Solving these problems requires new solutions on the intersection of data integration, multi-domain search, deep web extraction, and information extraction. In this edition, a particular focus is the construction of search services and knowledge bases from unstructured web data and the deep web.
http://vlds.search-computing.org
Recent years witnessed an exponential growth of data providers available on the Web. These providers offer a plethora of different ways of accessing their data sources, spanning from APIs over proprietary query languages (such as Yahoo! Query Language, YQL) to endpoints accessible through standard query languages (e.g., SPARQL). At the same time, data is increasingly being labeled, tagged, and linked with existing data, partially due to social networking applications. These data sources expose their data as semi-structured information and an increasing number also provide the information in the linked data cloud, with URI-based references between resources. Linked Open Data (LOD) emerges as a best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge.
This is a major change of paradigm. On one side, this augments the power of search methods which access and query information with respect to the old-fashioned page based Web paradigm. On the other side, though, this challenges the current information retrieval, data integration, and Web search practices to comply with the new shape and capabilities of new Web data sources. Searching for data upon such new, Web-enabled data sources has the potential of reshaping the scenario of current Web applications, going beyond the capabilities of conventional search engines in solving search problems, but it also presents new technical challenges, for search as well as for surfacing techniques. Current web pages all to often stick with the old-fashioned page-based Web paradigm. Therefore, methods for turning such web pages into search services or other forms of knowledge are very much necessary for search services to be universally useful.
This years’ VLDS workshop gathers, as in previous years, leading researchers and practitioners in the diverse fields related to data integration, deep web search, and the construction of knowledge bases from the web with the purpose of discussing innovative strategies for combining search facilities with integration aspects for Web data sources. The workshop represents a unique venue for discussing all the aspects related to the surfacing, publication, and orchestration of services over new Web data sources, the most suitable paradigms to improve the user experience in context, as well as the application scenarios which may better benefit of these new technologies. VLDS’12. Istanbul, August 31st, 2012.
Copyright c 2012 for the individual papers by the papers’ authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes. This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors. 3.
We wish to thank the PC members that contributed to the success of the workshop by carefully reviewing the submitted papers and providing the authors with useful suggestions for improving the papers:
Robert Baumgartner Lixto Software GmbH Michael Benedikt Oxford University Florian Daniel University of Trento Anish Das Sarma Google Research Arjen de Vries CWI Sergio Flesca DEIS - University of Calabria Alejandro Jaimes Yahoo! Research Arnd Christian Ko¨ nig Microsoft Research Jens Lehmann Universita¨t Leipzig Ioana Manolescu INRIA Saclay–ˆIle-de-France and LRI,
Universite´ Paris Sud-11 Hamid Motahari HP Labs Neoklis Polyzotis University of California Santa Cruz David Robertson University of Edinburgh Mike Rosner University of Malta Sebastian Schaffert Salzburg Research Forschungsgesellschaft Klara Weiand University of Munich Gerhard Weikum KPI Clement Yu University of Illinois at Chicago We also wish to thank the additional reviewers that kindly helped to PC to select the best papers for VLDS 2012.
The workshop received about 15 submissions, of which only about 50% (7 papers) have been accepted. For the workshop, the papers are divided into three sessions on “Web Knowledge Bases”, “Deep Web”, and “Wrappers”. These papers are joined by two invited keynotes by Gerhard Weikum (Max-Planck-Institut, Germany) and Raghu Ramakrishnan (Microsoft).
Marilena Oita, Antoine Amarilli and Pierre Senellart
Cross-Fertilizing Deep Web Analysis and Ontology Enrichment Jianfeng Si, Qing Li, Tieyun Qian and Xiaotie Deng
Hierarchical Clustering on HDP Topics to build a Semantic Tree from Text Ndapandula Nakashole, Mauro Sozio, Fabian Suchanek and Martin Theobald
Query-Time Reasoning in Uncertain RDF Knowledge Bases with Soft and Hard Rules
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This workshop was partially supported by the Search Computing project (SeCo, http://www.search-computing.org) and by the DIADEM project (DIADEM, http://diadem.cs.ox.ac.uk), both funded by the ERC under the Advanced Grant programme. We would also like to thank Sun SITE Central Europe for hosting these proceedings on http://ceur-ws.org.