IST Project WEBKIT (IST-2001-34171)

WEBKIT is a 24-month EU funded IST project. The 9 European partners involved in the project will create an object-based interface using RFID (radio frequency identification) tags, communicating with a remote server to retrieve information stored centrally or on the WWW. Users will trigger searches by the selection and positioning of tagged objects on a reader device. The semantics of object-based searching and the interrelationship of objects to create complex queries will be a major part of the work. Cognitive psychology, industrial design and systems engineering will be combined to create an interface that is ergonomic, robust and fun to use.

The University of Strathclyde will be mainly involved in designing and developing a suite of back-end technologies for content-based information searching and retrieval that will be integrated to interpret the commands and queries constructed by the user multimodal interface. Further work will address personalisation of the interface, through both explicit and implicit profiling and the use of agent technologies, in order to allow the system to automatically respond to the needs of individual users. In addition, we will investigate how information retrieved from disparate sources can be ranked and presented to the user in a meaningful and relevant way.

At the Department of Computer and Information Sciences of the University of Strathclyde we are looking for a Research Assistant/Fellow to join the project. The successful candidate should have a post graduate degree
(Masters or PhD) with experience in Information Systems, Digital Libraries, and/or Information Retrieval. The salary will be highly competitive.

It is expected that the project will start very soon (possibly April 1st) and a formal job advert will go out at a later date, however, those interested in the prospective job are strongly encouraged to send their CVs and reason for applying to Prof. Fabio Crestani
f.crestani@cis.strath.ac.uk as soon as possible.

Prof. Fabio Crestani                              tel: +44 141 548 4303
Dept. of Computer and Information Sciences        fax: +44 141 552 5330
University of Strathclyde            email: F.Crestani@cis.strath.ac.uk
Glasgow G1 1XH, Scotland, UK http://www.cs.strath.ac.uk/~fabioc

Chair Of Computing

School of Computing,
University of LEEDS,
Yorkshire, England

Application packs from:
Ann Milner, Administrative Officer,
Human Resources,
University of Leeds,
Leeds
LS2 9JT,
Tel: (0113) 233 5775,
E-mail: a.e.milner@leeds.ac.uk

Job ref: 048-177-002-001.
Closing date: 15 April 2002.

Informal enquiries to:
Professor Tony Cohn,
Tel: (0113) 233 5482,
Fax: 0113 233 5468,
E-mail agc@comp.leeds.ac.uk .

For further information about the School and the Informatics Research Institute respectively see:
http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk
And
http://www.iri.leeds.ac.uk

III Notices

III.1 Publications

Google currently offers many interface languages

Google currently offers many interface languages including indo-european languages (Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Pendjabi, Tamoul, Telegu, Ourdou, Bihari...), asian and even north-european language Frisian !
Here there's a page which offers a complete list of language and countries supported by Google :
http://c.asselin.free.fr/french/googleinternational.htm

JASIST Special Issue on Webometrics

Call For Papers
Submission deadline June 30, 2003

The next Special Topics Issue of Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) is scheduled to come out in late 2004 on the topic of webometrics. The guest editors for this special
issue will be Mike Thelwall of The University of Wolverhampton, UK, and Liwen Vaughan of The University of Western Ontario, Canada.

Webometrics, the quantitative study of web phenomena, encompasses a variety of types of research, some of which date back to the early years of the Web although the widespread adoption of the term itself is relatively new. The dynamic, diversified and far-reaching nature of the Web provides a fertile ground for knowledge discovery. Frequencies and patterns of word and phrase usage on web pages can provide valuable information for search algorithms. The selective coverage of web sites by search engines reflects favor toward certain communities and bias against others. Use of query terms reflects issues of interest and concern to people. The size and structure of web sites around the world can provide extensive social, cultural, economic and political information. Web links, although individually less reliable sources of information than bibliographic citations, may reveal significant trends when aggregated over large areas of the Web.

