Durham, NC – So much for tagging photographs with names, locations and activities yourself – a new cell phone application can take care of that for you.

The system works by taking advantage of the multiple sensors on a mobile phone, as well as those of other mobile phones in the vicinity.

Dubbed TagSense, the new app was developed by students from Duke University and the University of South Carolina (USC) and unveiled at the ninth Association for Computing Machinery’s International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys), being held in Washington, D.C.

“In our system, when you take a picture with a phone, at the same time it senses the people and the context by gathering information from all the other phones in the area,” said Xuan Bao, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Duke who received his master’s degree at Duke in electrical and computer engineering.

Bao and Chuan Qin, a visiting graduate student from USC, developed the app working with Romit Roy Choudhury, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering. Qin and Bao are currently involved in summer internships at Microsoft Research.

“Phones have many different kinds of sensors that you can take advantage of,” Qin said. “They collect diverse information like sound, movement, location and light. By putting all that information together, you can sense the setting of a photograph and describe its attributes.”

By using information about the environment of a photograph, the students believe they can achieve a more accurate tagging of a particular photograph than could be achieved by facial recognition alone. Such information about a photograph’s entirety provides additional details that can then be searched at a later time.

For example, the phone’s built-in accelerometer can tell if a person is standing still for a posed photograph, bowling or even dancing. Light sensors in the phone’s camera can tell if the shot is being taken indoors or outdoors on a sunny or cloudy day. The sensors can also approximate environmental conditions – such as snow or rain — by looking up the weather conditions at that time and location. The microphone can detect whether or not a person in the photograph is laughing, or quiet. All of these attributes are then assigned to each photograph, the students said.

Bao pointed out that with multiple tags describing more than just a particular person’s name, it would be easier to not only organize an album of photographs for future reference, but find particular photographs years later. With the exploding number of digital pictures in the cloud and in our personal computers, the ability to easily search and retrieve desired pictures will be valuable in the future, he said.

Read the whole artice at today.duke.edu

Source: today.duke.edu

The Third Canadian Semantic Web Symposium 2011 calls for papers in all topics related to semantic web technologies and their applications. The following are some example topics:
· Languages, tools and methodologies for the Semantic Web
· The application of AI technologies in the Semantic Web
· Searching, querying, visualizing and interpreting the Semantic Web
· Semantic Web-based Knowledge Management;
· Semantic Grid and semantic Grid services
· Trust, privacy, security on the Semantic Web
· Ontology design, evolution and management
· Ontology mapping and merging
· Semantic Web and uncertainty
· Description logics and frame logics as ontology formalisms
· Modular, distributed, and multi-ontologies
· Semantic Web technologies for collaboration and cooperation
· Semantic Web Services (description, discovery, invocation, composition)
· Semantic Web and databases
· Practical applications of Semantic Web techniques in e-business, e-commerce, e-government and e-learning
· Semantic Web rule languages and engines
· Social Semantic Web (Web 3.0)

CSWS 2011 will feature two tracks: a Research and a Work-in-Progress track. The objective of the research track is to solicit original papers that present accomplished research on the area of the Semantic Web. The Work-in-Progress track aims at providing an opportunity for practitioners to present their on-going research on principles and applications of the Semantic Web, even when implementation or deployment has not been completed.

Accepted submissions will be published in the symposium Proceeding.

Authors are invited to submit full papers in PDF, Postscript or MS-Word RTF electronically. All papers must be written in English. Research papers can be up to 12 pages in length and Work-In-Progress papers can be up to 6 pages. Papers must be formatted according to Springer’s LNCS style. Please follow the instructions for authors at Springer’s site for authors. To submit papers, please follow visit
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cswws11
Papers that are not submitted through the automatic procedure cannot be reviewed.

Submission Deadline: June 20th, 2011
Acceptance Notification: July 15th, 2011

Research on this topic has so far, and not surprisingly, concentrated on formal ontologies, i.e., on the logical structures that encode the semantics of a software’s domain of application. Work on the Semantic Web as well as on information integration, distributed knowledge management, multi-agent and distributed reasoning has focussed on the relationship between an ontology and its context. This has aimed at clarifying how to relate knowledge that is distributed over many resources. Recent Semantic Web specific developments suggest that aspects of this relation can be captured by means of named graphs (to express meta-information), the use of provenance (to track the context where data/axioms came from) and querying (to facilitate reasoning).

Other neighbouring research areas, though, have also investigated topics that shed light on how to reason with context in the Semantic Web. Ontology Engineering and Maintenance, for instance, has tackled the problems faced by ontology engineers when developing and maintaining an ontology. The yielded automation of the process of ontology development and of its phases (e.g. knowledge elicitation, revision cycles, alignment with pre-existing ontologies etc.) has improved efficiency, reduced the introduction of unintended meanings into ontologies and in general made explicit the relationship between an ontology and its development context. Finally, research on Problem Solving and Agent Communication has explored how an agent’s ontology needs to change at run-time because of interactions with its context – for instance with other agents whose ontologies are not known or with new non-classifiable world situations. This type of research has delivered a deeper understanding of the evolution of an ontology and is often based on non-monotonic reasoning, belief revision or changes of signature, i.e., of the grammar of the ontology’s language, with a minimal disruption to the original theory.

Topics of interest:
This special issue aims at bringing together work on reasoning with context in  the Semantic Web from the integration, development and evolutionary perspectives described above. Submitted articles, which may describe either theoretical results or applications, must clearly pertain to the Semantic Web and/or to semantic technologies. They should  present either Semantic Web specific approaches to reasoning with context, or approaches that have characteristics that are interesting for the Semantic Web (e.g., scalability, bounded reasoning), or approaches that are of value to a larger community containing a non-trivial Semantic Web sub-community (e.g. revision/update techniques and error pin-pointing).

Submissions are welcome on topics relevant to reasoning with context in the Semantic Web and that include but are not limited to:
- Named graphs
- Provenance
- Knowledge representation languages for semantic technologies
- Planning and reasoning about action and change in the Semantic Web
- Ontology fault diagnosis and repair
- Pinpointing of logical errors in contexts and ontologies
- Explanation and justifications in DL ontologies
- Ontology and context evolution, debugging, update and merging
- Inconsistency handling in contexts and ontologies
- Uncertainty handling, defeasible reasoning and argumentation in ontologies
- Non-classical belief revision
- Context revision and theory change in DL ontologies
- Ontology and context versioning
- Semantic difference in ontologies and in contexts
- Information and knowledge integration
- The role of context and ontology in distributed reasoning and knowledge management
- Heuristic and approximate reasoning
- Bounded reasoning and bounded rationality in the Semantic Web
- Adaptive systems and reconfiguration
- Ontology-based data access
- Querying
- Multi-Agent systems in the Semantic Web
- Temporal and spatial reasoning
- Normative reasoning in the Semantic Web
- General problem solving for semantic technologies
- Machine learning for the Semantic Web
- Philosophical foundations of reasoning about context and ontology evolution
- Comparison of uses of contexts and ontologies

How to submit:
Maximal length of submissions is 25 pages. Authors should upload submissions on Elsevier’s Electronic Submission System at http://ees.elsevier.com/jws
Choose “Reasoning with context in SW” as article type. See the link “Guide for Authors” on the above url for instructions.

If you have any enquiries, please feel free to contact us at organization [at] arcoe.org

Important dates:
- Submission deadline: 26 June 2011
- First-round reviews: 5 September 2011
- Revised papers submitted: 30 September 2011
- Final acceptance decisions: 31 October 2011
- Tentative publication date: April 2012

Guest editors:
Alan Bundy (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom)
Jos Lehmann (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom)
Ivan Varzinczak (CSIR Meraka Institute, South Africa)

1. It takes 100 years to have 1 billion fixed lines & only 20 years to reach 5 billion mobile subscriptions
2. More consumers will access the Internet by mobile devices than by desktop or laptop by 2014
3. 2015 forecast of annual global mobile data traffic (75 exabytes) is equal to 19.000 million DVDs
4. Mobile-only Internet population will grow 56-fold up to 788 million by the end of 2015
5. In 2015 mobile devices will exceed the home PC base installed
6. 500 million mobile using mobile health Apps in 2015
7. In 2015 revenue mobile Apps will be an amount near to 40.000 million dollar
8. M2M revenues will grow more than 3,5-fold from 2010 to 2015
9. The TV experience will be more personal and social but less familiar
10. Traffic generated by 20 homes will be greater than the total traffic of Internet in 1995
11. New services in the cloud: “ Your Desktop Wherever You Want”
12. Social Networks revenues will grow more than 4-fold from 2010 to 2015
13. By 2015, it is expected that 500 million people worldwide use their mobiles as metro and bus tickets
14. MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) is expected to reach 20.000 million dollar by 2015
15. It is expected that in 2015 it will exist 2,5 Internet connected devices per inhabitants worldwide

Source: http://digitallife.neolabels.com/

Video: http://vimeo.com/23903009

Incentive Programs

A good starting place for making sure your user base sticks around is to give them a reason to. It’s pretty commonplace to see sweepstakes and giveaways as a way to encourage more people to comment, like, and generally keep interest high. What is less common and far more effective, however, is to make a game out of it. As an example, if you implemented a system where points are given for various actions—ten points for liking a page, maybe twenty for referring another user to like the page, and five points for every comment posted—you’re immediately giving your users something to work towards and a sense of progression not unlike those found in video games.

