Hi all,

This is a first draft for an (invited) WWW2006 workshop. All comments welcome.
Final version should be send to www2006-workshops@www2006.org.

Important Dates

    * Proposal submission deadline: 1 October 2005
    * Acceptance notification: 1 November 2005
    * Individual workshop CFP deadline: 15 November 2005
    * Individual workshop submissions deadline: 10 January 2006
    * Individual submitters’ notification: 1 February 2006
    * Final workshop program available: 15 February 2006


Jacco

--


Title: 
	First workshop on Multimedia Annotation on the Semantic Web (MASW 2005) 

	[jvo: note that MASW is also the Missouri Association for
	Social Welfare, so googling for MASW 2005 gives unexpected
	results. A better acronym is most welcome ]

Organizers:
	Giorgos Stamou (NTUA)
	Jacco van Ossenbruggen (CWI)

Description:
	The multimedia community has a long tradition in annotating
	multimedia assets, a tradition that predates the Semantic Web.
	The Semantic Web community, on the other hand, has more
	experience in developing generic languages and tools based on
	an explicit and formally defined semantics.  In theory, the
	combination should be ideal: the Semantic Web could be
	significantly enriched by converting existing annotations and
	vocabulary to RDF or OWL, and multimedia applications could
	benefit from extra functionality offered by Semantic Web
	languages and tools.

	In practice, however, lots of work still needs to be done.
	This workshop invites contributions on all topics related to
	annotating multimedia assets using Semantic Web languages and
	tools.  These topics include, but are not limited to:

	- Image, audio and/or video annotation tools
	- Using media semantics in search, presentation and other processing
	- Automatic and semi automatic annotation
		From feature extraction to semantics
		Extracting metadata from context (GPS, diary etc)
	- Vocabulary for describing multimedia assets
	- Combining various vocabularies
	- Interoperability between RDF and non-RDF metadata:
		- MPEG 7
		- EXIF
		- VRA
		- IPTC
		- AAT
		- Flickr/del.icio.us tags
		- Microformats
	- Added value of using RDF/OWL semantics in multimedia
	  applications
	- Multimedia extensions of Semantic Web technology
		- Multimedia datatypes
	- Multimedia portals based on Semantic Web technology
	- Practical experiences, lessons learned and best practices 
	  for multimedia annotation on the Semantic Web

Expected outcome:
	The workshop is expected to 
		- bridge the various communities involved
		- provide an overview of the state of the art in the field
		- provide a list of open problems/promising
		  directions/research agenda
		- determine and prioritize potential work that needs
		  to be done within future W3C working groups (for
		  example, as a follow up on the work done by the
		  Multimedia Task force of the Semantic Web Best
		  Practices and Deployment Working Group

Timing & Venue: 

	The organizers believe the WWW Conference venue and Spring
	2006 time frame is perfect for this workshop because:

		- WWW conferences attract attendees from all target
		  audiences.  Multimedia, Semantic Web and Digital
		  Library researchers are typically not attending each
		  others conferences, this conference is one of the
		  exceptions to the rule

		- A flurry of large (European) research projects have been
		  started on this topic, so there will be sufficient
		  material submitted to the workshop

		- The Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment
		  Working Group is charted to end in February 2006, so
		  this is a good time to think about follow up work
		  that needs to be done, within or outside W3C.


Workshop registration and submissions:

	Workshop participants will have to submit a short position
	paper to be invited to the workshop.  This not only allows the
	workshop organizers to get an idea on how many participants
	will show up, but also to determine what topics to schedule on
	the agenda.  Otherwise the barrier to attend the workshop is
	intended to be as low as possible.  To keep the workshop size
	manageable and productive, the organizers reserve the freedom
	to reject people based on the quality of the submission if
	they receive over 20 submissions.

Organizers qualifications:
	Giorgos Stamou: [jvo: Giorgos, please fill this in for me]

	Jacco van Ossenbruggen is a senior researcher at CWI in
	Amsterdam.  His research interests include media semantics and
	automatic generation of web-based presentations. He has
	published several papers in the WWW conference series, served
	on WWW PC and panels, and co-organized the WWW9 workshop
	"Multimedia on the Web".  He was a member of the W3C SYMM
	Working Group during the development of SMIL 1.0 and 2.0 and
	is currently a member of the W3C SWBPD Working Group where he
	coordinates the Multimedia Task Force with Giorgos Stamou and
	Jeff Pan.

Publication of submissions: 

	TBD [ jvo: we could try to make a special issue out of
	selected contributions, but I'm not sure for what journal.
	Least we can do is publish things as a (CWI) tech report.
	Ideas more than welcome]