This issue will provide a forum for a broad spectrum of scholars to compile a body of research that begins to cement these emerging areas into a coherent field. It will also serve as a tribute to Tomas Almind who originated the term webometrics with Peter Ingwersen and who died in an accident before he could see the influence of his ideas. It is envisaged that future progress of webometrics will prove the Web to be one of the most valuable mainstream data sources for information science.

Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
Structures, patterns and topologies of hyperlinks on the Web
Methodological issues pertaining to the use of search engines, crawlers, and other online tools for data collection
Motives for the creation of hyperlinks
Categorization of web page types and content.
Social, cultural, and linguistic factors in Web use
Frequency distributions of web query terms
The application of webometrics to information retrieval research
Web impact measurements
Mapping web communities and relationships
Applying and extending bibliometric and scientometric techniques onto the study of the Web

The guest editors seek papers that address these and related topics. The quantitative orientation of Webometrics does not preclude the use of qualitative methods when appropriate. Inquires can be made to Mike Thelwall: m.thelwall@wlv.ac.uk
Or Liwen Vaughan: lvaughan@uwo.ca Manuscripts can be submitted in electronic form (Word or PDF) to either guest editor or in print form (four copies of full articles) to:

Dr. Liwen Vaughan
Faculty of Information and Media Studies
University of Western Ontario
London, Ontario, N6A 5B7
Canada
Phone: (519) 661-2111 ext. 88499
Fax: (519) 661-3506
E-mail: lvaughan@uwo.ca

The deadline for accepting manuscripts for consideration for publication in this special issue is June 30, 2003. Authors are requested to notify the guest editors of their intent to submit prior to submitting a paper. The guest editors will be happy to provide advice on the suitability of topics if needed.

All manuscripts will be reviewed by a select panel of referees, and those accepted will be published in a special issue of JASIST. Original artwork and a signed copy of the copyright release form will be required for all accepted papers. A copy of the call for papers will be available on the World Wide Web as is further information about JASIST, at http://www.asis.org/.

World Wide Web Journal

http://www.kluweronline.com/issn/1386-145X

World Wide Web: Internet and Web Information Systems
Volume 4, Number 3, 2001
------------------------
Table of Contents

pp. 147-149
Special Issue on The 2nd Web Information Systems Engineering Conference
(WISE'01)
Tamer Oszu, Hans-Jorg Schek, Katsumi Tanaka & Yanchun Zhang

pp. 151-166
XForms in X-Smiles
Mikko Honkala, Petri Vuorimaa

pp. 167-187
Algebraic XML Construction and its Optimization in Natix
Thorsten Fiebig, Guido Moerkotte

pp. 189-207
A Probabilistic Approach for Distillation and Ranking of Web Pages
Gianluigi Greco, Sergio Greco, Ester Zumpano

pp. 209-230
Middle-Tier Extensible Data Management
Brian F. Cooper, Neal Sample, Michael J. Franklin, Joshua Olshansky,
Moshe
Shadmon

World Wide Web: Internet and Web Information Systems
Volume 4, Number 4, 2001
---------------------------

Table of Contents

pp. 235-254
Design and Implementation of PKI-based End-to-End Secure
Infrastructure for Mobile E-Commerce
Samuel T. Chanson and Tin-Wo Cheung

pp. 255-276
Scalable Federation of Web Cache Servers
A. Belloum, L.O. Hertzberger and H. Muller

pp. 277-298
Proxy Cache Replacement Algorithms: A History-Based Approach
Athena Vakali

pp. 299-321
Integrating Web Prefetching Using Prediction Models
Qiang Yang and Henry Hanning Zhang

III.2 Meetings

Fifth International Conference on TEXT, SPEECH and DIALOGUE (TSD 2002)

Brno, Czech Republic, 9-12 September 2002
Second Announcement And Call For Papers

Important Dates
Submission of full papers and short papers (submitting a paper is considered as preliminary registration):
April 5, 2002.
Notification of acceptance sent to the authors:
May 7, 2002.
Final papers (camera ready) and registration:
May 31, 2002.
Submission of demonstration papers:
July 31, 2002.
Conference date:
September 9-12, 2002.

