a powerful tool in knowledge management and acquisition.

The aim of this workshop is exactly to look deeper into the problems that cultural heritage institutions and Semantic Web researchers face in their effort to produce knowledge-intensive and globally accessible digital collections. Through proposed techniques, tools, case studies, comparisons and extensive discussions we seek for valuable and innovative solutions to some of these open problems. Best practices and standards, data models and representation methods, efficient implementation tools and techniques, search and retrieval mechanisms, evaluation techniques, often raise arguable issues that worth further investigation.

Topics of Interest

We seek for high quality and original contributions which consider and present innovative applications for “meaningful” knowledge management in the cultural heritage field. The semantic aspects of digital information, as they are utilized by digital libraries and other digital repository infrastructures, are also within the workshop’s scope. In particular, topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Semantic-enabled search in cultural heritage collections and digital libraries
• Reasoning over cultural heritage information
• Integration with SKOS terminologies
• Linked Data
• Semantic Search Evaluation
• Usability and Interfaces
• Scalability and Performance
• Semantic tagging and user feedback
• Semantic and mental maps of interlinked cultural information
• Visualization techniques and paradigms
• Experience reports from relevant projects

Audience

This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners active in the deployment of semantic-aware and reasoning-based applications, and especially of those applying to the cultural heritage field. Industry and academic researchers interested in knowledge management and acquisition in general are also included to the workshop’s audience, as well as those involved in projects working on the development of knowledge-intensive applications for digital libraries and digital repository systems.

Submission

Papers reporting original and unpublished research results on the above and related topics are solicited. Authors should submit a paper with up to 6 pages (in English) in double-column IEEE format following the submission guidelines available at the ICSC-2010 web page. Submissions must be in electronic form as PDF files and should be uploaded at EasyChair. Submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by at least 2 independent members of the program committee.

At least one author of each accepted paper must be registered and present the paper at the workshop. All accepted papers will be included in the IEEE conference proceedings and published by the IEEE Computer Society Press.

Extended versions of selected workshop papers will be considered for publication in a special issue of the Semantic Web Journal.

Registration

Authors and participants should register with the main conference following the instructions available at the conference web-site. Registration deadline for authors is July 15, 2010.

Important Dates

Paper Submission: June 25, 2010 (23:59 EEST) Submissions are now closed
Acceptance Notification: July 7, 2010
Camera-Ready & Registration: July 15, 2010
SWARCH-DL workshop: September 24, 2010

Organization

Workshop Chair:
Dimitrios A. Koutsomitropoulos
High Performance Information Systems Laboratory
Computer Engineering and Informatics Dpt.
University of Patras, Greece

Co-Chairs:
Georgia D. Solomou
High Performance Information Systems Laboratory
Computer Engineering and Informatics Dpt.
University of Patras, Greece

Theodore S. Papatheodorou
High Performance Information Systems Laboratory
Computer Engineering and Informatics Dpt.
University of Patras, Greece

Program Committee:

• Andreas Andreou, Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus

• Panayiotis Bozanis, University of Thessaly, Greece

• Christodoulos Chamzas, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece

• Mark Diggory, @Mire, USA

• Kate Fernie, MDR Partners, UK

• Stefanos Gritzalis, University of the Aegean, Greece

• Antoine Isaac, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands

• Sarantos Kapidakis, Ionian University, Greece

• Sokratis Katsikas, University of Piraeus, Greece

• Stefanos Kollias, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

• Spiridon Likothanassis, University of Patras, Greece

• Nikolaos Mavridis, United Arab Emirates University, UAE

• Bijan Parsia, Clark & Parsia LLC, USA

• Evangelos Sakkopoulos, Research Academic Computer Technology Institute, Greece

• Yiannis Saridakis, Technical University of Crete, Greece

• Miguel-Angel Sicilia, University of Alcala, Spain

• Dimitrios Tsolis, University of Ioannina, Greece

• Ioannis Venetis, Technological Education Institution of Piraeus, Greece

• Axel Vitzthum, Digicult SH, Germany

Contact

For additional information, please contact:
<solomou AT hpclab DOT ceid DOT upatras DOT gr>
<kotsomit AT hpclab DOT ceid DOT upatras DOT gr>

Call for Papers

The workshop call for papers is also available as plain text and as a pdf file.