XML and Information Retrieval Workshop (3rd Edition)

Sheffield, England: July 29, 2004

Organizers:
Ricardo Baeza-Yates, University of Chile, Chile
Yoelle S. Maarek, IBM Haifa Research Lab, Israel

Program committee:
Mariano Consens, University of Toronto, Canada
Michael Gertz, UC at Davis, USA
Torsten Grabs, Microsoft Corporation, USA
David Hawking, CSIRO, Australia
Joemon Jose, Glasgow University, UK
Mounia Lalmas, Queen Mary University of London, UK
Yosi Mass, IBM Haifa Research Lab, Israel
Prabhakar Raghavan, Verity Inc., USA
Dan Suciu, University of Washington, USA

Background and goals:
The workshop is the third in the series of XML and Information Retrieval workshops that were held in at SIGIR'2000 (Athens, Greece, see SIGIR Forum Fall 2000 issue at http://www.acm.org/sigir/forum/S2000/XML_report.pdf) and SIGIR'2002 (Tampere, Finland, see SIGIR Forum Fall 2002 issue at http://www.acm.org/sigir/forum/F2002/maarek.pdf). It complements the INEX (Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval) meetings that have been organized for the last two years, by providing researchers a useful forum for discussing (before implementing) and evaluating their models at INEX in the second half of the year.
We plan here to pursue the exchange of ideas between researchers who are now active in this "sub-field" and attract new interests. We remind here that we focus on issues related to the application of IR methods to XML data for querying, retrieval, navigating, etc. We have gone a long way since the first edition in 2000, when XML was entirely dominated by the DB community. However, there is still room for more efforts in this field, in particular from the IR point of view.

Topics of Interests:
This third edition will bring together researchers and practitioners interested in XML and IR. We will review the progress that has been made since the two previous workshops. More specifically, recent technologies, models and new efforts will be discussed. Topics of interest include:
- XML Query Languages
- XML Indexing Models
- Ranking methods for XML collections
- Evaluation mechanisms beyond INEX
- Leveraging IR technologies in XML standards (XQuery, XPath)
- Web Services for XML Search
- Other XML Retrieval Problems
- Applications domains: Searching XML, Life Sciences, Learning, etc.

Worskshop program:
- Presentations and demos sessions (accepted submissions)
- Invited talks (e.g., XML evaluation effort)
- Demo session on XML tools
- Working session on how to work with W3C standards/working groups

How to submit a paper/proposal for the workshop:
Each candidate will send to yoelle@il.ibm.com by email in PDF or postscript format:
- A short bio (between 120 and 500 words) in plain ASCII
- A position paper or extended abstract of less than 2500 words for one of 4 tracks: (a) short tutorial, (b) research in progress, (c) system presentations/demos or (d) standards proposal The position paper should be formatted according to the standard SIGIR templates available at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html and then converted to pdf or postscript. MS Word documents will *not* be accepted.
Submissions will be reviewed by the organizing committee and invitations to attend and present (or attend only) will be sent accordingly. Authors of accepted submissions will be requested to submit a longer version (using the standard SIGIR templates available at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html) for inclusion in the Working Notes to be distributed during the workshop.

Important dates:
Submissions: EXTENDED DEADLINE May 31, 2004
Notification of acceptance: June 15, 2004
Final submissions: June 29, 2004
Workshop: July 29, 2004