Best Using the Point System

Once you have a system like this put in place, it’s important that when an eventual winner, or winners of this game are chosen, no one feels cheated or like their time was wasted. The best way to do this is to foster a sense of community, and make your users feel like they are working together rather than against one another. A good example of a way to implement this is to keep a grand point total as well as an individual point total, and give incentives to the entire community at various points. When the grand total reaches one hundred thousand points lets say, everyone gets a coupon code for five percent off at your or maybe a partner retailer. This increases sales, makes everyone feel like they have won, and keeps interest in your page extremely high.

Source:

• jeffbullas.com by Heather Green
• Image by Master Isolated Images

“The battle’s been raging for years to try and put together a ‘social network for gamers’.  The idea is that gamers everywhere need a place where they can hook up with one another, share their scores across all their platforms, challenge one another and find new games.  I’ve seen it tried in some form by EA Rupture, Zynga, OfferPal (now TapJoy), Facebook and even Apple.  Among the various efforts, though Raptr has stood out as a solid option, combining a simple interface with a plethora of options.  Today, Raptr’s upgrading.

Raptr announced today that they are launching a social news platform, which is essentially a news feed.  This will be broadcast to its 8m+ user base today, and the goal is to get gamers interacting with one another more, and likely discovering new games and opportunities based on the feed.  They’re not saying much about the algorithm that chooses what gamer stories you see, but they’ve indicated it will be based on what you play, what platforms you use and what your friends do.  Raptr’s CEO, Dennis Fong, explains:

“At Raptr we’re reinventing the way people stay connected and informed about the games they care about. We’re excited by the launch of the new community-driven website because it builds upon the success of our existing service and provides a new way to discover and share content.”

Check out Raptr and let us know what you think.  The list of features available at the site are given below as well, in case you weren’t sure what else you can get out of the service.

• Personalized news feed
• Community-curated content
• Expanded topics to include all things related to gaming
• Suggestion engine to help you discover new games
• Automatic gameplay and achievements tracker on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3
• Centralized buddy list and friend tracker
• In-game chat and web browsing for PC games”

Source:

• socialtimes.com by Neil Vidyarthi

“Without question, the social gaming market is the newly hot space in the game industry.  Some of the leading developers have emerged as companies only in the last few years and in that time have managed to gather tens of millions of both dollars and users from these games.   With these outstanding numbers and increasing sociality of games not only on the web, but on mobile and console platforms as well, it seems like a very attractive market to enter.  However, for all its potential, it’s a place that many independent developers and traditional game publishers are having difficulty being successful in.  The reason for this is because these games are overwhelmingly financed by microtransactions of virtual goods, and knowing how to inspire users to pay you for virtual goods is something that’s not easy to master.

This article will attempt to shed light on these economics within the social games market, what kind of opportunity exists for new entrants, and provide strategies that independent developers with limited resources can use to make a successful entry into the market.  This article is one of a two part series that will focus on strategies independent developers can use to be successful.  The next will focus on strategies for publishers to enter the space.”

Read the full article, including:

• The Social Games Market at a Glance
• Keys to making your games a success

at: socialtimes.com

Amid booming consumer spend on PC social networking games in 2010, Zynga managed to pad its market share lead over the other top operators, based on the success of its CityVille and FarmVille offerings, new IHS Screen Digest (NYSE: IHS) research indicates.

Consumer spend on Zynga’s PC social networking games and its revenue from lead generation and advertising activities amounted to $544 million in 2010, giving it 39.1 percent share of the global market, a 4.2 percentage point increase over 2009. This represented the largest increase among the Top 5 operators.

The IHS Screen Digest market ranking of the Top 5 PC social networking game operators is presented in the attached table. The market sizing of PC social network games combines consumer spend on both microtransactions and operator revenues that have been derived from lead generation and advertising.

“During 2010 Zynga played a central role in expanding the size of the PC social networking games market, attracting millions of new users with its popular titles offered through Facebook,” said Piers Harding-Rolls, head of games for IHS. “Near the end of the year, the company offered a new title, CityVille, which broke records for monthly active users (MAUs). The success for CityVille had a positive impact on other Zynga games, particularly FarmVille, which achieved growth in its user base in late 2010 after experiencing steady declines during the rest of the year. Meanwhile, Zynga’s strategy continues to deliver in monetizing its offerings more aggressively through analytics-driven design and to acquire users from within its other games.”

Zynga’s closest competitor, No. 2-ranked Playfish, owned by Electronic Arts Inc., suffered a significant decline in market share of 3.8 percentage points in 2010. Nonetheless, consumer spending on its properties still grew 42 percent during the year.

No. 3-ranked Playdom Inc., which is now owned by Disney, managed a 0.6 percentage point increase in market share during 2010, reflecting a strong start to the year despite a second half that saw its MAUs decline steadily.

Social networking games market continues to climb
The global market for PC social networking games, including consumer spend on microtransactions and operator revenue from lead generation and advertising, amounted to $1.4 billion in 2010, up 116.4 percent from $636 million in 2009.

Beyond Zynga’s success with CityVille, market growth was driven by operator acclimatization to changes in Facebook’s user notification policies, which undermined the cheap viral marketing success of the market so rampant in 2009. Operators also concentrated their efforts on improving user engagement and monetization—in effect targeting better lifetime value from existing users, rather than commercial growth delivered purely through market expansion.

Outside Facebook, growth was driven by the continued adoption of games content from other social networks across all regions. These developments helped the market outperform forecasts.

“Overall, 2010 was a year of strong expansion for the market,” Harding-Rolls observed. “Although growth moderated as expected following a muted start to 2010 for Facebook games, market performance in the second half of the year picked up, and revenue and user growth convincingly outperformed expectations. This has resulted in a significant upgrade to our five-year forecasts.”

The market will expand at a compound annual growth rate of 15 percent from 2010 to 2015, although annual growth rates will slow during the coming years compared to the blistering expansion in 2009 and 2010.

For more information on this topic, see Harding-Rolls’ new report, entitled: “PC Social Network Games, 2010: Outperformance Boosts Forecasts.”

Source:

• IHS Pressroom
  

Despite the record-breaking activity resulting from the release of Zynga’s CityVille on Facebook in December 2010, the leading social network has seen its gaming userbase swiftly settle back into the mature groove heralded in the second half of last year. One record left untouched by CityVille’s immense touchdown is that of average engagement of the top games, which stubbornly holds firm.

Wheras Zynga may have successfully expanded its position on Facebook in the past quarter, performance isn’t as rosy for some of 2010′s major companies, as increased competition and other factors take toll, and newly released games become essential for combating churn, offering little growth.

Further, we offer closer looks at the numerous alternative networks to Facebook that are presenting opportunity to European operators, such as V Kontakte, Tuenti and Nasza Klasa. Three prominent Facebook titles of various note are also examined in greater detail: Bejeweled Blitz, Ravenwood Fair and Millionaire City.

Highlits:

• Zynga ups its share of Facebook’s total gaming activity to 38.1%, compared to 33.9% in Q4 2010
• A total of 18 funding and acquisition deals are charted, five of which are worth $20m or over.
• Ubisoft’s CSi: Crime City gives the publisher some much-needed traction on Facebook, while Sega and Square Enix struggle.

(via screendigest by Steve Bailey)

Source and full report:

• screendigest: Social Network Gaming Q1 2011 Market Monitor

“Turkey had the highest Facebook penetration in Europe at 90.4 percent, followed by the UK at 81.7 percent. Nordic countries ranked in four of the next five spots, led by Finland (81.2 percent), Norway (79.7 percent) and Sweden (78.5 percent). Italy ranked sixth at 78.1 percent, while the fourth Nordic country Denmark followed at 77.5 percent.”

Markets Showing Greatest Facebook Growth
“Although Facebook is not currently the leading social network in the Netherlands, it experienced significant growth in 2010 in that country and in several other European markets. In addition to the Netherlands, Facebook achieved its most significant gains in Portugal (up 48.2 percentage points), Germany (up 35.7 points), Austria (up 27.2 points) and Spain (up 18.5 points). In April 2010, Facebook eclipsed the leading social networks in Portugal (Hi5) and Germany (StudiVZ/VZ- Netzwerke) to assume the #1 position among social networking sites in both those markets. The previous year, Facebook grabbed the #1 position in Spain (from Tuenti.com) and in Austria (from Netlog.com).”

Source:

• comScore: “The 2010 Europe Digital Year in Review”

DBpedia Poland, being a part of the international project DBpedia, gives access to information in Polish Wikipedia in accordance with the Linked Open Data standard.
It is envisioned that soon DBpedia Poland will become an important source of knowledge for various systems and applications using Semantic Web technologies, and in the future, will become a central node in the Linked Open Data cloud.

The main goal of Open Vocabulary is to encode in the SKOS/RDF standard those vocabularies that do not yet have their RDF or SKOS representation. The new recently added thesauruses are, among others, Open Thesaurus for Polish language and thesaurus of Polish cultural heritage.

