[Air-l] Collaborative Tagging workshop at WWW2006

[Golder, Scott A.]

We have extended the deadline for this workshop until January 29th, and
welcome submissions addressing any aspect of tagging. 

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WWW 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland
May 22/23, 2006
Collaborative Web Tagging Workshop
Call for Papers and Participation

URL: http://www.rawsugar.com/www2006/cfp.html
Contact: [frank AT rawsugar DOT com]


Chairs:

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Frank Smadja, RawSugar.
Andrew Tomkins, Yahoo Research.
Scott Golder, HP Labs.

 

Program Committee:

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Eytan Adar, University of Washington.
Michael Cafarella, University of Washington
Ed Cutrell, Microsoft Research
Susan Dumais, Microsoft Research
Jonathan Feinberg, IBM Research, Cambridge
Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
R. Guha, Google
Yoelle Maarek, IBM Research, Haifa Israel.
Vova Soroka, IBM Research, Haifa Israel

 

Background

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There has recently there been a great surge of interest in collaborative
tagging as a means of facilitating knowledge sharing in social
computing. Collaborative tagging refers to the process in which a
community of users adds meta-information in the form of keywords or tags
to Web content such as web pages, links, photographs and audio files on
a centralized web server.

While collaborative tagging is only starting to be researched in the
research community, it seems to address a real need on the Web as
demonstrated by the growing popularity of tagging and annotation sites
(see del.icio.us, flickr, technorati, RawSugar, Shadows, etc.); the most
popular sites already have a combined user base of several millions. The
philosophy of what is called Web 2.0, the social Web or also the two-way
Web is that users can and should be content creators as well as
consumers and it suggests that there is a great deal of untapped
potential for tagging to improve how web content is organized, navigated
and experienced. Yet it is not yet clear how it will evolve and how it
will scale, when, if at all, its usage base will go beyond early
adopters. There are many open questions about what tagging can and
cannot do, especially for a larger, mainstream web community and we
would like to explore that in our workshop.


Goal and Topics of Interests

-----------------------------------------

The goal of this workshop is to bring researchers and practitioners
together in order to explore both the social and technical issues and
challenges involved in Web tagging. We plan to address not only the
current state of collaborative tagging, and understand its
attractiveness to early adopters but also discuss its future.


Topics of interest for the workshop include:

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    * Semantics and Vocabulary: How can collaborative tagging be used in
the creation of ontologies and the semantic web? What are tagging's
benefits and limitations in this domain? How can meaning be faithfully
preserved when disparate tag sets are integrated? Is there a place in
tagging for controlled vocabulary?  Is it necessary to match synonymous
tags, and if so, how can this be accomplished technically?  Are there
other mechanisms that can extend tagging to provide some of the
capabilities of hierarchies without the drawbacks?

    * Measurement: What is the structure of tagspace?  What behavioral
patterns do users display when tagging, and how can the entire space of
objects and tags be understood and visualized?

    * Standardization efforts: Although very little of this has been
done currently, current services are somehow interoperable through the
use of RSS or Atom feeds. What could be the benefits of tagging
standards and what would they be?

    * Scalable architecture for tagging: What will happen when millions
of users will tag, how about hundreds of millions? What kind of
architecture can deal with billions of objects? Can current tagging
concepts be applied to such scales?

    * Multimedia: Are there special considerations for tagging
multimedia such as photos, videos and audio? Yahoo photos now already
has over two billion photographs.

    * Search and Navigation: How can tagging improve internet search?
How are tags used as a mechanism for navigation and discovery of
content?

    * Discovery paradigms: How to search, browse a tagged universe? What
is the use of faceted search, people search, etc.?

    * Blogging: What is the relationship between tagging and blogging??
How do these two methods of adding personalized organization to web
content affect how that content is found, navigated, used and
interpreted by others?

    * Interfaces: Using Boolean operators like AND, OR and NOT on sets
of tags rapidly grows complex and confusing, especially for non
technical users. How can good interface design simplify and clarify
these complex operations?


Workshop Presenter Selection Process:

---------------------------------------------------------

We will solicit submissions to present work to the workshop, and
submissions will be evaluated by the organizing committee.

Because collaborative tagging on the web is relatively young and has
received relatively little scholarly attention, we encourage
contributions from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds, including
computer science and engineering, sociology, anthropology and
linguistics, and communications and library science.

Despite the novelty of collaborative tagging, we seek contributions with
demonstrable results, as well as purely theoretical pieces. These
results may consist of designs and prototypes for future tagging
systems, quantitative or qualitative analyses of existing systems, or
solutions for technical challenges facing tagging. Though speculative or
theoretical contributions will be considered, we will require that they
be well-grounded in previous research or practice.


How to submit a paper/proposal for the workshop:

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For research in progress work, each candidate will email to [frank AT
rawsugar DOT com] in PDF format:

    * A short bio (less than one half page)
    * A position paper or extended abstract (less than 5 pages)
including references and figures.

For system presentations/demos, each candidate will email to [frank AT
rawsugar DOT com] in PDF format:

    * A short bio (less than one half page)
    * A description of the system to be demoed (less than 3 pages)
    * If available, a demo of the system in some format.


Submissions will be reviewed by the organizing committee and invitations
to present will be sent accordingly. Authors of accepted submissions
will be requested to submit a longer version for inclusion in the
Working Notes to be distributed during the workshop.


Format:

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Papers should be emailed to [frank AT rawsugar DOT com] preferably in
PDF format and alternatively in HTML or MS Word.

Papers should be formatted according to the standard ACM templates
available at http://www2006.org/cfp/submissions.php, for example the MS
Word template is in http://www2006.org/cfp/www2006-submission.doc; and
then converted to pdf. Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org/) can be
used to export standard formats to PDF.


Important Dates:
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Individual workshop submissions deadline: 29 January 2006
Acceptance notifications to authors of workshop papers: 1 February 2006
Final workshop program available: 15 February 2006
Workshop date: May 22 (Mon), 2006