SAAW2006

SUMMARY
The workshop aims to combine the "traditional" paradigm of Semantic Web (SW) annotation with SW technologies in the authoring domain (e.g. Blogs and Wikis, Semantic Word, etc). Together with the popular collaborative tagging paradigm, these three application domains make up what can collectively be called Semantic Authoring and Annotation.

MOTIVATION, AIM AND SCOPE
The "traditional" paradigm of Semantic Web (SW) annotation - annotating existing web sites with the help of external tools - has been established for a number of years now, e.g. in the form of tools such as OntoMat or tools based on Annotea, and is continuously being developed and improved.

At the same time, core technologies of the SW - the common, open data-model of the Resource Description Framework and the use of shared vocabularies - are now gradually being introduced into mainstream publishing and authoring channels such traditional online publications or office software, as well as in new and "hip" technologies such as Blogs and Wikis. Regardless of the medium, SW technologies in the authoring domain aim at aiding human content producers to author, structure, annotate and publish text and other media right from the start, rather than enriching them with metadata at a later stage.

The collaborative tagging paradigm, which has its roots in social bookmarking and folksonomies, is now becoming popular. Unfortunately, it is often very centralized and does not take users needs for different levels of sharing into account. Many services would benefit their users by offering them SW based bookmarks and topics such as in Annotea bookmarking and topic framework.

Together these three application domains make up what can collectively be called Semantic Authoring and Annotation, the result of which are documents with formal, machine-understandable semantics, partly created by authors and partly by collaborators examining the work in different angles and in different contexts. An important aspect in all these technologies is that they are human-centric, target non-computer experts and aim at making various kinds of content more visible, better accessible, easier to find, reuse, share, organize, and examine from different viewpoints. Furthermore, Semantic Annotation and the introduction of SW technologies into mainstream authoring domains will result in an increased amount of relevant SW data, and help to achieve a broader success of the SW.

Finally, various technologies to implement semantic annotation and the authoring of semantic documents (e.g. GRDDL for deriving formal metadata or RDFa and Microformats for embedding it) have entered the scene recently, and are being endorsed by standards bodies such as the W3C.

The SAAW workshop will be organized as a half-day workshop and will investigate technical and methodological, as well as social issues surrounding all aspects of Semantic Web Authoring and Annotation.

TOPICS OF INTEREST
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:


 * has topic:=Semantic Authoring and has topic::Annotation tools - has topic::Semantic Blogs, has topic::Semantic Wikis, etc. - that allows human users to produce content and publish it on the web:
 * Usability - As SW techonologies enter the mainstream, the end-users (authors) of authoring tools will often not have formal computing background, which is why simple and intuitive user interfaces are becoming increasingly important.
 * Context - Knowing the context of the authoring and publishing process - where and when is an author producing content, for which audience, etc. - can be exploited in aiding and guiding human users.
 * Integration and Aggregation - Many tasks require authors to draw on various often not integrated sources. An important goal must therefore be to find ways to enable this integration and aggregation process.

RDFa or Microformats), or for deriving such metadata from documents (e.g. GRDDL):
 * Formats and standards for embedding formal metadata in documents (e.g.
 * Assessment of such standards - are they sufficient, what is still missing?
 * Examples of the use of such technologies (e.g. Microformats in Structured Blogging)


 * Semantic Authoring and Annotation for scientific publications:
 * What would users (readers) need from and gain by semantically authored and annotated documents?
 * What would authors be willing to submit?
 * To what extent can scientific papers be structured?
 * Are current authoring/browsing tools able to handle these needs, if not what is the next step?
 * Enabling Semantic Conference Proceedings: Conceptual Structures for Publication
 * Cost and benefit of "going semantics" for a large (publishing) organization

Annotation - the Next generation collaboration infrastructure:
 * The impact of the Social Semantic Desktop on Semantic Authoring and
 * Means to author and annotate Semantic Documents on the Desktop


 * General descriptions of semantic annotation


 * (Common) semantic annotation strategies for upgrading the web to the Semantic Web (including multimedia content):
 * Semantic annotation of static vs. dynamic web documents
 * Manual and/or automated semantic annotation of the current Web
 * Multimedia semantic annotation (e.g. with adoptions of MPEG-7)


 * Collaborative tagging and annotation
 * Relations between tagging systems and full-fledged semantic annotation
 * Deriving formal semantics from flat tagging systems (tag clustering, etc.)

Semantic Web applications
 * All topics related to the evaluation of authoring and annotation for


 * Vocabularies and Ontologies for Semantic Authoring and Annotation

SUBMISSIONS
Format requirements for the submission of papers are:


 * Maximum 10 pages, including title page and bibliography for technical papers.
 * Maximum 4 pages, including title page and bibliography for short position papers.

Although not required for the initial submission, we recommend following the ACM format guidelines http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html, as this will be the required format for accepted papers. Also please note that papers in ACM format tend to have fewer pages, compared to the same paper in other styles.

ORGANISING COMMITTEE

 * has general chair::Knud Möller, DERI/NUI Galway (Ireland)
 * has general chair::Anita de Waard, Elsevier Publishing (Netherlands)
 * has general chair::Steve Cayzer, HP Labs, Bristol (United Kingdom)
 * has general chair::Marja-Riitta Koivunen, Annotea.org (USA)
 * has general chair::Michael Sintek, DFKI (Germany)
 * has general chair::Siegfried Handschuh, DERI/NUI Galway (Ireland)