At the moment OV comes with following vocabularies:

• top five levels of DMoz taxonomy
• all levels of the Polish localization of the DMoz taxonomy
• complete WordNet/RDF
• complete OpenThesaurus-Polish.

Open Vocabulary grew out of the JOnto project that Corrib.org, supported by DERI, NUI Galway, has been working on. The main advantages of OV compared to JOnto are:

• support only for RDF vocabularies (SKOS ontology used by default)
• unified access to terms from thesauri, taxonomies and tags
• redesigned and simplified Java API
• redesigned and extended REST API
• new, agile terms selector based on Facebook entry box concept
• support for OpenThesaurs vocabularies.

Open Vocabulary (OV) delivers Java API and REST API to streamline the use of controlled vocabularies, such as thesauri and taxonomies. It operates on vocabularies delivered in RDF using SKOS ontology; hence it is very easy to provide support for large number of vocabularies that are already delivered in SKOS or can be easily translated into it.

The sources of the platform are available under Affero GNU Public Licence and can be downloaded from the project subversion repository.

source:

• news.webwweb.pl
• www.knowledgehives.com

More information:

• www.openvocabulary.info

Available at:

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1958824.1958938&coll=DL&dl=ACM&CFID=18492130&CFTOKEN=83579586

Answering this questionnaire is anonymous and will only take 5 to 10 minutes. The survey is aimed at practitioners who are using or who are thinking about using controlled vocabularies in their organisation.

This is your opportunity to give feedback about applications & usage of controlled vocabularies. Through your participation in the survey the knowledge management community will gain a better understanding of the potential of controlled vocabularies.

The survey will close on May 18th, 2011 – all participants will gain access to a report with the results within the following month.

Thank you for your help and cooperation!

You can find the survey at http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/480834/Controlled-Vocabularies-Survey

http://www.sis.smu.edu.sg/SocInfo2011

———————————————————————-
The International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo) is an interdisciplinary venue for researchers from informatics and the social & management sciences to come together to share ideas and opinions, and present original research work. The goal is to create an opportunity for the dissemination of knowledge between the two communities, as well as to enable mutual critical discussion of current research.
The conference solicits original research and experience based case study papers, as well as proposals for demonstrations. It welcomes interdisciplinary papers on methods from the social sciences in the study of information systems, applying information technology in the study of social phenomena, or applying social concepts in the design of information systems.

Detailed research topics of interest for this conference include, but are not limited to:
- Computational models of social phenomena and social simulation
- Social networks: discovery, evolution, analysis and applications
- Web mining and its social interpretations
- Security, privacy, trust, reputation and incentive issues
- Design and analysis of Web2.0 applications (social or collaborative Web applications)
- Algorithms and protocols inspired by human societies
- Mechanisms for providing fairness in information systems
- Social choice mechanisms in the e-society
- Recommendation systems and social applications of the semantic Web
- Virtual communities (e.g., open-source, multiplayer gaming, etc.)
- Impact of technology on socio-economic, security, defense aspects
- Visualization of dynamic social networks
In addition, the Symposium on Social Dynamics in Online Gaming will be organized as part of SocInfo2011. Please see the SocInfo2011 website for more information.

Accepted papers (research, poster and demonstration) will appear in Springer’s Lecture Note Series in Computer Science. More details on the conference and submission guidelines can be found at the conference website.

Selected SocInfo2011 papers will be invited to be extended for submission to a Special Issue of Journal of Information Technology and Politics and to the Social Network Analysis and Mining (Springer) journal submission.

SocInfo2011 will also provide some travel awards to student authors attending the conference. More details about the award application will be available later.

http://BledConference.org

The theme for this year’s conference eFuture: Creating Solutions for the Individual, Organisations and Society serves to focus discourse and discussion on the impacts of our e-initiatives and how they serve to shape the New eWorld. Especially in the light of the recent global down turn, the future is indeed very challenging making the need for appropriate and suitable e-initiatives and e-solutions for individuals, organizations and societies an imperative. As emerging digital environments generate new ways of communication and interaction between individuals, organizations and societies we need to examine structures, processes and operations to ensure we are migrating to a more reliable eWorld. New eResponsiblities have to be taken by business, governments and individuals of this Brave New eWorld in order to contend with emerging eRisks and eChallenges. Moreover, it is essential that managers, politicians, employees, and citizens take actions at both the macro and the micro level so that discourse and discussion focuses on designing suitable organizational configurations, effective and effi-cient processes, new kinds of products and services, and necessary infrastructures and technologies in short we need the correct eSolutions so that the eFuture is indeed bright.

We would like to encourage you to submit a panel, workshop or a project meeting proposal.

Submission of Business Track Proposal April 15, 2011
Notification of acceptance April 25, 2011

Panels
Panels are expected to explore innovative ways of exploiting the latest eTechnologies and development approaches, and to suggest new research agendas. Duration of all conference’s program components is 90 minutes. A special goal of the panels sessions is to provide a big picture of the “e” domain by highlighting current issues and expected future impacts of eTechnologies in regional, or global economies. Demonstrations of successful collaboration between business, government, and academia in cross-border, cross-industry, and/or cross-disciplinary environments are particularly welcome.

Workshops
Workshops are expected to demonstrate successful use (via prototypes, Living Labs, etc.) of the latest eTechnologies showing innovative opportunities, and to lay out the directions for further research. Duration of workshop is 90 minutes.

EU poject dissemination meetings
The conference offers the possiblities for EU project dissemination acitivities.

The proposal (1 page) should indicate panel title, panel chair and the panelists (name, position, affiliation, country, e-mail address, web site address), the topic and issues to be discussed.

Panel, Workshop and EU project dissemination meeting participants are expected to register for the conference.

For further information please visit our website:

http://BledConference.org

Googles "+1"

More…

Link to the talk at TED:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

Bidding adieu to his last “real job” as Al Gore’s speechwriter, Dan Pink went freelance to spark a right-brain revolution in the career marketplace.

More Info about Dan Pink:

http://www.ted.com/speakers/daniel_pink.html

You can get the paper at http://research.yahoo.com/node/3469

Some of GameTreat’s benefits include:

• It enhances your current content with high quality, full version games for free.
• In-site play increases user-stickiness and encourages repeat traffic.
• Additional exposure from game score sharing and viral element on social networks.
• Potential to earn traffic-based revshare from ads within your GameTreat App.

You can find all the information at: http://www.gametreat.com

http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/user_experience_and_experience_design.html

On this page you’ll find  interesting interviews with Marc Hassenzahl talking about his work and his approaches. Perhaps at least for the games this approach gives a new interesting point of view, while designing game concepts.

1st International Workshop on Games for Knowledge Acquisition
Located at the 20th International World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2011
March 28 or 29, Hyderabad, India

Website:http://www.insemtives.eu/playit11/

Deadline for submissions: February 5, 2011 11.59 PM CET

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

** Content **
Many areas of knowledge acquisition inherently rely on the availability on large quantities of human input. The problem is that in many of these domains, users lack the motivation to contribute the required metadata. At the same time, there is a steady trend of people spending a substantial amount of time in playing games. As initially proposed by Luis von Ahn’s Games with a Purpose , one can benefit from the vast amount of hours spent on online playing, by applying mechanisms to extract meaningful information from game inputs. Since then, there have been many proposals to use casual games which capitalize on fun and competition as two key motivators for people, to willingly invest time and effort in knowledge-acquisition related tasks hiding behind an entertaining collaborative game experience.

The PLAYIT workshop will provide a forum for researchers and practitioners in Web technologies to discuss and exchange positions on the topic of using games for acquiring knowledge following the paradigm of human computation.

** Topics **
The objective of PLAYIT is to foster the thinking process about games that have the purpose of acquiring knowledge in some form. The topics include but are not limited to:

* Analysis and surveys of games with the purpose of knowledge acquisition
* Proposals for new game models for acquiring knowledge
* Cost – benefit analysis for games
* Games exploiting the “Wisdom of Crowds”
* New games for creating different types of information in a human-driven way
* Evaluations of “games with a purpose”
* Going beyond quiz gaming models and using new game formats for creating information (e.g. shooters, fantasy games, role plays, etc.)
* Games for data interlinking, multimedia annotation, text analysis, speech analysis, etc.
* Game architectures and technology
* Game interoperability

** Submissions **
We seek three kinds of submissions:
1. Full technical papers: up to 8 pages in ACM format
2. Short technical and position papers: up to 4 pages in ACM format
3. Demo descriptions: up to 2 pages in ACM format

Submissions must be formatted using the WWW2011 templates. Please note that the author list does not need to be anonymized, as we do not operate a double-blind review process.

Submissions will be peer reviewed by at least three independent reviewers. Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop and included in the workshop proceedings. Proceedings will be published online at CEUR-WS.