Address:
All correspondence regarding the conference should be addressed to:

Dana Komarkova
TSD 2002 Faculty of Informatics
Masaryk University
Botanickل 68a
CZ-602 00 Brno
Czech Republic
Telephone: +420 5 41 512 359
Fax: +420 5 41 212 568
E-mail: mailto:tsd2002@fi.muni.cz > tsd2002@fi.muni.cz
The official TSD 2002 homepage is:
http://www.fi.muni.cz/tsd2002/>http://www.fi.muni.cz/tsd2002/

Symposium on Document Engineering 2002

McLean, VA (near Washington, DC)
November 8-9, 2002

Held in conjunction with the:
11th Intl Conf on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM '02)
Sponsored by ACM SIGIR and ACM SIGMIS (pending approval)

Call for Papers

Important dates
Abstracts due: May 24, 2002
Full papers due: May 31, 2002
Acceptance notice by: July 26, 2002
Revised versions: August 30, 2002
http://www.sdml.cs.kent.edu/doceng2002/

HLT 2002, Human Language Technology Conference

Next Sunday March 24-27, 2002
Catamaran Resort Hotel,
San Diego,
California
Final Call For Attendance

Space still available
http://hlt2002.org

ACM CIKM 2002

Eleventh International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
Call For Papers
November 4 -9, 2002
SAIC Headquarters,
McLean,
Virginia, USA
Sponsored by ACM SIGIR and ACM SIGMIS

Important dates:
May 20, 2002 Electronic abstract due
May 27, 2002 Full paper submission due
Aug. 5, 2002 Notification of acceptance
Sept. 3, 2002 Camera ready copy due
May 27, 2002 Workshop Proposals
July 30, 2002 Tutorial Proposals
http://www.cikm.org/2002

The Cross-Language Evaluation Forum Interactive Track

Call for Participation

The Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2002 will include an interactive track (iCLEF) for comparative evaluation of interactive cross-language retrieval systems.

Participating teams may choose to focus on one of three tasks:
Interactive query translation, in which improved translations developed through user-machine interaction serve as a basis for ranking documents in order of likely relevance.

Interactive document selection, in which translated documents or document surrogates (e.g., translated summaries) are used as a basis for identifying truly relevant documents among those that are highly ranked by a retrieval system.

Iterative refinement, in which searchers iteratively pose queries and examine documents, with the goal of producing the best possible result set.

Researchers with interests in machine translation, document summarization, and/or cross-language information retrieval are invited to participate. Each participating research team will adapt a common user study design to their specific interests. Participating teams may choose to work with documents that will be provided in English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, or Spanish and with topic descriptions that will be provided in any of those languages or in Chinese, Dutch, Japanese, Russian, Swedish or Thai. Results submitted by each participating team on 15 June 2002 will be presented at the CLEF workshop in Rome on 19-20 September 2002.

The track guidelines, along with other information, are available from the iCLEF Web site: http://terral.lsi.uned.es/iCLEF/2002

Interested parties should contact the track organizers as soon as possible:

Julio Gonzalo (UNED Madrid) julio@lsi.uned.es

Doug Oard (University of Maryland) oard@glue.umd.edu

Event Modelling for Multilingual Document Linking LREC 2002 Workshop

2nd June 2002, Las Palmas, Canary Islands – Spain
Call for Papers
Extended Deadline for Submission

Important Dates
Deadline for workshop abstract submission: 20th of March 2002
Notification of acceptance: 27th of March 2002
Final version of paper for proceedings: 15th of April 2002
Workshop: 2nd of June 2002
http://www.lrec-conf.org/lrec2002/

