The ExpertFinder Initiative

2nd International ExpertFinder Workshop: FEWS2007 (Finding Experts on the Web with Semantics)
Busan, Korea, November 2007

co-located with the 6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2007) and 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference (ASWC 2007)

ExpertFinder is an emerging collaborative initiative with the aim of devising vocabulary, rule extensions (for e.g. FOAF and SIOC) and best practices to annotate personal home pages, as well as web pages of institutions, conferences, publication indexes, etc. with adequate metadata to enable computer agents to find experts on particular topics.

Following the 1st ExpertFinder workshop during the Knowledge Web NoE general assembly in January 2007, the ExpertFinder initiative would like to solicit research contributions from the wider Semantic Web expert community.

ExpertFinder’s goal is to enable a Web-scale infrastructure for the creation, publication and use of experts’ semantic descriptions to support expert finding scenarios such as group management, disaster response, recruitment, team building, problem solving and on-the-fly consultation. Descriptions of such scenarios can be found at http://rdfweb.org/topic/ExpertFinderUseCases. We welcome all submissions which describe original research contributing to this goal.

Topics of Interest
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We welcome all research contributions that address one or more of the following topics:

• Specification of vocabularies to describe experts
• Reuse of existing standards and taxonomies to describe experts
• Extraction of expert descriptions from legacy (meta)data
• Use of microformat data to locate experts
• International and cross-organisational heterogeneity issues in the expert descriptions
• Algorithms for expert finding and recommendation (e.g., mining of social networks)
• Expressivity extensions (in logics, rules) to support expert finding processes
• Tools for the intuitive creation and maintenance of expert descriptions and associated rules
• Web infrastructures for the publication and sharing of expert descriptions (storage, access, querying, rule execution, coordination, communication)
• Security, trust and privacy aspects of expert finding
• Scalability to the Web level
• Integrating expert finding research into legacy systems to support industrial uptake

Event Information
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The workshop will take place during the 6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2007) and 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference (ASWC2007). For every accepted paper at least one of the authors must attend the workshop and must register for the workshop and the main conference.

Submission Information
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We invite submissions of papers no longer than 14 pages (including figures, references and appendices). Paper submissions must be formatted in the style of the Springer Publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).

Papers need to be submitted electronically through the
conference submission site.

Papers will be published in accompanying online proceedings (CEUR) as well as in hardcopy which will be available to all workshop attendees.

Important Dates
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• August 20, 2007: Submission of papers
• September 10, 2007: Notification of acceptance
• September 30, 2007: Camera-ready versions due
• November 12, 2007: Workshop