Please submit papers as PDF via EasyChair at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=playit11

** Important Dates **

* Submission deadline: February 5, 2011 11.59 PM CET
* Notification of acceptance: February 25, 2011
* Camera-ready versions of accepted papers: March 5, 2011
* Workshop date: 28th or 29th March, 2011

** Program Committee **
* Roberta Cuel, University of Trento
* Carl Goodman, Peppersghost Productions
* Hans-Joerg Happel, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
* Tania Tudorache, University of Stanford
* Denny Vrandecic, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
* Robert West, University of Stanford
* Giuseppe Attardi, Università di Pisa
* Jon Chamberlain, University of Essex
* Amac Herdagdelen, University of Trento
* Edith Law, Carnegie Mellon University
* Donn Morrison, University of Geneva
* Marta Sabou, MODUL University Vienna
* Sebastian Schaffert, Salzburg Research
* Stefan Thaler, University of Innsbruck
* Johanna Voelker, University of Mannheim
* Jeff Yan, Newcastle University
* Marco Zamarian, University of Trento

** Contact **
Please contact the chairs at playit11@easychair.org

* Katharina Siorpaes, STI Innsbruck, University of Innsbruck, Austria
* Arpita Ghosh, Yahoo! Research, Santa Clara, USA
* Michael Fink, Google Israel
* Elena Simperl, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany

Guest Editors:
Jim Ang and Ania Bobrowicz, School of Engineering and Digital Arts,
University of Kent
Panayotis Zaphiris, Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts, Cyprus
University of Technology
Ben Schneiderman, Human Computer Interaction Laboratory, University of Maryland

Call Description:
Recently we have witnessed an increasing proliferation of new digital
technologies such as online social networking sites, micro-blogging
and virtual worlds which has changed the way we communicate and
interact with each other. Studies are being conducted in order to
investigate these interesting socio-technological phenomena.

To date, little research has been published on inclusive design in the
context of social networking and emerging technologies. These
technologies have the potential to impact positively on the lives of a
wide range of people including older people, disabled people, and
people from different social and cultural backgrounds. For example, it
is claimed that the fastest growing demographic of the social
networking sites is women over 55 years old (Facebook Global Monitor,
2009).

With this special issue, we aim to analyse existing and novel ways in
which these audiences use social networks and emerging technologies.
We ask questions such as: How can these technologies be designed to be
more inclusive? What motivates people to engage with these new
technologies? What are the effects on people’s behaviour, attitudes
and social interactions? What methods can be used to analyse these
interactions?

This special issue of Interacting with Computers invites contributions
from the academic community, industry and design practitioners. We
welcome research papers that trigger discussions based on
investigations, case studies and overviews in this area.

Possible topics may include (but are not limited to):
• Inclusive design issues related to social media and emerging technologies
• Concepts, methods and frameworks aimed at motivating people to participate
• Case studies of various social and cultural contexts
• The impact of participation on society and culture
• Different user groups’ engagement with social media
• New technologies such as virtual worlds and augmented humans
• The application of these technologies in a variety of settings
(e-democracy, communities, sustainability and environment, etc.)

Submission Details:
Please submit a 300-500 word abstract to Dr Jim Ang
(c.s.ang@kent.ac.uk) no later than 28th January 2011. Please include
full contact information and a biographical note (up to 75 words) on
each of the authors.

Important Dates:
28th January 2011: Deadline for abstract submission
25th February 2011: Announcement of results and full paper invitations
29th April 2011: Submission of full papers
24th June 2011: Response to authors
2nd September 2011: Final submission

We are a young team of researchers with backgrounds in information systems, conceptual modeling, economics, computer science, and related disciplines. Our main goal is to find practically relevant and scientifically significant results that help coordinate human activity over the Web. A flagship example of our recent work is the GoodRelations technology for e-commerce, adopted by major Web companies like Google, Yahoo, BestBuy, Overstock.com, and many others.

Research topics for the positions:
* Linked Data and the Semantic Web
* Recommender Systems
* Data Quality
* Ontology Engineering
* Economics of Semantic Technology
* Social Commerce
* Micropayment

We offer…
* a stimulating research environment with people who are working on leading edge problems of the future World Wide Web and novel E-Business scenarios,
* a „small think-tank“ atmosphere, in which experienced seniors are still deeply involved in actual research,
* excellent ties to the international research community,
* guidance on how to publish your best findings in good conference proceedings and peer-reviewed journals , and last but not least
* the supervision and continuous, timely feedback that you need to achieve great results and complete your PhD in a 3 – 3.5 years time-frame.

The salary will be according to the German TVOED E13 scheme for the PhD positions (75 …100%, depending on profile and experience) and E14 for the post-doc position (100%).

We expect…
* a sincere interest in the technical, socia, or economic aspects of the World Wide Web, ideally related to E-Business,
* the willingness to contribute the „99% perspiration“ (Thomas Alva Edison) that is needed to carry a great idea forward until it yields a validated result: a prototype, a statistically significant improvement, or similar,
* excellent English skills in speaking and writing, and
* a master’s degree or equivalent in business management, computer science, information systems, economics, or a related subject.

A plus would be any of the following skills:
* Conceptual modeling (in particular in UML, ER, ORM, or BPMN)
* Good knowledge of the current WWW technology stack (Web architecture, XML and related technologies, Web protocols, etc.)
* RDF, OWL, SPARQL expertise
* Programming skills in Java, PHP, or Python, ideally with RDF APIs
* Economics and Business Management
* Databases
* Statistics

We very much appreciate if you develop prototypes or supervise the development of prototypes of your work, unless that is not applicable to your type of research question.

If you have a deep interest in driving forward the World Wide Web both as a technology and tool and as a social environment, we would be happy hear from you.

Please submit your application in English by e-mail (mandatory) with all documents as PDF attachments (mandatory) to martin.hepp@unibw.de, no later than December 15, 2010.

Your application should include the following documents:
1. Cover letter
2. CV
3. Academic credentials
4. Title and abstract of your Master’s thesis
5. List of publications (if any)

For further information, see also our following Web pages:

GoodRelations research project:
- http://purl.org/goodrelations/
- http://www.ebusiness-unibw.org/wiki/GoodRelations

Recent publications:
- http://www.heppnetz.de/publications/

Research vision:
- http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/research/

Best regards

Martin Hepp

——————————————————————————————-

Dr. Martin Hepp, Professor of General Management and E-Business
Universitaet der Bundeswehr
Werner-Heisenberg-Weg 39
D-85579 Neubiberg, Germany

http://www.unibw.de/ebusiness/research/

http://bit.ly/socialgames-chi2011

#################################

“Social games”, defined as games played and distributed on Social Networks, have become a digital gaming phenomenon. The most popular games boast tens of millions of users each month, using simple mechanics to reach a vast audience apparently under-served by traditional digital games. This enormous success raises important questions about game design, interface design, psychology and the social power of online networks.

This one-day workshop will convene academics and practitioners in the HCI community and other fields to share and discuss the state of the art in social games design and research, and how it connects to HCI as a field. Papers and workshop results will be published on socialgamestudies.org, and contributors will be encouraged to participate in the growing community of researchers and practitioners.

We invite you to submit a 2-4 page position paper that reports current work, contextualises social games in existing (HCI) fields, systematizes research approaches and questions, or otherwise relates to social games. Papers will be selected based on relevance and potential contribution to a vivid discussion.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:
* Interfaces for Social Interaction
* Play Practices in Social Games
* Design for “Freemium” models
* Social Games Audiences
* Player Behavior in Social Networks
* Psychology of Social Games
* Social Mechanics in Social Games

Please indicate how many authors will attend the workshop (places are limited). At least one author of each accepted position paper must register for the workshop and for at least one day of the conference. For more information, visit the workshop site at http://socialgamestudies.org/chi2011.

###Organizing Committee###
* Ben Kirman, University of Lincoln
* Staffan Björk, Göteborg University
* Sebastian Deterding, Hamburg University
* Janne Paavilainen, University of Tampere
* Valentina Rao, Utrecht University

###Submission Details###
* Format: 2-4 pages, in ACM CHI Extended Abstracts format
* Submit: by email to chi2011@socialgamestudies.org
* Deadline: 14th January 2011
* Notification: 11th February 2011
* Workshop: 7th or 8th May 2011

Cheers,
Sebastian

————————————————————
Sebastian Deterding | coding conduct
Mail: sebastian@codingconduct.cc | Twitter: dingstweets
Web: http://codingconduct.cc | Skype: sebastiandeterding
Mobile: +49 151 400 300 44 | Phone: +49 40 450 217 81
————————————————————

http://www.semantic-web-journal.net

Semantic Web research is interdisciplinary in nature. Indeed, progress towards the Semantic Web vision requires the incorporation of fundamental state-of-the-art and future developments from many domains including Computer & Information Science, Cognitive Science, Geographic Information Science, the social sciences, and many more. To establish bridges between these domains, it is thus important to demonstrate what and how they contribute to the Semantic Web vision, and what the Semantic Web can offer in return to these disciplines.

Hence, the Semantic Web Journal calls for Special Issue proposals on topics which (a) are within the topical realm of a neighboring domain but (b) contribute directly or indirectly to Semantic Web research. Research published in such special issues should strengthen the in-depth information exchange between disciplines by providing novel and high-quality contributions and at the same time demonstrate the impact on foundational research questions relevant for Semantic Web. While such manuscripts can be written with a specific audience in mind, the key ideas and contributions should be accessible to the broader Semantic web community.

