ESWC-2006 Workshop on:

Semantic Network Analysis

Monday, June 12, 2006 at Budva, Montenegro

During the past years a shift in the fundamental understanding of the aims of Computer Science, especially in AI, could be observed. While early research in AI aimed at replacing the human being with better tools, the prevalent current vision is nowadays to support him in his tasks. This shows up in the rise of research areas like communities of practice, knowledge management, web communities, and peer to peer. In particular the notion of collaborative work - and thus the need of its systematic analysis - becomes more and more important.

On the other hand, techniques for analysing such structures have a long tradition within sociology. While in the beginning, researchers in that area had to spent huge efforts in collecting data, they nowadays harvest the data free from the WWW. Popular examples are citation and co-author graphs, friend of a friend etc.

A new kind of user-centered applications such as blogs, folksonomies, and wikis, now known as "Web 2.0", consist of large networks of individual contributions, providing a testbed for Social Network Analysis (SNA) techniques at the intersection of the semantic web and SNA areas.

The semantic web provides an additional aspect to SNA on the Web as it distinguishes between different kinds of relations, allowing for more complex analysis schemes.

Our aim is to bring together the semantic web community, the SNA community, and the Web 2.0 community, in order to increase collaboration and exchange of experiences. We expect especially that the semantic web community can largely benefit from the long tradition present in SNA, and to uncover new possibilities and test beds for semantic technology within the Web 2.0 community.

Besides analysing social networks and cooperative structures within the (semantic) web, our second aim is to exploit the results for supporting and improving communities in their interaction. An important research topic is thus how to include network analysis tools in working environments such as knowledge management systems, peer to peer systems or knowledge portals.

Topics of Interest

Submissions are invited on work relating the Semantic Web with Social Network Analysis. Both theoretical as well as applciation papers are
welcome. The topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:

Potential Audience

The workshop aims at any researchers working on social communities on the web. It focuses especially on approaches to social network
analysis that are related to the semantic web. The participants are expected to be primarily computer scientists, although submissions
from sociology and Web 2.0 community application developers are also welcome. The primary goal of the workshop is to establish and enhance communication between these communities.

The workshop follows the successful first SNA workshop held at ISWC 2005, and continues a series of workshops on Semantic Web Mining which have been held at ECML/PKDD data mining conferences in 2000-2003 and on Ontologies in P2P communities at ESWC 2005.

We will publicise the workshop via several active and relevant mailing lists will invite the contributors and attendees of the first SNA
workshop, and to the Semantic Web Mining workshops organised at the ECML/PKDD conference series.

Organisers

Programme Committee

Submission

We invite papers that report on completed or current work related to the topic of this workshop. Submissions are to be emailed in Postscript or Adobe PDF format to Bettina Hoser (bettina.hoser@em.uni-karlsruhe.de), no later than March 12, 2006. Papers should be formatted according to the official formatting guidelines of the ESWC'06 main conference (LNCS). Page limit is set to a maximum of 6 for short papers, and 14 for full papers.

Important Dates

Harith Alani