Semantic Methods for Events and Stories (SEMMES) 2024 Pasquale Lisena1 , Simon Gottschalk2 and Inès Blin3,4 1 EURECOM, Sophia Antipolis, France 2 L3S Research Center, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany 3 Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands 4 Sony Computer Science Laboratories-Paris, Paris, France Abstract 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. Keywords Semantic Web, Events, Stories, Narratives 1. Introduction 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 event- centric 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 struc- tured 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-Open 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) © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). CEUR Workshop Proceedings http://ceur-ws.org ISSN 1613-0073 CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org) CEUR ceur-ws.org Workshop ISSN 1613-0073 Proceedings 2. Overview on the Program 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 impor- tance 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 Tan et al. introduced A Semantic Representation of Pedestrian Crossing Behavior, proposing an RDF representation of the latter in order to help systems in predicting future ones. Guillem Anais et al. presented their work for representing and visualising the different possible alterna- tives in the reconstruction of the destroyed parts of Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, titled Let the fallen voussoirs of Notre-Dame de Paris speak: Scientific Narration and 3D Visualization of Virtual Reconstruction Hypotheses and Reasoning; this work has been awarded with the best paper award of the workshop. The GOLEM Triple Store: A Graph-based Representation of Narrative and Fiction has been presented by Franziska Pannach et al. as a way to represent fanfictions as pieces of cultural heritage in evolution. Cosimo Palma presented a way to compute interestingness with formal metrics proposed in Modelling Interestingness: a Workflow for Surprisal-based Knowledge Mining in Narrative Semantic Networks. Lastly, Myrto Koukouli et al. presented their work on storytelling in the cultural domain called Creating and applying a data model for an Augmented Documentation of Cultural Heritage. 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/. Acknowledgments 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. References [1] R. Piryani, N. Aussenac-Gilles, N. J. Hernandez, Comprehensive Survey on Ontologies about Event, in: Semantic Methods for Events and Stories (SEMMES), volume 3443, ceur-ws.org, Hersonissos, Greece, 2023, pp. 1–15. [2] M. Rospocher, M. van Erp, P. Vossen, et al., Building Event-centric Knowledge Graphs from News, Journal of Web Semantics 37-38 (2016) 132–151. [3] S. Gottschalk, E. Demidova, EventKG – the Hub of Event Knowledge on the Web – and Biographical Timeline Generation, Semantic Web 10 (2019) 1039–1070. [4] P. Lisena, I. Tiddi, S. Gottschalk, L. Steels, Semantic Methods for Events and Stories, in: ESWC 2023 Workshops and Tutorials Joint Proceedings, Hersonissos, Greece, 2023. [5] M. van Erp, V. de Boer, A Polyvocal and Contextualised Semantic Web, in: The Semantic Web, Springer International Publishing, Cham, 2021, pp. 506–512.