Proposals for special issues shall be sent to the Editors-in-Chair (contact@semantic-web-journal.net) and contain the following information in a single PDF file:

* Names and affiliations of all guest editors

* Topic of the special issue

* Tentative list of Guest Editorial Board members

* A short description of the topic

* Why the topic is currently of interest

* Why the topic is relevant to this call

* Credentials of the guest editors regarding their research impact and their community standing with respect to the topic

* A draft call for papers, including a suggested time-line

It will be assumed that all proposed guest editors are aware of the journal’s open and transparent review policy described at http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/reviewers#review

Submission deadline: 10th of January, 2011

Best Regards,

Pascal Hitzler.

–
Prof. Dr. Pascal Hitzler
Dept. of Computer Science, Wright State University, Dayton, OH
pascal@pascal-hitzler.de http://www.knoesis.org/pascal/
Semantic Web Textbook: http://www.semantic-web-book.org
Semantic Web Journal: http://www.semantic-web-journal.net

For those not familiar with RDFa: RDFa is a way to attach semantic machine-readable metadata to XHTML pages. It is the preferred way to expose annotations on the web. For example, Google and Yahoo consume RDFa, if available, to provide richer and more to-the-point snippets search result pages.

A browser with the respective extensions will be able to understand this metadata and present it in a better way than what can only be presented through plain text.

Currently, the metadata exposed on insemtives.eu is the result of automatic annotation – a kind of bootstrapping. To see the annotations, install a RDFa reader in your browser (e.g. for Firefox – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=rdfa) and open the INSEMTIVES website. To only see the embedded RDFa as RDF, use the W3C web distiller – http://www.w3.org/2007/08/pyRdfa/. You can put the actual online page in the distiller – put “http://insemtives.eu/case_studies.html” in “URI of HTML or SVG File”.

From a more technical perspective, the process works like this:
– for each XHTML page in insemtives.eu:
— either the page is an existing resource in a plaform instance
with stored annotations
— or some annotations are created via automatic annotation
– the original XHTML tree is processed; for each annotation, some RDFa
markup is injected in the original XHTML.

This batch process is executed only once – not on every page visit. Injecting RDFa markup without affecting the visual presentation of the page was particularly challenging. Check it out at www.insemtives.eu!

OpenDover uses semantic technologies for sentiment tagging texts that you send to the service. Sentiment/emotion tags are returned to users for implementing in web applications, searches, blogs and so on.

On the other han, OpenDover provides a Web service that lets you tag your documents based on sentiments and emotions found in your documents. The OpenDover API can handle different ways of sentiment tagging, depending on what your needs are, or what the content is that you provide via the API.

The OpenDover knowledge base consists of thousands of opinion words, domain-related words and relations organized hierarchically. Since OpenDover is ontology-based, it can recognize the subject domains of the documents parsed via the API.

They also provide a live demo at http://demo.opendover.nl/.

TOPICS OF INTEREST

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Interfaces
  • Novel interfaces for high-volume transient data, e.g. feeds, streams and sensors.
  • Novel interfaces supporting discovery of social data and richer interactions using Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol, Twitter Annotations for tweets, Google’s Social Graph etc.
  • ‘Living’ interfaces tconstantly evolving data, vocabularies, and emerging links between them.
  • Collaborative interfaces supporting social data analysis.
  • Adaptive user interfaces on the Web.
  • Lightweight components and processes for casual users tpublish/share their own content on the Web.
  • Task-centric interfaces for structured and/or Linked Data.
  • Novel visualisation of structured, linked and aggregated data, originating from multiple sources.
  • Interface components for displaying/interacting with aggregated, heterogeneous Linked Data, e.g. components for displaying provenance information.
  • Ontology-based visualization of collections of data.
• Interaction Paradigms
  • Novel (e.g. touch-based, gesture-based, etc.) interaction paradigms for textual, photos, music, videos, etc. on various platforms (e.g. mobile devices, set-top boxes, shared/public single/multiple displays).
  • Investigation of task-centric interaction paradigms beyond search and browse.
  • Novel interaction paradigms with structured, linked and aggregated data.
  • Ontology-based interaction with collections of data.
  • Semantic models for interaction and their reuse on the web
• Empirical Studies and Evaluation
  • Use cases which present novel visualization requirements and expose interesting interaction challenges on the Social and Semantic Web.
  • Empirical studies that can guide the development of interfaces for Linked Data.
  • Implications for design from user-studies, pilot systems and live deployments in the Social and Semantic Web

The deadline is 8th of November 2010. For any further information please check the homepage of the workshop.

http://www.swat4ls.org/2010/

—————————————————–

Overview
________________________________________
SWAT4LS is a workshop that provides a venue to present and discuss benefits and limits of the adoption of Web based information systems and semantic technologies in life sciences, biomedical informatics and computational biology.

Rationale
________________________________________
The web is a key medium for information publishing, and web based information systems play a key role in biomedical information exchange and integration. At the same time, the variety and complexity of biomedical information call for the adoption of semantic-based solutions. The Semantic Web provides a set of technologies and standards that are key to support semantic markup, ontology development, distributed information resources and collaborative social environments. Altogether the adoption of the web-based semantic-enabled technologies in the Life Sciences has potential impact on the future of publishing, biological research and medicine. This workshop will provide a venue to present and discuss benefits and limits of the adoption of these technologies and tools in biomedical informatics and computational biology. It will showcase experiences, information resources, tools development and applications. It will bring together researchers, both developers and users, from the various fields of Biology, Bioinformatics and Computer Science, to discuss goals, current limits and some real use cases for Semantic Web technologies in Life Sciences.

Topics
________________________________________
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• Standards, Technologies, Tools for the Semantic Web
o Semantic Web standards and new proposals (RDF, OWL, SKOS, Linked Data, … )
o Biomedical Ontologies and related tools
o Alternative approaches to integrate semantic representations and web based solutions
o Formal approaches to large biomedical knowledge bases
• Systems for a Semantic Web for Bioinformatics
o RDF stores, Reasoners, query and visualization systems for life sciences
o Semantic biomedical Web Services
o Semantics aware Biological Data Integration Systems
• Existing and prospective applications of the Semantic Web for Bioinformatics
o Semantics aware application tools
o Semantic Wikis
o Semantic collaborative research environments
o Case studies, use cases, and scenarios

Type of contributions
________________________________________
The following possible contributions are sought:
• Research papers
• Position papers
• Posters
• Software demos
We are also accepting proposals for tutorials, hackathons or other related events to be held on Dec 8th (hackathons) and Dec 9th (tutorials). If interested, please contact info at swat4ls.org

Proceedings
________________________________________
All accepted communications will be published in the proceedings. Proceedings for the last editions of the workshop have been pubslished via the CEUR-WS.org Workshop Proceedings service (see http://ceur-ws.org/). Best papers will be invited to a journal special issue (probably BMC Bioinformatics).

Special issue
________________________________________
Authors of accepted contributions to the last editions of SWAT4LS have been invited to submit extended and revised contributions for a special issue in BMC Bioinformatics (dedicated to the SWAT4LS 2008 edition), and for a special issue of the BMC Journal of Biomedical Semantics (dedicated to the SWAT4LS 2009 edition, in preparation). We will continue with this approach and we will announce more detailed infomation as soon as we have reached an agreement with publishers.

Deadlines
________________________________________
• Submission openinig: 7 September 2010
• Papers submission deadline: 12 October 2010
• Posters and demo submission deadline: 1 November 2010
• Communication of acceptance: 8 November 2010
• Camera ready: 21 November 2010

Instructions
________________________________________
All papers and posters must be in English, formatted according to LNCS format (http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html) and submitted in pdf format.
• Submissions for papers should report original research, and should be between 8 and 15 pages.
• Submissions for position papers should report qualified opinions, recommendations or conclusions, and should be between 3 and 6 pages.
• Submissions for posters should be between 2 and 4 pages.
• Submissions for software demo proposals should also be between 2 and 4 pages.

Submission
________________________________________
All submissions will be handled via the EasyChair submission system. A link will be provided when registrations open.
To ensure high quality, submitted papers will be carefully peer-reviewed by at least three members of the Scientific Program Committee.

Workshop Chairs
________________________________________
• Adrian Paschke, Corporate Semantic Web, Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany
• Albert Burger, School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, and Human Genetics Unit, Medical Research Council, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
• Paolo Romano, Bioinformatics, National Cancer Research Institute, Genova, Italy
• M. Scott Marshall, Adaptive Information Disclosure Group, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Andrea Splendiani, Biomathematics and Bioinformatics dept., Rothamsted Research, UK

Program Committee
See website http://www.swat4ls.org/2010/

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

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

1st International Workshop on Semantic Repositories for the Web (SERES 2010)

http://www.ontologydynamics.org/od/index.php/seres2010/

at the 9th International Semantic Web Conference

http://iswc2010.semanticweb.org

November 7, 2010, in Shanghai, China
==============================

Ontologies and Linked Data vocabularies are being actively developed and used by numerous applications. Several domains are making their vocabularies available for others to reuse. In addition, good practices when developing ontologies are often followed, particularly for producing reusable modules. The Semantic Web is a modular and highly federated environment of reusable knowledge sources; these provide the meaning so that SW applications change our experience of the web. Within this context, the need for repositories delivering the added value that makes the SW a concrete step beyond our current experience of the web is palpable. SERES addresses issues around semantic repositories within the context of the SW.