A Roadmap for Computational Linguistics

Saturday, August 31 2002
Workshop in conjunction with COLING 2002
(August 24 - September 1, 2002, Taipei, Taiwan)
Organized by ELSNET

First announcement and call for papers and other contributions
Deadline for Submissions: Fri 26 April 2002
Notification of Acceptance for papers, panels and rapporteurs: Fri 24, May 2002
Final Versions of Papers Due: Fri 28 June 2002
Workshop: Sat 31 August 2002

Registration and other information
Registration details and other information will be published on the main conference website: http://www.coling2002.sinica.edu.tw/
The URL for this workshop is
http://www.elsnet.org/roadmap-coling2002.html

AAAI-02 Workshop

On Agent-based Systems for Information Retrieval
July 28/29, 2002
Shaw Convention Centre
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Call for Papers/Participation
Submission Deadline Extended To March 31

Important dates:
3/31/2002: Submissions due. (Extended - was 3/15)
4/19/2002: Notification of Acceptance sent.
5/3/2002: Camera-ready copies due.
7/(28 or 29)/2002: Symposium.

For further information visit the following URL:
http://www.csee.umbc.edu/conferences/aaai02ws/

Second Workshop on Computational Terminology COMPUTERM'02

Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan
31 August 2002

Call For Papers
Important dates:
Deadline for paper submission: 5 May 2002
Notification of acceptance: 15 June 2002
Final camera-ready copy due: 1 July 2002
COMPUTERM'2002 workshop: 31 August 2002

Inquiries:
Should you have any inquiries, please contact Kyo Kageura at: kyo@nii.ac.jp
Computerm02 Webpage:
http://www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/info/recherche/Theme_TALN/cfpComputerm02.html

SPIRE 2002 - String Processing and Information Retrieval

September 11-13, 2002
Lisbon, Portugal
Call For Papers

Important Dates
Paper submission: April 12th, 2002
Authors notification: May 24th, 2002
Camera ready copies due: June 21st, 2002

For further inquires, please contact the Program Committee Chair:
Alberto Laender
Computer Science Department
Federal University of Minas Gerais
31270-901 - Belo Horizonte - MG
Brazil
Email: laender@dcc.ufmg.br
http://www.inesc-id.pt/spire2002

Third International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning (IDEAL'02)

12-14 August 2002
Manchester, UK
Proceedings to be published by Springer-Verlag in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series.
Final Call For Papers

Important Dates
Submission of Paper 1 March 2002
Notification of Acceptance 20 April 2002
Final Camera-Ready Paper 1 June 2002

Contact Information
IDEAL 2002 Secretariat
Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Electronics
UMIST
PO Box 88
Manchester, M60 1QD, England
Tel: +44 (0) 161 200 8714
Fax: +44 (0) 161 200 4784
http://ideal02.ee.umist.ac.uk
Email: ideal@umist.ac.uk

Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services IIWAS2002

The forth-International Conference
10-12 September 2002
Bandung, Indonesia.

Important Dates
April 1, 2002: Proposals for panels, tutorials, invited sessions due
May 1, 2002: Abstracts Submissions due
June 4, 2002: Paper Submissions Due
July 14, 2002: Notice of Acceptance/Rejection
August 1, 2002: Online Pre-Registration Starts
August 7, 2002: Camera-Ready Papers Due
September 10-12, 2002: Conference
Conference Website:
http://iiwas.comp.nus.edu.sg

IV Projects

Release 2.0 of GATE, A General Architecture for Text Engineering

Release 2.0 of GATE, A General Architecture for Text Engineering, is now available for download from:
http://gate.ac.uk/

GATE is an architecture, development and framework (or SDK) for building systems that process human language. It has been in development at the University of Sheffield since 1995, and has been used for many R&D projects, including Information Extraction in multiple languages and for multiple tasks and clients.

