Apologies for possible multiple posts

============================ CALL FOR PAPERS

International Workshop on Semantic Technologies meet Recommender Systems & Big Data - SeRSy 2012 in conjunction with ISWC 2012, Boston, USA, November 11-15, 2012

http://sisinflab.poliba.it/sersy2012/

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission for workshop papers: Jul 31 Notification of acceptance: Aug 21 Camera-ready versions: Sep 10

MOTIVATION

People generally need more and more advanced tools that go beyond those implementing the canonical search paradigm for seeking relevant information. A new search paradigm is emerging, where the user perspective is completely reversed: from finding to being found. Recommender Systems may help to support this new perspective, because they have the effect of pushing relevant objects, selected from a large space of possible options, to potentially interested users. To achieve this result, recommendation techniques generally rely on data referring to three kinds of objects: users, items and their relations.

Recent developments of the Semantic Web community offer novel strategies to represent data about users, items and their relations that might improve the current state of the art of recommender systems, in order to move towards a new generation of recommender systems which fully understand the items they deal with.

More and more semantic data are published following the Linked Data principles, that enable to set up links between objects in different data sources, by connecting information in a single global data space: the Web of Data. Today, Web of Data includes different types of knowledge represented in a homogeneous form: sedimentary one (encyclopedic, cultural, linguistic, common-sense) and real-time one (news, data streams, ...). This data might be useful to interlink diverse information about users, items, and their relations and implement reasoning mechanisms that can support and improve the recommendation process.

The challenge is to investigate whether and how this large amount of wide-coverage and linked semantic knowledge can be automatically introduced into systems that perform tasks requiring human-level intelligence. Examples of such tasks include understanding a health problem in order to make a medical decision, or simply deciding which laptop to buy. Recommender systems support users exactly in those complex tasks.

The primary goal of the workshop is to showcase cutting edge research on the intersection of Semantic Technologies and Recommender Systems, by taking the best of the two worlds. This combination may provide the Semantic Web community with important real-world scenarios where its potential can be effectively exploited into systems performing complex tasks.

TOPICS

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

Recommendation approaches using Semantic technologies

• Linked Data for Recommender Systems
• Ontology-based recommendation algorithms
• Merging and ranking recommendations
• Social recommender systems
• Reasoning with Big Data

Data Acquisition

• Discovery of relevant Linked Data sources for recommendation algorithms
• Tracking provenance, evaluating reliability, quality and trustworthiness of Linked Data
• Linking, aggregating, intertwining and mining Linked Data for recommender systems
• Integrity and privacy issues

New Reference Architectures for Recommender Systems

• Linked Data in new Recommender Systems architectures
• Efficiency, performance and scalability issues
• Distributed architectures

Innovative applications

• Semantic technologies for Cross-lingual and cross-domain recommender systems
• Mining user data streams
• Semantic technologies for improving transparency and explanations

Evaluation methodologies and approaches

• Big datasets for the evaluation
• Evaluation methodologies for real time personalization in big datasets
• Semantic technologies for improving novelty, diversity and serendipity

FORMAT

We welcome work at all stages of development: papers can describe applied systems, empirical results or theoretically grounded positions.

• Full papers (10-12 pages)
• Short papers (4-6 pages)
• Demos (2-4 pages for description)

Papers should be formatted according to the general ISWC2012 submission guidelines. Accepted format is PDF.

SUBMISSION

Please submit your paper via EasyChair at the following URL:

https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sersy2012

You need to open a personal account upon the first login, if you do not have one.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Marco de Gemmis - University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy Tommaso Di Noia - Politecnico of Bari, Italy Pasquale Lops - University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy Thomas Lukasiewicz - University of Oxford, UK Giovanni Semeraro - University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Fabien Abel (L3S Research Centre - Germany) Claudio Bartolini (HP Labs @ Palo Alto – USA) Marco Brambilla (Politecnico di Milano – Italy) Andrea Calì (Birkbeck, University of London – UK) Ivan Cantador (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid – Spain) Pablo Castells (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid – Spain) Federica Cena (University of Turin – Italy) Bettina Fazzina (Università della Calabria – Italy) Tim Furche (Oxford University Computing Laboratories – UK) Nicola Henze (Leibniz Universitä Hannover – Germany) Leo Iaquinta (Univ.di Milano Bicocca – Italy) Roberto Mirizzi (Politecnico of Bari – Italy) Enrico Motta (Open University in Milton Keynes – UK) Cataldo Musto (Università di Bari "Aldo Moro" – Italy) Fedelucio Narducci (Univ.di Milano Bicocca – Italy) Vito Claudio Ostuni (Politecnico of Bari – Italy) Alexandre Passant (DERI, National University of Ireland – Ireland) Gerardo I. Simari (University of Oxford – UK) Markus Zanker (Alpen–Adria–Universitä Klagenfurt – Austria)

CONTACT

e-mail: sersy2012(a)gmail.com Web page: http://sisinflab.poliba.it/sersy2012/ twitter: @sersy2012 linkedin: http://tinyurl.com/sersy2012