The aim of the Workshop on Semantic Methods for Events and Stories (SEMMES) was to offer an opportunity to discuss the challenges related to dealing with events and stories, and how we can use semantic methods to tackle them, also in combination with methods from other fields, including machine learning, narratology or information extraction.
In this second edition of the workshop, large space has been given to the study of alternative and multiple directions that a story can take, in different domain such as Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage, but also in Smart Cities scenarios.
Representing and instantiating events has always been a crucial task for the Semantic Web community, with some relevant contributions such as specialised ontologies [1] and eventcentric knowledge graphs [2] such as EventKG, which serve as data models and resources of event knowledge [3]. While several workshops recently focused on events, stories and their coverage in the news from different angles, SEMMES specifically wants to bring these topics into the Semantic Web community. We addressed works which use semantic formalisms and technologies to solve challenges related to events, stories and narratives. Semantically structured information can bring an essential contribution to AI applications involving generating, managing and understanding events and stories, also in combination with other techniques. With this workshop, we intended to come closer to understand events and stories and thus the world that is formed by them. This has been the second edition of the workshop, after a first one held at ESWC 2023 [4].
ESWC 2024 Workshops and Tutorials Joint Proceedings, May 28-29, Heraklion, Greece Envelope pasquale.lisena@eurecom.fr (P. Lisena); gottschalk@l3s.de (S. Gottschalk); i.blin@vu.nl (I. Blin) GLOBE http://pasqlisena.github.io/ (P. Lisena); https://personal.l3s.uni-hannover.de/~gottschalk/ (S. Gottschalk); https://inesblin.github.io/ (I. Blin) Orcid 0000-0003-3094-5585 (P. Lisena); 0000-0003-2576-4640 (S. Gottschalk); 0000-0003-0956-9466 (I. Blin)
The workshop has been held on May 29th, 2023, opened by the keynote talk "More than one side to every story" of our invited speaker Victor de Boer, Associate Professor (UHD) at the User-Centric Data Science group at the Computer Science department of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) and a co-director of the Cultural AI Lab. The keynote highlighted the importance of polyvocality, i.e. the need to go beyond the common version of the information that we have in our system, embracing different points of view and a multiplicity of interpretations [5].
The workshop has been followed by the presentation of 5 papers, of which 3 long papers and 2 short papers, organised in two sessions.
He The workshop attracted over 20 attendees in this edition. Details about the workshop, including the Program Committee, are available at https://anr-kflow.github.io/semmes/.
This workshop has been partially supported by the French National Research Agency (ANR) within the kFLOW project (Grant n°ANR-21-CE23-0028), the MUHAI project (Horizon 2020, Grant n°951846) and the Sony Computer Science Laboratories-Paris.