GATE is free software under the GNU library licence. Version 2 has been completely redeveloped in Java, and is a stable, robust, and scalable infrastructure for Natural Language Processing, which allows users to focus on NLP tasks, while mundane tasks like data storage, format analysis, data visualisation are handled by GATE. The new version has NLP components that will enable you to reliably process documents, including Web documents supplied as URLs, and obtain information such as the sentences they contain, person names, organisations, etc., etc. This is based on a set of reusable NLP components, which you can also use outside
GATE by embedding them into your own applications (e.g. a news indexing service). GATE also provides standard tools for manual annotation and performance evaluation, which are essential during application development. GATE and its NLP components have been successfully used in a large number of research projects and commercial applications.

A summary of features:

An architecture that describes NLP systems (including embedded systems) as components, and that defines a set of use cases for NLP infrastructure
A framework, or class library, that implements the architecture
A graphical development environment built on the framework re-taskable components (beans), inc. GUI components
Web-loaded components (HTTP, XML config)
Distributed data (JDBC)
Annotation model: "standoff markup", isomorphic with ATLAS, typing based on XSchema
Annotation differences viewer and automated measurement of accuracy
XML I/O, XML system configuration Run-time interoperation with e.g. XSLT or X-PATH (via re-positioning info)
JAPE, a pattern language for FST over annotation
ANNIE, A Nearly-New Information Extraction system for English

To contact the GATE project mail
gate-crashers@dcs.shef.ac.uk
or see the support page
http://gate.ac.uk/support.html

Dr. Hamish Cunningham
Department of Computer Science
University of Sheffield, UK
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~hamish

Tony Kent Strix Award

Nominations for the 2002 Award are now invited, and should be sent, with full supporting documentation to:

Alan Gilchrist,
Editor, Journal of Information Science,
32 Friar Road,
Brighton
BN1 6NH.
UK

The closing date for nominations is Friday 16th June.

Notes
The Strix Award is in memory of Dr Tony Kent, a past Fellow of the Institute of Information Scientists, who died in 1997. Tony made a major contribution to the development of information science and information services in the UK and internationally, particularly in the field of chemistry.

The Award is given in recognition of an outstanding practical innovation or achievement in the field of information retrieval. This could take the form of an application or service, or an overall appreciation of past achievements from which significant advances have emanated. The Award is open to individuals or groups from anywhere in the world.

Nominations will be judged by a panel of experts, and the statuette of an owl will be presented to the winner in September.

The name Strix was chosen both to reflect Tony's interest in ornithology, and the name of one of the last and most successful information retrieval packages, which he created.

3 years research Assistant Post in GIS and IR

SPIRIT is a 36-month EU funded 6-partner project investigating the application of geographical information (GIS) to enhance text-based information retrieval (IR) systems. Sheffield's part in the project is to adapt an existing retrieval system to search a 1Tb Web collection using a cluster of coordinated Unix/Linux machines (probably a Beowulf cluster); find means of evaluating the accuracy of the searching system; and integrate GIS information into the text searching system.

The successful candidate should have a post graduate degree (Masters or PhD) with experience in either Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and/or Information Retrieval (IR). Strong undergraduate students with a Computer Science degree interested in pursuing a PhD should also apply.

It is expected that the project will start in June and a formal job advert will go out at a later date, however, those interested in the prospective job are encouraged to send their CVs and reason for applying to:
Mark Sanderson: m.sanderson@shef.ac.uk as soon as possible.

Workshop on Multilingual Summarization and Question Answering 2002

(Post-conference workshop to be held in conjunction with COLING-2002)
August 31 and September 1, 2002 (1 and half days)
Taipei, Taiwan
Preliminary CFP
Deadlines:
Paper submission deadline: May 6, 2002
Notification of acceptance for papers: June 17, 2002
Camera ready papers due: July 1, 2002
Workshop date: August 31 and September 1, 2002 (1and half days)