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1st International Workshop on "Crowdsourcing the Semantic Web" (CrowdSem2013)

Full-Day Workshop in conjunction with ISWC 2013
12th International Semantic Web Conference
21-25 October 2013, in Sydney, Australia

Workshop website: http://crowdsem.wordpress.com/
Stay tuned on twitter: @crowdsem #crowdsem2013

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Submission deadline: 12 July, 2013 (23:59 Hawaii time)
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The Global Brain Semantic Web—a Semantic Web interleaving a large number of human and machine computation—has great potential to overcome some of the issues of the current Semantic Web. In particular, semantic technologies have been deployed in the context of a wide range of information management tasks in scenarios that are increasingly significant in both technical (data size, variety and complexity of data sources) and economical terms (industries addressed and their market volume). For many of these tasks, machine-driven algorithmic techniques aiming at full automation do not reach a level of accuracy that many production environments require. Enhancing automatic techniques with human computation capabilities is becoming a viable solution in many cases. We believe that there is huge potential at the intersection of these disciplines – large scale, knowledge-driven, information management and crowdsourcing – to solve technically challenging problems purposefully and in a cost effective manner.

The topic of using human computation to address some of the more intractable problems in semantic web research has been gaining attention recently, with a crop of papers appearing in the last 12-18 months. This workshop is the first opportunity to bridge the diverse communities whilst giving it a focus on both humans as part of the Semantic Web as well as humans as consumers of Semantic Web data within the Collective Intelligence context. It aims at providing a framework for interaction and exchange among researchers studying these specific aspects, and presenting and discussing the latest insights in human computation and crowdsourcing research and their application and use in a Semantic Web context.

As part of the workshop we plan "Live crowdsourcing exercise" to collectively design an experiment that we will be posted on a crowdsourcing platform (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk) and results analyzed as a concrete example of how to use crowdsourcing for those who are just exploring the field.

Topics
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Applications of crowdsourcing for traditional semantic web tasks:
- approaches and systems hiding the authoring of ontologies, semantic annotations, links between entities in heterogeneous sources behind more accessible user activities
- models and approaches for community-based crowdsourced support of the different lifecycle stages of Linked Data such as knowledge extraction, authoring, and repair
- crowdsourcing tasks for gathering content semantics
- paradigms for user involvement during semantic bootstrapping activities and studies discussing experiences in this area;
- architectures for the combined use of different crowdsourcing approaches and means to enable interoperability and data reuse

Improvement of existing human computation approaches through usage of semantic web technologies:
- applications of semantic technologies in building flexible and scalable crowdsourcing technology (e.g., declarative task models)

Crowdsourcing fundamentals (in the context of the Semantic Web):
- frameworks for using crowdsourcing
- human-computation workflows optimizing user and machine performance
- crowd management (incl. expertise identification, worker task assignment, incentive management)
- evaluation metrics of crowdsourcing tasks
- methods for quality control and validation of crowd-produced work
- paid vs. not paid crowdsourcing workflows
- gaming platforms for supporting crowdsourcing activities
- nichesourcing for specific domain knowledge acquisition
- hybrid models, languages, techniques and implementations leveraging both machine and human intelligence
- studies exploring the added value of crowd-generated knowledge compared to expert-driven scenarios
- methods for resource management and task assignment in crowdsourcing-enabled systems

Submission
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This full-day workshop is aimed at an interdisciplinary audience of researchers and practitioners involved or interested in the Semantic Web, and coming from fields as diverse as machine learning, social computing, natural language processing, data integration, HCI. The workshop also targets practitioners who make use of Web-based information sharing applications in enterprise environments. The workshop will be suitable both for researchers who have begun to use crowdsourcing as one of the components of their semantic web toolkits, as well as for those who are only considering these ideas and want to learn more.

All papers must represent original and unpublished work that is not currently under review. Papers will be evaluated according to their significance, originality, technical content, style, clarity, and relevance to the workshop. At least one author of each accepted paper is expected to attend the workshop.

We welcome the following types of contributions:
- Full research papers (up to 15 pages).
- Experiment papers (up to 10 pages).
- Position statements (up to 3 pages).
- Demo papers (up to 4 pages).

All papers are due on July 12, 2013

Full instructions are available at: http://crowdsem.wordpress.com/submission/

Organizers
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Maribel Acosta, Institute AIFB, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Lora Aroyo, VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Abraham Bernstein, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Jens Lehmann, University of Leipzig, Germany
Natasha Noy, Stanford University, US
Elena Simperl, University of Southampton, United Kingdom

Contact
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More information: crowdsem2013@easychair.org
Twitter Feed: @crowdsem
Twitter HashTag: #crowdsem2013