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Call for papers - First International Pragmatic Web Conference 2006
21-23 Septembe 2006 in Stuttgart, Germany
www.pragmaticweb.info
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The World Wide Web has been very successful in enabling information sharing among a seemingly unlimited number of people worldwide. The vast and ever-growing amount of documents on the Web, however, results in information overload and makes it often difficult to discover the information that is relevant, because the current Web is a syntactic web. The goal of the Semantic Web is thus to provide the basis for intelligent applications that enable more efficient information retrieval and use by not just providing a set of linked documents but a collection of knowledge repositories with meaningful content and additional logics.
The key elements of the Semantic Web are ontologies representing the basic conceptual knowledge about some domain. Ontologies are not fixed specifications but always depend on the context of use. Therefore, ontologies co-evolve with their communities of use. Members of a community have to negotiate continuously about what they agree to be their shared background. This is especially important in an (inter) organisational context, where participants from different professional, social, or cultural backgrounds need to understand each other in order to collaborate effectively.

In order to enable the use of the Web for communicating, agreeing upon, and cooperatively modifying ontologies, the support provided by the Semantic Web needs to be extended.
The crucial questions are first how to model and analyze collaboration, context, organizational commitments, and meaning negotiation; second, how to use these conceptual models in the design and implementation of real-world tools and applications. This new paradigm for effec-tively exploring and exploiting the potentials of the Web is called the Pragmatic Web. It constitutes the new challenge that will complement the Semantic Web. The goal is to augment human collaboration effectively by modelling and developing appropriate applications of the Semantic Web, such as systems for ontology negotiations or for ontology-based business interactions.

We call for contributions for the First International Pragmatic Web Conference dealing with theoretical, methodological, and technological aspects of the Pragmatic Web as well as business, governmental, and other applications. Papers up to 5000 words can be submitted to submission@pragmaticweb.info before the deadline. Formatting guidelines and detailed submission instructions can be found at www.pragmaticweb.info.

Proceedings will be published as Lecture Notes of Informatics by the German Computer Society (GI).

Topics include but are not limited to:

Theory, methods, and technologies

    * Technology acceptance/media choice theories
    * Language/action theory
    * Evaluation methods
    * Communication modelling methods
    * Context modelling methods
    * Semantic Web technologies
    * Web services
    * Applied pragmatic theories


Applications

    * Organisational communication
    * Collaboration
    * Decision support
    * Knowledge management
    * Negotiation
    * Community informatics
    * Collaborative working environments
    * Active knowledge systems
    * Appropriate technologies
    * E-business, E-government E-politics, E-health etc.
    * Information brokers and mediators


Dates:

- Submission Deadline: 31 May 2006
- Notification of Acceptance: 1 July 2006
- Final Version: 1 August 2006
- Conference: 21-23 September 2006

Invited Talk by Ian Horrocks, University of Manchester, UK

Conference Chairs:

    * Mareike Schoop, University of Hohenheim, Germany
    * Aldo de Moor, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
    * Jan Dietz, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands

Programme Committee:

    * Mark Aakhus, Rugers University, USA
    * Pär Agerfalk, University of Limerick, Ireland
    * Martin Bichler, Technical University of Munich, Germany
    * Robert Biuk-Aghai, University of Macau, China
    * Fiorella de Cindio, University of Milan, Italy
    * Harry Delugach, University of Alabama in Huntsville, USA
    * Göran Goldkuhl, Linköping University, Sweden
    * Mike Gurstein, Community Informatics Research Network, Canada
    * Michael Heng, Universitas 21 Global, Singapore
    * Christian Huemer, University of Vienna, Austria
    * Thomas Kamphusmann, Fraunhofer ISST, Germany
    * Ronald Lee, Florida International University, USA
    * Torsten Leidig, SAP Research, Germany
    * Mikael Lind, University College of Boras, Sweden
    * Kalle Lyytinen, Case Western Reserve University, USA
    * Ambjörn Naeve, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
    * Willy Picard, Poznan University of Economics, Poland
    * Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen, University of Helsinki, Finland
    * Simon Polovina, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
    * Wolfgang Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT and Aachen University, Germany
    * Michael Rebstock, Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, Germany
    * Alexander Repenning, University of Colorado, USA
    * Gary Richmond, City University of New York, USA
    * Munindar P. Singh, North Carolina State University, USA
    * Peter Spyns, Ministry of Flanders, Belgium
    * Yao-Hua Tan, Free University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
    * James Taylor, University of Montreal, Canada
    * Dov Te'eni, Tel-Aviv University, Israel
    * Hans Weigand, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
    * Christof Weinhardt, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
    * Brian Whitworth, Massey University, New Zealand