Call for Participation: Semantic Web Workshop at the 2002 World-Wide Web Conference Hawaii, May 7, 2002 The term "Semantic Web" denotes the next evolutionary step of the Web, which establishes a layer of machine-understandable data for automated agents, sophisticated search engines, and information integration and interoperability services. The ultimate goal of the Semantic Web is to allow machines to share and use knowledge worldwide in a scalable, adaptable and extensible manner, without any central authority and just a few basic rules. The Semantic Web workshop at WWW-2002 will complement the Semantic Web track at the main conference by providing a forum for active discussion on the current achievements, pitfalls, and the future research directions of the Semantic Web. Our goal is to provide a forum for fruitful discussion sessions rather than a mini-conference. We solicit papers, but at the workshop itself the emphasis will be on sharing experiences with time for all participants to contribute. The workshop will be structured around group discussions designed to help us achieve greater understanding of the following issues: What are the recent successes in Artificial Intelligence, Databases, Information Integration, and other Computer Science fields that are relevant to the Semantic Web? What are the unique challenges of the Semantic Web that do not allow us to apply that research directly? How do we overcome these challenges? What are new areas of basic research that the Semantic Web needs? What are possible killer applications for the Semantic Web? How can we achieve the critical mass of ontologies, annotated data, tools, and agents to make the Semantic Web as ubiquitous as the regular Web is today? Besides the papers about up-to-date progress of research, we solicit reports from Semantic Web practitioners. We also encourage submissions from researchers in established areas of Computer Science discussing the possibilities and challenges of applying traditional techniques to the Semantic Web, with its de-centralization and scale. Practitioners' reports will give us the opportunity to discuss the gap between the current practices and the visions. The challenge papers will help us achieve a coherent picture of the Semantic Web to come. Relevant workshop topics include but are not limited to: * Language and Representation issues of the Semantic Web (e.g. RDF, OIL, DAML, Topic-Maps, RSS) * Query languages for RDF * Tools, systems and methodologies for engineering of, storing of and reasoning with RDF data * Migrating existing information to be usable for RDF applications * Trust in the Semantic Web * Information integration and Mediation on the Web * Semantic Web applications Organizing Committee Steffen Staab, Universitaet Karlsruhe, Germany Natasha Noy, Stanford University, USA Martin Frank, USC Information Sciences Institute, USA Program Committee Sean Bechhofer, University of Manchester, United Kingdom Paul Buitelaar, DFKI, Germany Fabio Ciravegna, U Sheffield, UK Peter Crowther, Network Inference, UK Monica Crubézy, Stanford University, USA Mike Dean, BBN, USA Stefan Decker, Stanford University (DB), USA Jerome Euzenat, INRIA, France Dieter Fensel, Vrije Universiteit, Netherlands Tim Finin, University of Maryland-Baltimore County, USA Carole Goble, University of Manchester, UK Asun Gómez-Pérez, Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain Frank van Harmelen, Vrije Universiteit, Netherlands Jeff Heflin, Lehigh University, USA Martin Lacher, Technische Universität München, Germany Yannis Labrou, Univ. of Maryland, USA Fred Lochovsky, HKUST, Hong Kong Alexander Maedche, FZI, Germany Brian McBride, HP Laboratories, UK Sergey Melnik, Stanford University, USA Enrico Motta, The Open University, UK Louiqa Raschid, Univ. of Maryland, USA Rudi Studer, University of Karlsruhe, Germany Katia Sycara, CMU, USA Valentina Tamma, University of Liverpool, UK Mike Uschold, Boeing, USA Submission procedure We invite three types of submission: research papers, application papers, and position statements. Research and application papers should not exceed 12 pages (including bibliography). Position statements should not exceed 3 pages and address some of the questions in this announcement. Indicate the type of paper in large fonts on the first page of your submission. We will accept only electronic submissions in PDF format. To submit the paper, send the PDF file or the URL where we can download it to noy@smi.stanford.edu For additional information about the workshop, visit http://semanticweb2002.aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de For additional information about WWW-2002, visit http://www2002.org Important dates Submission of papers: March 1st Notification of acceptance: April 1st Submission of camera-ready copy: April 15th