Workshops

BOF - Between Ontologies and Folksonomies:

Tools and Architectures for Managing and Retrieving Emerging Knowledge in Communities

Note: new deadline for submitting position papers: April 27, 2007

To send a position paper or obtain more information, please use: bof AT dico.unimi.it

Brief summary

Today on-line communities, as well as individuals, produce a substantial amount of unstructured (and extemporaneous) content, arising from tacit and explicit knowledge sharing. Various approaches, both in the managerial and computer sciences, are seeking ways to crystallize the knowledge contained in communities “chatters.” The intrinsic limits of technologies underpinning such approaches tend to push communities users towards the spontaneous adoption of less cumbersome tools, usually offered in the framework of Web 2.0 (e.g. folksonomies, XML- based tagging, etc.), for sharing and retrieving knowledge. In this landscape, community members should be able to access and browse the community knowledge through tools that should be at once device-independent and context- and user- dependent in order to manage and classify content for heterogeneous interaction channels (wired/wireless network workstations, smart-phones, PDA, and pagers) and disparate situations (while driving, in a meeting, on campus).

Motivations and Goals

Today on-line communities, as well as individuals, produce a substantial amount of unstructured (and extemporaneous) content, arising from tacit and explicit knowledge sharing. Various approaches, both in the managerial and computer sciences, are seeking ways to crystallize the - somewhat volatile, but often highly valuable - knowledge contained in communities 'chatters.' Among those approaches, the most relevant appear to be those aimed at developing and formalizing agreed-upon semantic representations of specific knowledge domains (i.e. domain ontologies).

Nonetheless, the intrinsic limits of technologies underpinning such approaches tend to push communities users towards the spontaneous adoption of less cumbersome tools, usually offered in the framework of Web 2.0 (e.g. folksonomies, XML-based tagging, etc.), for sharing and retrieving knowledge.

In this landscape, community members should be able to access and browse the community knowledge transparently and in a personalized way, through tools that should be at once device- independent and context- and user-dependent in order to manage and classify content for heterogeneous interaction channels (wired/wireless network workstations, smart-phones, PDA, and pagers) and disparate situations (while driving, in a meeting, on campus).

The nature of the proposed topic requires multidisciplinary research efforts involving researchers from different areas of applied computer science (Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge management, Community Informatics, Information Retrieval, network applications infrastructures, etc.) and social sciences (Sociology, Economics, Management Science, Discourse Analysis, etc.).

This workshop proposal aims at the development of a common understanding of the frontier technologies in acquiring, structuring, and using shared semantics by examining both technological and social issues. To do so, conceptual consideration, technical issues and 'real-life case studies' are needed to build useful theories that are valuable in communities environments. A roundtable discussion with researchers will possibly offer new insights on how to look at, think, design and manage contents build by communities.

Relevant Topics

The workshop will be structured to provide a picture for technology and content management issues that one encounters when trying to extract and structure knowledge arising form on-line community content. Topics of interest are (but are not limited to):

Techniques for a smart extraction and reuse of knowledge

Extraction of knowledge from collaborative environments

Location-based and device-independent access to knowledge

Steering Committee

Dario Maggiorini
Dept. of Information and Communication (D.I.Co.), University of Milano - Italy maggiorini AT dico.unimi.it

Alessandro Provetti
Dept. of Physics, University of Messina - Italy provetti AT dsi.unimi.it

Laura Anna Ripamonti
Dept. of Information and Communication (D.I.Co.), University of Milano - Italy ripamonti AT dico.unimi.it

Program Committee (partial list)

Organizing Committee

Ines Di Loreto D.I.Co., University of Milano - Italy, ines.diloreto AT unimi.it
Francesco Giudici D.I.Co., University of Milano - Italy, fgiudici AT dico.unimi.it
Massimo Marchi D.S.I., University of Milano - Italy, marchi AT dsi.unimi.it
Cristian Peraboni D.I.Co., University of Milano - Italy, cristian.peraboni AT dico.unimi.it

Intended Audience

Academics and practitioners of on-line communities so as to have both conceptual and empirically grounded speeches.

Organization

The workshop is a one day event, organized in three sessions, following the topics mentioned above; a round table will end the workshop. Accepted position papers will be available before the workshop and are to be read in advance by all participants. To facilitate a lively discussion, attendance could be limited to around 30 participants. At most two authors per accepted submission can participate. Our goal is to promote discussion and knowledge beyond the workshop event. Post-workshop activities will include the possible publication of revised and extended papers by an international publisher.