The number of ontologies being built and made available for reuse has increased steadily in the last few years. Semantic Web search engines such as Swoogle and Watson currently index several tens of thousands of them; there are also systems specifically designed to support the publication of ontologies, e.g. Cupboard, NCBO Bioportal, and ONKI. Some tools also support editing features, e.g. Neologism, Knoodl. While being a foundation for the Semantic Web, this new environment where ontologies are shared and interlinked online also poses new challenges; fostering thus a number of research projects aiming to understand, amongst others, ontology reuse, storage, publication, versioning, quality control, evaluation, retrieval and modularization. For instance, as part of the EU NeOn project new tools supporting Knowledge Engineering in the age of “networked ontologies” have been developed, while in the EU OASIS project approaches from software engineering and formalization are now also being applied to inter-connect ontologies. Moreover, despite initial efforts, ontology repositories are hardly interoperable amongst themselves. Although sharing similar aims (providing easy access to Semantic Web resources), they diverge in the methods and techniques employed for gathering these documents and making them available; each interprets and uses metadata in a different manner. Furthermore, many features are still poorly supported; for instance, modularization, versioning, and the relationship between ontology repositories and ontology engineering environments (editors) to support the entire ontology lifecycle.

By the same token, there are several domains making available knowledge resources; for instance, digital libraries such as Pubmed Central offer a large collection of biomedical abstracts and, in some cases, open access to the full document. Some researchers are starting to bridge the gap between clinical and experimental data and literature; such connection is being built via ontologies, some approaches have had BioPortal as their ontology repository. Linked Data is also being explored as a means for publishers to expose their content. Knowledge management over documents is actively aiming to make real the notion of self-descriptiveness; being this intrinsically related to various resources over the web providing meaning for atomic component in documents –words, tables, figures, maps, etc. In order for these systems to be successful, it is necessary to provide a forum for researchers and developers to discuss features and exchange ideas on the realization of repositories providing semantics. In addition, it is now critical to achieve interoperability between these repositories, through common interfaces, standard metadata formats, etc. SERES10 intends to provide such a forum.

Questions addressed by SERES10:

· How can semantic repositories support the realization of the SW?

· Semantic repositories, ontology repositories, knowledge repositories, where are the boundaries? How are they interacting? Are they changing our experience of the web?

· How are domain specific knowledge repositories, such as biomedical digital libraries, interconnecting knowledge in meaningful manners?

· How are e-government initiatives using and delivering semantics and knowledge repositories?

· How can ontology repositories support novel semantic applications?

· How can ontology repositories encourage the development of high quality ontologies that are used routinely by relevant communities?

· How can ontology repositories provide semantics for applications?

· How can ontology repositories contribute to the reuse of ontologies across different domains and applications?

· How can ontology repositories interoperate with one another to support scalability, availability and distributed reasoning?

· How can provenance and intellectual property information be managed in and across ontology repositories?

· How can the abundant and complex knowledge contained in relevant ontology repositories be made comprehensible for users?

· How can branching, versioning, mappings, dependencies and configurations/compositions be managed in and across ontology repositories?

· How can ontology repositories interoperate with related applications such as ontology editors, automated reasoners, and rule engines?

· How can modularity be better supported in and across ontology repositories; similarly, how could modularization be formalized?

· How can ontology repositories support distributed reasoning?

· How can ontology repositories support corporate, national and domain specific metadata/semantic infrastructures?

· What measurements for describing and comparing ontologies can we use? How could ontology repositories use these?

Workshop Audience

We want to bring together researchers and practitioners active in the design, development and application of semantic web technology, semantic registries and repositories, knowledge management systems, knowledge repositories, repository editors, modularization techniques, versioning systems and issues around federated ontology systems. As some repository-related tools are already under development, and repositories are a crucial part of business infrastructure, we also address progressive Chief Technology Officers interested in using these technologies.

IMPORTANT DATES
==============================

Paper Submission Deadline August 20, 2010, 23.50 Hawaii time
Acceptance Notification September 17, 2010
Camera Ready October 7, 2010
SERES Workshop (tentative date) November 7, 2010

SUBMISSION AND PROCEEDINGS
==============================
Research papers are limited to 12 pages and position papers to 5 pages. For
system descriptions, a 5 page paper should be submitted. All papers and system
descriptions should be formatted according to the LNCS format

http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-6-793341-0

Proceedings of
the workshop will be published online. Depending on the number and quality of
the submissions, authors might be invited to present their papers during a
poster session.

Please submit your paper via EasyChair at

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=seres10

Submissions that do not comply with the formatting of LNCS or that exceed the
12 page limit (research papers) or 5 page limit (position papers and systems descriptions) will be rejected without review.

We note that the author list does not need to be anonymized, as we do not have
a double-blind review process in place.

Submissions will be peer reviewed by three independent reviewers. Accepted
papers have to be presented at the workshop and they will be included in the

workshop proceedings that are published online at CEUR-WS.

Program Committee

Natasha Noy, Stanford University, USA.

Li Ding, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA.

John Bateman, Universität Bremen, Germany.

Michael Kohlhase, Jacobs University, Germany.

Raul Palma, Poznan University, Poland.

Oscar Corcho, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain.

Fabian Neuhaus, University of Maryland, USA.

Aleman-Bonarges Meza, Universidad Politecnica de Victoria, Mexico

Christoph Lange, Jacobs University, Germany.

Sandro Hawke, W3C.

Christopher Baker, University of New Brunswick, Canada.

Nigam Shah, Stanford University, USA.

Peter Haase, Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods, Germany.

Michael Gruninger, University of Toronto, Canada

Leyla Garcia, Bundeswehr University, Germany.

Benjamin Good, USA

Matthew Horridge, University of Manchester, UK

Organizing Committee

Alexander Garcia, University of Bremen
Mathieu d’Aquin, Knowledge Media Institute of the Open University
Mike Dean, Principal Engineer at Raytheon BBN Technologies
Kenneth Baclawski, College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University

This special issue calls for research from diverse fields that explores the
HCI phenomenon in the dynamic and ubiquitous Web 2.0 environment. Conceptual
and theory building papers, design science studies, and empirical research
that investigates the success of the interaction of people with Web 2.0
applications are all welcome. Prospective contributors are expected to bring
in a variety of perspectives from social to technical.

Topics include but are not limited to:
. Identification and classification of Web 2.0 user profiles and
motivations
. Analysis of Web 2.0 use patterns
. Impact of Web 2.0 on user activities
. Personal-life impacts
. Social and political impacts
. Web 2.0 in the organizational context
. Evaluation of Web 2.0 interaction techniques
. Design, implementation, and evaluation of innovative Web 2.0 user
interfaces
. Methods for indexing, searching, and mining Web 2.0 data
. Impacts of mobility and distributed computing

The deadline for submissions is 01.02.2011.

More information can be found at the THCI website: http://thci.aisnet.org

This workshop will not focus on the overall topic of social web applications, e.g. Wikipedia, Facebook and so on, since there are already various initiatives on the topic (e.g. the ICWSM conference as well as various workshops SDOW, etc.) but our main focus will be research conducted on tagging systems, based on the three aforementioned areas. Then, we encourage the submission of research papers that deal with the following topics of interest (but not limited to):

• Semantic Tagging and Linked Data
• Semantics of tagging systems
• Tagging systems versus controlled vocabularies
• Extreme tagging methodologies
• Tagging systems in enterprise environments
• Information retrieval in tagging systems
• Tagging and augmented reality
• Best practices for tagging
• Social aspects of tagging
• Prospective views on the future of tagging systems
• Evolution of tagging systems
• Dynamics of tagging systems
• Ontology learning from tagging systems
• Datasets and baseline for evaluating semantic tagging systems
• Social Network analysis based on tagging systems
• Tag and Resource recommendation
• Tags in genuine Web 2.0 applications vs tags in streamed data (e.g. Twitter)
• User profiles from tagging information
• People-tagging
• Multilingual tagging systems
• User-feedback in tagging systems

The deadline of the submissions is 11th of July 2010, the workshop will be held at the 14th of october.

For any further information feel free to check the homepage of the workshop.

ANNOUNCING S-Match Open Source, the first release.

About S-Match
————–
S-Match is a semantic matching framework.

S-Match takes any two tree like structures (such as database schemas, classifications, lightweight ontologies) and returns a set of correspondences between those tree nodes which semantically correspond to one another.

S-Match contains implementations of the semantic matching, minimal semantic matching and structure preserving semantic matching algorithms.

S-Match applies as a solution in many fields, including:
* information integration,
* ontology evolution and alignment,
* peer-to-peer information sharing,
* digital libraries integration,
* web service composition,
* agent communication, and
* query answering on the web.

S-Match is extendable to host new algorithms.

Subscribe to S-Match low traffic mailing list or RSS news feed to receive further announcements.

Resources
———
Homepage:

http://semanticmatching.org

Documentation:

http://semanticmatching.org/documentation.html

Download:

http://semanticmatching.org/download.html

Bug Tracker:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/s-match/

Mailing Lists:

http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/s-match-announce

Forums:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/s-match/forums/

RSS News Feed:

http://sourceforge.net/export/rss2_keepsake.php?group_id=288592

Co-located with the 7th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2010)
as part of the SemWiki 2010 workshop.

