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Knowledge Maps and Information Retrieval (KMIR)

2nd International Workshop, held in conjunction with JCDL 2015

June 24 2015, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA

The workshop has been canceled due to low number of submissions. We hope to reschedule sometime.

We are pleased to announce the upcoming 2nd halfday workshop on Knowledge Maps and Information Retrieval (KMIR), to be held as part of the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL 2015), Knoxville, Tennessee (USA), 21-25 June 2015 (http://www.jcdl2015.org/).

Abstract: Knowledge maps are promising tools for visualizing the structure of large-scale information spaces, but still far away from being applicable for searching. The workshop aims at bringing together experts in IR and knowledge mapping in order to discuss the potential of interactive knowledge maps for information seeking purposes.

Motivation, Goals and Objectives

The success of an information system depends mainly on its ability to properly support interaction between users and information. Current information systems, however, show as a particular point of failure the vagueness between user search terms and the knowledge orders of the information space in question (Mayr et al. 2008, Mutschke et al. 2011). Studies in interactive information seeking behavior have confirmed that the ability to browse an information space and observe similarities and dissimilarities between information objects is crucial for accidental encountering and the creative use of information (Nicholas et al. 2004, Westerman et al. 2005). This is in particular true for heterogeneous information spaces within the open web. Some kind of guided searching therefore becomes more and more important in order to precisely discover information without knowing the right search terms. Yet, this seems to remain the weakest point of interactive information systems (Ford 2000, Foster 2004, Tang 2007).

Knowledge mapping encompasses all attempts to use visualizations to gain insights into the structure and evolution of large-scale information spaces. Knowledge maps can take the form of network visualizations, treemaps or specific, map like arrangements of search results (cf. Börner et al. 2003, Shiffrin/Börner 2004, Börner 2010, Klavans/Boyack 2010, Skupin et al. 2013, Sahal et al. 2013, Boyack/Klavans 2013). As an activity performed in very different disciplines – and often independent from each other – it stands in line with the dominance of the visual in our culture (Manovich 2009). Knowledge maps of digital library collections are promising navigation tools through knowledge spaces but – to the best of our knowledge – still far away from being applicable for searching digital libraries. Most maps are made for special purposes, are static, and usually not interactive (Akdag Salah et al. 2012). In interactive information systems the use of visual elements to enhance information seeking and discovery is a recurring research issue. However, not much of the experiences made in knowledge mapping have ever been implemented in online interfaces to digital libraries and collections (Börner/Chen 2001), nor is there a stable and continuous knowledge exchange between the “map makers” on the one hand and the Information Retrieval (IR) specialists on the other hand. Thus, there is also a lack of models that properly combine insights of the two strands, which are driven by quite different epistemic perspectives.

Our workshop aims at bringing together these two communities: experts in IR reflecting on visual enhanced search interfaces and experts in knowledge mapping reflecting on visualizations of the content of a collection that might also present – visually – a context for a search term. The intention of the workshop is to raise awareness of the potential of interactive knowledge maps for information seeking purposes and to create a common ground for experiments aiming at the incorporation of knowledge maps into IR models at the level of the user interface. The major focus of the workshop is on the question of how knowledge maps can be utilized for scholarly information seeking in large information spaces. Our interests include interactive IR, information seeking behavior, knowledge mapping, science modelling, information visualization, and digital libraries. The workshop is closely related to the COST action KNOWeSCAPE (Analyzing the dynamics of information and knowledge landscapes: http://knowescape.org/) which aims at implementing new navigation and search strategies based on insights of the complex nature of knowledge spaces as well as visualization principles for knowledge maps.

The proposed workshop can tie up to the success of the first international workshop on “Knowledge Maps and Information Retrieval (KMIR)”, held as part of the DL 2014 in London (see http://www.gesis.org/en/events/events-archive/conferences/kmir2014/ or workshop proceedings: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1311).

The long-term research goal is to develop and evaluate new approaches for combining knowledge mapping and IR. More specifically, we address questions such as:

  • What are appropriate interactive knowledge maps for IR systems
  • How can knowledge maps be utilized for information seeking purposes?
  • How to locate an information need on a knowledge map?
  • How can (visually enhanced) search interfaces to knowledge maps look like?
  • How can interaction with knowledge maps be transformed into IR tasks?
  • Can knowledge maps improve searching in large, in particular heterogeneous, cross-language, cross-domain information spaces?
  • And the other way around: Can insights from IR also improve knowledge mapping itself?

The availability of new IR test collections that contain citation and bibliographic information like the iSearch collection (see Lykke et al. 2010) or the ACL collection (Ritchie et al. 2006) could deliver an interesting playground for developing or evaluating combined models of IR and knowledge mapping for scholarly searching.

Topical Outline

To support the previously described goals the workshop topics include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Knowledge maps for digital libraries
  • Knowledge orders of information spaces
  • Information seeking behaviour
  • Information discovery
  • Interactive IR systems
  • Human–computer IR
  • Knowledge Visualization in IR
  • Visual interfaces to information systems
  • Browsing and navigating information spaces
  • Task based user modelling, interaction and personalization
  • Evaluation of interactive IR systems.

Types of Submissions

  • Full Papers (6 to 8 pages): Full papers, describing advanced or completed work
  • Short Papers (4 pages): Position papers or work in progress
  • Poster and Demonstrations (2 pages): Poster and Presentation of systems or prototypes

All submissions must be written in English following the Springer LNCS Author Guidelines (http://www.springer.com/lncs) and should be submitted as PDF files to EasyChair: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=kmir2015.