Submission details

Statement describing real cases and well-grounded in empirical research will be highly welcome. Position statements should clearly state how they relate to the workshop, what particular problem and corresponding solution they address, and why the statement is expected to be relevant to both the workshop and the community. All submitted papers will be peer-reviewed by at least 2 members of the program committee. Participants will be selected on the basis of significance of their submission to the workshop theme, for the discussion or on the basis of their research/practice background and interests (priority will be given to those whose interests most resemble the workshop topics), in order to ensure the presence of different perspectives and to foster a constructive exchange of ideas. Acceptance of a position statement submission implies that at least one of the authors will register for the workshop and actively participate in the discussion groups. The position statements will be published in a workshop reader and possibly on the CEUR web-site (CEUR- WS.org is a recognized ISSN publication series, ISSN 1613-0073), while a number of them will be possibly selected for submitting to a special issue of an international publisher (still to be defined).

Statements should be at most 4 pages for position papers, 10 pages for full papers and state the author’s name, affiliation, and contact information. Papers should be formatted using Springer guidelines for camera-ready contributed/multi-authored books (http://www.springer.com/east/home/computer/computer+authors). Submitted files should be in .pdf format.

Papers should be sent to: bof AT dico.unimi.it
Paper submission due: April 27, 2007
Notification of acceptance: May 4, 2007

References

Agostini, A., Bettini, C., Cesa-Bianchi, N., Maggiorini, D., and Riboni, D. (2003). Integrated Profile Management for Mobile Computing. Proc. 18th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI2IA 2003), Acapulco (Mexico), August 11 2003.

Baumgartner R. et al. (2005). Web Data Extraction for Business Intelligence: the LiXto Approach. Proc. of BTW Workshop.

Begelman, G., Keller, P. and Smadja, F. (2006). Automated Tag Clustering: Improving search and exploration in the tag space. Proc. of WWW2006, Collaborative Web Tagging Workshop.

Brown J.S. and P. Duguid (1991). Organizational Learning and Communities of Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning and Innovation. Organization Science, Vol.2, N.1, pp.40-57.

Davies, J., Fensel, D., and van Harmelen, F. (2003). Towards the Semantic Web: Ontology-driven Knowledge Management. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY.

De Cindio, F., Fiumara, G., Marchi, M., Provetti, A., Ripamonti, L.A., and Sonnante, L. (2006). Aggregating Information and Enforcing Awareness Across Communities with the Dynamo RSS Feeds Creation Engine: Preliminary Report. Proc. of COMINF07, On The Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2006 - OTM Federated Conferences, Oct./Nov. 2006, Montpellier (France), LNCS 4277, pp. 227- 235.

Golder, S., and Huberman, B. (2006). Usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems. Journal of Information Science 32, 2, 198-208

Gottlob, G. and Koch, C. (2004). Monadic Datalog and the Expressive Power of Languages for Web Information Extraction. Journal of the ACM 51.

Gruber., T. (2005). Folksonomy of Ontology: A Mash-up of Apples and Oranges. First on-Line conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR'05).

Haase, P., Volker, J. and Sure, Y. (2005). Management of dynamic knowledge. Journal of Knowledge Management 9, 5 97-107.

Hendler, J. (2001). Agents and the Semantic Web. IEEE Intelligent Systems Journal, 16(2), 30-37.

Heymann, P. and Garcia-Molina, H. (2006). Collaborative Creation of Communal Hierarchical Taxonomies in Social Tagging Systems. Technical Report InfoLab 2006-10, Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.

Holsapple, C.W. and Joshi, K.D. (2002). A collaborative approach to Ontology design. Communication of the ACM, Vol.45, N.2, pp.42-47, February 2002.

McCulloch, E. and MacGregor, G. (2006). Collaborative Tagging as a Knowledge Organisation and Resource Discovery Tool. Library Review 55, 5.

Polanyi, M. (1967). The Tacit Dimension. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. Preece, J. (2000). Online Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons.

Schmitz, P. (2006). Inducing Ontology from Flickr Tags. Proc. of WWW2006, Collaborative Web Tagging Workshop.

Wenger, E. (2004). Knowledge Management as a Doughnut: Shaping Your Knowledge Strategy Through Communities of Practice. Ivey Business Journal, 68(3).

Wu, X., Zhang, L. and Yu, Y. (2006). Exploring social annotations for the semantic web. Proc. of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web 417-426.

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