30th May – 3rd June, 2010, Heraklion, Greece
http://www.eswc2010.org/

Deadline for submission: 09.04.2010 (12.00 AM, GMT)

——————————————————————————–

Awards

Win attractive prizes at the INSEMTIVES Game Idea Challenge!

• 1st Prize: iPhone
• 2nd Prize: iPod Nano
• 3rd Prize: iPod Shuffle

Summary

Useful semantic content cannot be created fully automatically, but motivating people to contribute to this process remains challenging. Our project INSEMTIVES revisits fundamental design issues of semantic-content authoring tools in order to find out which incentives speak to people to become engaged with the Semantic Web, and to determine ways in which such mechanisms can be transferred into technology design. Hiding the technicalities of knowledge engineering, semantic annotation and data integration behind captivating, entertaining games seems to be a promising approach to achieve this goal.

As part of the INSEMTIVES game challenge we are looking for colorful, innovative ideas with a twist for new “games with a purpose”. The purpose, of course, is primarily the creation of useful semantic content, but there are no bounds to your creativity. To get some inspiration, you can have a look at some of our games: OntoPronto and OntoTube, which are about the development and population of an ontology, and the semantic annotation of video content, respectively. Other relevant topics could include the annotation of text, music files, photo collections, but also the interlinking of RDF data sets, their curation, the alignment of data sources, or any other aspect that facilitates the uptake of the Semantic Web.

Format

The ideas should be submitted in PDF format per email to games@sti2.at. The text should not exceed five pages and follow the outline below:

• Overview:

             What Semantic Web-related aspect will this game solve? What will attract people to play this game? What is innovative in your idea?

• Game description:

             Explain the game scenario: Is it a multi-players or a single-player game? Is there any time restriction? What is the target of the game? What makes your game entertaining? How do you prevent cheating?

• Screen mocks or sketches of the game:

              How will your game look like? Describe the game interface and provide some pictures, either as screenshots or as hand-made sketches.

• Semantic content creation:

             Explain how the game creates semantic content, that is, how user inputs are translated into RDF(S), OWL etc.

• Validation:

              Explain how can you test whether the semantic content that the game creates is useful.

Review Process

The submitted game ideas will be reviewed by 3 reviewers according to its novelty, entertainment and Semantic Web-related impact value. The awards ceremony will be held at the European Semantic Web Conference as part of the SemWiki 2010 workshop.

Reviewers

• Pierre Andrews, University of Trento, Italy
• Roberta Cuel, University of Trento, Italy
• Carl Goodman, Pepper’s Ghost Productions, UK
• Elena Simperl, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
• Katharina Siorpaes, STI Innsbruck, Austria
• Germán Toro del Valle, Telefónica Investigación y Desarrollo
• Torben Wiedenhöfer, University of Siegen, Germany
•  Ilya Zaihrayeu, University of Trento, Italy
• Marco Zamarian, University of Trento, Italy

Important Dates

• Deadline for submissions: 09.04.2010 (12.00 AM, GMT)
• Notification of the winners: 23.04.2010
• ESWC2010 conference: 30.05 – 03.06.2010
• Awards ceremony: 31.05.2010, co-located with the SemWiki workshop

Contact Information

Katharina Siorpaes
STI Innsbruck, Austria
Email: katharina.siorpaes@sti2.at

Enjoy!: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAtBki0PsC0

1. Serve your users’ narcissism. Daniel Carnegie has already said that the sweetest word in all languages is your name. It is one of incentives exploited by Twitter. Anytime someone uses your @name in a Tweet you see it.

2. Measure behavior and report it. Foursquare gives points every time the person checks in. You are also shown when someone of your friends or people from your area check in. Foursquare reports how big a loser you are because there are 34 people from your area who’ve checked in more than you this week.

3. Add status for behaviors. Show how many times the person has checked in, what his achievements at this app are, etc.

4. Make multiple status reports. Foursquare reports how much status each person earned, but it also tells who is the mayor in some area. That is two ways you can see status, and get addicted.

5. Make undesired behavior seem lame. “Why is everyone finally putting their photos into Twitter? Because if you don’t have your photo in Twitter the icon it puts there looks, well, lame. So, Twitter is putting a subtle enticement to all of its users to upload a photo”.

6. Make it easy to share success with others. Information about your mayorship or changes in your status can be shared also per mail, per tweets, they are shown on your wall and on the main page on Facebook

7. Make an API for studying behavior. Developers love to build apps to study data and report that.

8. Make it easy to join in other users. Facebook makes it very easy to tag your friends in a photo. If your friends aren’t in the system it makes it easy to invite them.

9. Give people more “hooks” to addict their friends.”Facebook, for instance, asks you what your relationship status is, and what your political persuasion is. Why does it ask you those? So you’ll force your friends to join!!!”

I-Semantics 2010: 6th International Conference on Semantic Systems

Graz, Austria, 1 – 3 September 2010

http://www.i-semantics.at

including

Call for Papers

5th AIS SigPrag International Conference on Pragmatic Web

(ICPW 2010)

&

Call for Submission

3rd Triplification Challenge

Scope

=====

I-SEMANTICS 2010 (www.i-semantics.at) is the 6th conference in the I-SEMANTICS series and provides a forum for academic and industrial research & development that focuses on semantic technologies and the Semantic Web. I-SEMANTICS 2010 will bring together both researchers and practitioners in the areas of Linked Data, Social Software and the Semantic Web in order to present and develop innovative ideas that help realising the “Social Semantic Web” and the “Corporate Semantic Web”.

I-SEMANTICS 2010 will be the host of this year`s regional Pragmatic Web Conference as well as the third edition of the TRIPLIFICATION Challenge. Further on I-SEMANTICS will be complemented by I-KNOW (www.i-know.at), the 10th International Conference on Knowledge Management. This setup is aiming to reflect the increasing importance and convergence of knowledge management and semantic systems.

For tagging of images, Facebook is a quite good example of how to do it simply and how to provide incentives for tagging. As BJ Fogg discuss it in the video below, tagging of photos, notes, etc. is quite important to facebook. It is a “persuasive” trigger to get people to come back to the site.

How Tags Persuade Facebook Users

First, for Facebook, it is important to get people to connect to their website, it allows them to deliver advertising to the users and thus make a living out of their service. As BJ Fogg explains in the video, when someone is tagged by a friend, they will receive a persuasive trigger (email notification for example) to go and see what photo of them was tagged. This is a great “free” way of getting someone trusted to bring you back to their site.

In addition, it is also important for Facebook to have content tagged as it provides more information to profile users and tailor advertising. This allows them to sell the ad space for a better price than a random ad placement. We can assume that this is one of the core of their business model and, thus, how and if they do it is not made public. But we can assume that in addition to bringing people back to their site, tags have this second use for them.

There are thus at least two reasons for Facebook to want you to tag content with your name and your friends name. Now, what can they do to make you tag more? What incentives can they user?

I am sure there are many out there, but, for now, I will focus on the privacy settings as an incentives for the users to tag their own photos.

We have seen in the last year a lot of  ”scandals” about people lacking privacy on Facebook and getting in all sort of trouble from the photos that were posted of them:

• Barrow teacher done in by anonymous “parent” e-mail about her Facebook page
• Benefits lost ‘because of Facebook’
• …

People are now starting to realise that they have to protect the content they put on Facebook. And indeed, the company has realised they could use this to their advantage. Since a little while, you can find, for photos and videos, the following privacy settings:

This means that, if you have tagged a photo of you (or a friend of you does), then you can control clearly who can see it or not.

In fact, this is theoretically a great incentives, for the ones that understand the privacy setting, to have you tag your photos. Facebook makes it clear to you: if you want your photos to be private, then tag them, tag them! tag them!!

They are not actually asking you to do it, or telling you they need you to do it for their business model to work, they are just telling you that it is your problem and your responsibility to tag your content if you want to control your privacy.

Now, the question is if people really understand that this privacy feature is there and if it pushes them to tag more. I guess Facebook knows

ABSTRACT:
With more than 300 million users gained in less 5 years, the Mozilla project is today one of the most improtant open source project in the world. Based on a worldwide community of developers, translators, promoters, beta testers and enthusiasts, Mozilla has one of the most efficient and passionate community backing the creation of its software products and promoting innovation and the open web. This talk will explain how the various mozilla communities are organized into a global project and what is motivating a large variety of people in the world to collaborate in an open source project like Mozilla.

SPEAKER’S SHORT BIO:
Mozilla Europe co-founder and board member, Pascal Chevrel manages Web localization (worldwide) for the Mozilla project and community growth in Europe.
Mozilla press spokesperson for the Spanish market, Pascal is also a contributor in the French and Spanish communities as member of the Mozilla Hispano and MozFR projects.

Making the glass recycling, taking stairs instead of elevator or throwing rubbish fun to do, increases the amount of participants enourmously (see the videos on thefunttheory.com).

Giving people some fun in return motivates them for doing the right thing such as hand washing or red light respecting.

