*** Apology for multiple cross-postings ***

========================================================

First Call for Papers STICA06

1st International Workshop on Semantic Technologies in Collaborative Applications STICA06 

at the

15th IEEE International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructures for Collaborative Enterprises (WETICE-2006) The University of Manchester, Manchester, U.K. (26th-28th June 2006)

http://nbi.inf.fu-berlin.de/conf/STICA06

==========================================================

MOTIVATION

==================

With distributed information systems and the Internet continually increasing in significance, collaboratively creating and managing information has become an essential requirement for the success of (virtual) organizations. This situation has led to a plethora of platforms supporting cooperation as well as joint information access among geographically dispersed user communities that have emerged in the last decades: collaborative information spaces, tele-cooperation, autonomous agents or, more recently, various Web-related forms of communication and cooperation such as discussion forums, community portals, Wikis and blogs.

A fundamental requirement for an effective collaboration is the availability of technologies and tools which provide an explicit and unambiguous representation of the shared information and a feasible management of such semantics-enhanced information repositories.  The emergence of the Semantic Web has marked an important stage in the evolution of semantic technologies.  In this context the knowledge components i.e. ontologies are formalized using Web-suitable, but in the same time semantically unambiguous representation languages, are accessible and can be shared and reused across the World Wide Web. 

The Semantic Web offers new opportunities for the next generation of collaborative applications: it provides us with novel means to classify information items i.e. by means of ontologies which formally represent the consensual understanding of the application users w.r.t. a particular domain of interest. Taking advantage of this technology, the first promising implementations of Semantic Web-based collaboration platforms such as Semantic Web portals, semantic Wikis and blogs, to name only a few, have been proposed.

This workshop aims at contributing to this young application field by providing a forum for practitioners and researchers to present innovative approaches to applying Semantic Web technologies in collaborative environments and to discuss the opportunities and challenges related to this topic.

OBJECTIVES

================

The primary objective of this workshop is to gather researchers and practitioners working in different emerging aspects of semantics-enabled collaboration, ranging from discovering new application scenarios, proposing new methods to apply Semantic Web and related emerging technologies to current environments, pointing out issues that still need to be solved, and reporting results and experiences gained during the deployment of collaborative methods and the realization of support systems.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

=================

We invite original academic and industry contributions which report on issues related to semantic collaboration.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

            -- Methodologies for collaboratively creating and managing shared information

            -- Collaborative ontology engineering

            -- Semantic collaboration applications

            -- Collaborative Semantic Web portals

            -- Semantic community support systems

            -- Semantic Wikis

            -- Semantic Blogging

            -- Semantic Mindmapping and Conceptmapping

            -- Case studies, lessons learned and experience reports on semantics-aware collaborative applications

            -- Studies on the value added to collaboration by semantic technologies

            -- Future research directions in the area of semantic collaboration

ORGANIZERS

=================

Robert Tolksdorf, Elena Paslaru Bontas, Klaus Schild

Freie Universität Berlin

AG Netzbasierte Informationssysteme

Takustr. 9

D-14195 Berlin

Germany

{tolk|paslaru|schild} <at> inf.fu-berlin.de

SUBMISSION AND PROCEEDINGS

==================

Submission of papers will take place electronically. Detailed submission instructions will be announced on the homepage of the workshop at http://nbi.inf.fu-berlin.de/conf/STICA06.

The papers should be submitted in PDF format and should not exceed 6 pages in IEEE format (this will also be the page limit for the proceedings).

All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by a minimum of three people.

The accepted papers and the summary report on the workshop will be published in the post-conference proceedings and directly mailed to the registered authors by the IEEE Computer Press after the conference. Please note that in order for an accepted paper to be published in the conference proceedings at least one of its authors is required to register and present the paper at WETICE-2006.

IMPORTANT DATES

==================

Deadline for paper submission: February 10, 2006

Decision to paper authors: April 7, 2006

Final version of accepted papers due to IEEE: May 12, 2006

WETICE-2006 Workshops and On-site registration: June 26-28, 2006

------------------------------------------------------

Dipl. -Inform. Elena Paslaru Bontas Simperl

Netzbasierte Informationssysteme

Institut für Informatik

Freie Universität Berlin

paslaru <at> inf.fu-berlin.de