All submissions will be reviewed by at least two independent reviewers. At least one author per paper needs to register for the workshop and attend the workshop to present the work. In case of no-show the paper (even if accepted) will be deleted from the proceedings AND from the program.

Important Dates

  • Submission deadline: extended to May 10, 2015
  • Notification of acceptance: May 24, 2015
  • Workshop: June 24, 2015, 9 am to 12 (canceled due to low number of submissions)

Output

Workshop proceedings will be deposited online in the CEUR workshop proceedings publication service (ISSN 1613-0073) – This way the proceedings will be permanently available and citable (digital persistent identifiers and long term preservation). 

Program Committee

  • Alkim Almila Akdag Salah, e-Humanities Group/KNAW (The Netherlands)
  • Nicholas J. Belkin, Rutgers University (USA)
  • Katy Börner, Indiana University (USA)
  • Kevin W. Boyack, SciTech Strategies, Inc. (USA)
  • Edward A. Fox, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (USA)
  • Norbert Fuhr, University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany)
  • Daniel Hienert, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (Germany) 
  • Peter Ingwersen, Royal School of Library and Information Science (Denmark)
  • Claus-Peter Klas, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (Germany)
  • Birger Larsen, Royal School of Library and Information Science (Denmark)
  • Vivien Petras, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Germany)
  • André Skupin, San Diego State University (USA)
  • Catherine L. Smith, Kent State University (USA)
  • Howard D. White, Drexel University (USA)

Organizers

  • Peter Mutschke (GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne, Germany)
  • Andrea Scharnhorst (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) / Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS), Amsterdam / The Hague, The Netherlands)
  • Philipp Mayr (GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne, Germany)
  • Preben Hansen (University of Stockholm, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Sweden)
  • Aida Slavic (UDC Consortium, The Hague, The Netherlands)

Contact

  • Peter Mutschke (GESIS, Cologne): peter.mutschke@gesis.org

References

Akdag Salah, A.A.; Scharnhorst, A.; Ten Bosch, O.; Doorn, P.; Manovich, L.; Salah, A.A.; Chow, J. (2012): Significance of Visual Interfaces in Institutional and User-Generated Databases with Category Structures. Proceedings of the second international ACM workshop on “Personalized access to cultural heritage (PATCH)”. ACM Multimedia Conference, Nara, Japan.

Börner, K.; Chen, C. (2001): Visual interfaces to digital libraries - its past, present, and future. JCDL’01 Proceedings of the 1st ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries.

Börner, K.; Chen, C.; Boyack, K. W. (2003): Visualizing knowledge domains. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 37, 179-255.

Börner, K. (2010): The Atlas of Science. MIT Press.

Boyack, K. W.; Klavans, R. (2013, forthcoming): Creation of a highly detailed, dynamic, global model and map of science. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

Ford, N. (2000): Cognitive Styles and Virtual Environments. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(6), 543-557.

Foster, A.E. (2004): A Nonlinear Model of Information Seeking Behaviour. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 55(3), 228-237.

Klavans, R.; Boyack, K. W. (2010): Toward an objective, reliable, and accurate method for measuring research leadership. Scientometrics, 82(3), 539-553.

Lykke, M.; Larsen, B.; Lund, H.; Ingwersen, P. (2010): “Developing a Test Collection for the Evaluation of Integrated Search.” Advances in Information Retrieval, edited by Gurrin et al., 5993:627-630. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer.

Manovich, L. (2009): How to Follow Global Digital Cultures, or Cultural Analytics for Beginners”. Deep Search: The Politics of Search Beyond Google, edited by Felix Stalder and Konrad Becker, 198- 211 (Wien: Studien Verlag / Transaction Publishers, 2009).

Mayr, P.; Mutschke, P.; Petras, V. (2008): Reducing semantic complexity in distributed digital libraries: Treatment of term vagueness and document re-ranking. Library Review, 57(3), 213-224.

Mutschke, P.; Mayr, P.; Schaer, P.; Sure, Y. (2011): Science models as value-added services for scholarly information systems. In: Scientometrics, 89 (1), S. 349-364.

Nicholas, D. et.al. (2004): Reappraising Information Seeking Behaviour in a Digital Environment: bouncers, checkers, returners, and the like, Journal of Documentation, 60(1), 24-43.

Ritchie, A.; Teufel, S.; Robertson, S. (2006): Creating a Test Collection for Citation-based IR Experiments. Proceedings of the Main Conference on Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics, 391–398.

Sahal, A.A.; Wyatt, S.; Passi, S.; Scharnhorst, A. (2013): Mapping EINS - An exercise in mapping the Network of Excellence in Internet Science. Conference Proceedings of the First International Conference on Internet Science, Brussels, 75-78.

Skupin, A.; Biberstine, J.R.; Börner, K. (2013): Visualizing the Topical Structure of the Medical Sciences: A Self-Organizing Map Approach. PLoS ONE 8 (3): e58779.

Shiffrin, R.; Börner, Katy (2004): Mapping Knowledge Domains. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 101(Suppl. 1).

Tang, M. (2007): Browsing and Searching in a Faceted Information Space: a naturalistic study of PubMed users' interaction with a display tool, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(13), 1998-2006.

Westerman, S.J.; Collins, J.; Cribbin, T. (2005): Browsing a Document Collection Represented in Two- and Three-dimensional Virtual Information Space, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 62(6), 713-736.