The game was developed by Microsoft’s researchers Chris Quirk and Raman Chandrasekar, researchers from Georgia Tech and the Chinese University of Hong Kong and was presented to the public at the conference “SIGIR 2009” in Boston. More information about the game you can find on this page:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/23898/

It is stated that the researchers have already got some interesting results. One of them – they found the correlation between the number of characters in URL and the difficulty to match this page with the appropriate search queries.

The “Page Hunt” game exploits “human computation” and is interesting from this point of view to our INSEMTIVES project, where we try to develop funny and entertaining “games with a purpose” (in the style of Luis von Ahn)  for developing the Semantic Web.

We find the survey results of Mozilla’s team about the participatory design quite interesting for our project. Here are some of them:
1) The implementation of the pop-up in the middle of the window with the offer to take part in 5 minutes survey (instead of having the feedback button at the bottom of the screen) increased the amount of participants enormously. Moreover (and that is really important!!!), only one or two people out of 700 total comments said something negative about the pop-up itself. http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2009/08/18/cats-love-firefox-support/
2) The Mozilla team runs the tests where they investigate what color of Firefox download button causes more clicks. With a 1% lift the winning color was green and 1% translates to nearly 2 million downloads annually that is, 2 million more potential Firefox users. Such optimization testings are run quite often by Mozilla team and the colors are optimized according to the survey results.
http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2009/06/19/firefox-is-green/

http://kenai.com/projects/community-equity

Abstract: Semantically-enriched browsing has enhanced the browsing experience by providing contextualised dynamically generated Web content, and quicker access to searched for information. However, adoption of Semantic Web technologies is limited and user perception from the non-IT domain sceptical. Furthermore, little attention has been given to evaluating semantic browsers with real users to demonstrate the enhancements and obtain valuable feedback. The Sealife project investigates semantic browsing and its application to the life science domain. Sealife’s main objective is to develop the notion of context-based information integration by extending three existing Semantic Web browsers (SWBs) to link the existing Web to the eScience infrastructure.

Definitely, Life Sciences is a domain where semantic annotation can be very valuable.

You can get the whole paper at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2755822/pdf/1471-2105-10-S10-S14.pdf

In case you do not have time to read the paper, I recommend you to have at least a look at http://www.gopubmed.org/web/gopubmed/

Call For Papers

Special Issue on: “Incentives for Semantic Content Creation”

Guest Editors :

• Elena Simperl and Katharina Siorpaes, University of Innsbruck, Austria
• Denny Vrandecic, Universität Karlsruhe, Germany

https://www.inderscience.com/browse/callpaper.php?callID=1066

“The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.” Berners-Lee et al., The Semantic Web, Scientific American, 2001.”

Soon a decade will have passed since the publication of this article, but the original vision of the Semantic Web still remains to a large extent unrealised. Web-scale automated computer interaction and intelligent information processing technology producing added value for humans still have to become reality. Nevertheless, the Semantic Web community, academia as well as industry, were very active during the past decade and their efforts resulted in a wide range of maturing methodologies, methods, and tools for creating, processing, managing and using semantic content, be that ontologies or RDF data. A critical mass of useful semantic content is, however, missing; one can only find very few, well-maintained and up-to-date domain ontologies on the Web and even though recently growing, the amount of RDF data publicly available is limited compared to the size of the traditional Web.

One reason for this state of affairs is the lack of user involvement in semantic content creation tasks. Only a small number of Web users, typically members of the Semantic Web community, annotate their Web resources semantically or build and publish ontologies. This is a sharp contrast to several Web 2.0 applications, such as Wikipedia, Del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook or LinkedIn, which exhibit great popularity and user involvement and generate huge amounts of data at comparatively low costs and impressively high quality. To encourage large-scale user participation, the Semantic Web community has to look into incentive structures and means to motivate humans to become part of the Semantic Web movement and to contribute their knowledge and time to create useful ontologies and to use these in annotating documents, images, videos or even Web services.

In this special issue, we aim to present approaches that tackle the incentive bottleneck in semantic content creation. In particular we are looking for high quality research papers describing the way humans can be effectively involved in the development of useful ontologies, and the generation of massive amounts of RDF annotations of resources.

Subject Coverage

Topics of interest for the prospective special issue include, but are not limited to:

• Motivations and incentives of several Web 2.0 applications and their application and applicability to the Semantic Web and semantic applications.
• Incentive structures both within enterprise intranets and the open Web and their semantic extensions.
• Games with a purpose for the creation of semantic content, ontologies as well as RDF data.
• Tools and applications exploiting collective intelligence and the “Wisdom of Crowds” in the context of semantic technologies, and their respective incentive structures.
• Community-driven semantic applications.
• Empirical studies on the usage of Web 2.0 principles to encourage large-scale user participation in Semantic Web-related tasks.
• Instruments to derive and estimate the value of semantic technologies from quantitative and qualitative criteria.
• Experience reports and models of the benefits of semantic technologies.

Notes for Intending Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Author Guidelines page.

Important Dates

Paper submission: 15 September, 2009 (extended)
Acceptance notification: 31 October, 2009
Camera ready papers due: 1 December, 2009

Editors and Notes

You may send one copy in the form of an MS Word file attached to an e-mail (details in Author Guidelines) containing the subject line “Submission – IJKEDM Special Issue on Incentives for Semantic Content Creation” to the following email address:

incentives_specialissue@sti2.at

with a copy to:

Editorial Office
E-mail: editorial@inderscience.com

Please include in your submission the title of the Special Issue, the title of the Journal and the name of the Guest Editor.

Friday, July 17th morning: 9-12
Semantic Networks: Novelty, Integration and Application, Coevolution of Social and Semantic Networks
afternoon: 2-3
Information Extraction, Natural Language Processing and Modeling the Dynamics of Semantic Networks

Here is a link to  the program

Abstract: YouTube’s Collaborative Annotations

More and more YouTube videos no longer provide a passive viewing experience, but rather entice the viewer to interact with
the video by clicking on objects with embedded links. These links are part of YouTube’s Annotations system, which enables content owners to add active overlays on top of their videos. YouTube Annotation overlays also enable adding dynamic speech bubbles and pop-ups which can function as an ever-changing layer of supplementary information and entertainment, augmenting the video experience. This paper addresses the question of whether the ability to add annotation overlays on a given video should be opened to the YouTube public. The basic dilemma in opening a video to collaborative annotations is derived from the tension between the benefits of collaboration and the risks of visual clutter and spam. We term the degree to which a video is open to external contributions as the collaboration spectrum, and describe several models that let content owners to explore this spectrum in order to find the optimal way to harness the power of the masses.

Biographie:

Michael Fink’s work bridges media research, machine learning and cognitive science. Michael initiated the YouTube interactive video annotations project, which in the last year became a major driving force in making YouTube videos truly interactive. Previously, Michael worked at Google Research, focusing on image and audio fingerprinting for applications such as the “mass personalization” of broadcast television. His PhD research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem focuses on large scale object recognition in humans and machines, generating publications ranging from machine learning, computer vision and artificial intelligence to cognitive science, justice and economics. Recently, Michael has initiated an “innovation studies program” in a joint collaboration with The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Bezalel Design Academy.

INSEMTIVES plans to collaborate with a number of projects during its lifetime. With that respect, we are currently discussing different collaboration possibilities with the European project KIWI which is set out to realize novel means to support knowledge management using Web2.0 and semantic technologies.

Last week I had the pleasure to introduce our project in the KIWI plenary meeting in Prague and in the same sense to get some insights about current work from the KIWI partners.  It was quite interesting to see their work and especially their use cases. The most interesting use case from my point of view is the Sun use case which has some interesting people and technologies in it.  One very interesting part of their use case is current work by Henry Story on FOAF+SSL and by Peter Reiser and his group on the Community Equity (CE) approach. The goal of CE is to implement a system which determines the social value of people’s contribution with respect to contributed content, skills, or participation. CE is definitely interesting with respect to our incentive research in INSEMTIVES and we will for sure monitor what is going on there.
Furthermore it was nice to see the KIWI platform in action while getting an in-depth introduction to it.

So thanks again to Sebastian for inviting me to their meeting and I am looking forward to welcome him next week in our plenary meeting in Innsbruck!

Tobias

Deadline for submissions is June 30, 2009!

The aim of the workshop was to address the following questions around incentives and motivation of Web applications: what is the motivation for a user to (install and) use a tool? Which incentive structures can be applied to the Web, which cannot? Moreover, incentives are a crucial topic for future Web generations: Web paradigms, like the Semantic Web or the 3D Web, that are novel and unfamiliar to end users, aim to involve wide user bases.

We had very interesting submissions that approached the topic on different levels. The workshop accepted 5 submissions, that were invited to present in Madrid. We were happy to welcome Arpita Ghosh, Yahoo!, as an invited speaker. Arpita gave an entertaining and informative talk on her work on charity auctions through social networks.

The talks triggered lively discussions: a method for estimating causes of drop-out of Wikipedia contributors was presented; the Phrase Detectives game brought up many questions in the audience. Michael Fink’s presentation on YouTube’s annotation was very interactive and gripping. The incentives for social voting were discussed in another presentation. The final talk investigated reputation ranking in social networks.

Check back with us!