September 1st, 2009, Redondo Beach, California, USA

Social media on the internet are rapidly gaining importance and their use starts being perceived as the true value of the World Wide Web as a social space where users can interact and share their interests and opinions with others. Social media come in various forms, the most prominent are:

• Weblogs provide commentaries on a particular subject or personal online diaries.
• Chat-rooms and social messaging enable people to exchange messages in real time.
• Forums provide a space for more detailed discussions on certain topics.
• Wikis collect and provide jointly created content on a topic of interest.
• Opinion portals provide special platforms for discussing opinions about services, products or events
• social networking platforms provide an infrastructure for establishing
• communities of interest around certain topics.

Some systems like wikipedia, twitter or xing have become major sources of information both of factual knowledge and of opinions which can provide important background knowledge for a multitude of applications such as web search, semantic question answering or product selection.

In order to make use of the information stored in social media special analysis techniques are needed, that are tailored to the special character of social online media. While techniques from natural language processing, data mining and network analysis in principle provide a tools for executing such analysis, the actual analysis is often hampered by the use of Jargon as well as non-standard grammar. Further, social media often contain subjective information from different sources which is often inaccurate, inconsistent and reflects a personal opinion.

The goal of this workshop is on the one hand to discuss the benefits of using information from social media for different kinds of applications and on the other hand to analyze problems in the design and application of analysis methods to social media as well as possible solutions to these problems. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Metadata and semantic Models of and for social media
• Information Extraktion from Blogs, forums and chats
• Opinion Mining and sentiment analysis
• Trend detection and monitoring, meme tracking
• Visualization of social media contents
• Social Network Analysis of Online Communities
• Using Wiki-Contents (i.e. Wikipedia) as Background Knowledge for Information retrieval, ontology Matching and question answering
• Applications of social media analysis in science and business

We invite all kinds of contributions from theoretical research papers to application papers reporting success stories or even failures as well as brief statements of interest. Full papers should not exceed 8 pages according to the AAAI conference style. Style files for latex and Word can be optained from the K-CAP 2009 web page. PDF-Versions of Papers should be send by email to Heiner Stuckenschmidt

Papers due:     June 15, 2009
Notification:          July 15, 2009
Camera-ready:  August 1, 2009

Heiner Stuckenschmidt (main contact)

University of Mannheim
A5, 6, 68159 Mannheim, Germany
http://ki.informatik.uni-mannheim.de

Vivi Nastase

EML Research gGmbH
Schloss-Wolfsbrunnenweg 33
69118 Heidelberg, Germany
http://www.eml-r.org/english/homes/nastase/

Frederico Freitas

Centro de Informática
Av. Luis Freire s/n,
Cidade Universitária - 50740-540 - Recife , Brazil

• Rabeeh Abbasi, University of Koblenz, Germany
• Sofia Angeletou, Open University, UK
• Paul Buitelaar, DERI Galway, Ireland
• Kai Eckert, University of Mannheim, Germany
• Frederico Freitas, University of Pernambuco at Recife, Brasil
• Beate Krause, University of Kassel, Germany
• Gustavo Lugo, Technical University of Parana, Brasil
• Vivi Nastase, EML Research gGmbH, Germany
• Simone Paolo Ponzetto, University of Heidelberg, Germany
• Maarten de Rijke, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands
• Marta Sabou, Open University, UK
• Heiner Stuckenschmidt, University of Mannheim, Germany
• ...