The following workshop announcement may be of interest.

Daniel Greenstein
Director, DLF


               C A L L   F O R   C O N T R I B U T I O N S


              First DELOS Network of Excellence Workshop on

   "Information Seeking, Searching and Querying in Digital Libraries"

      Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Switzerland,
                         11-12 December, 2000

              jointly sponsored by the European Commission
        under the DELOS Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries
                and the National Science Foundation (NSF)


The question of how to extract useful information from a Digital Library
is crucial. Recently, a number of paradigms and approaches for doing so
have been devised. These include, for instance,

- similarity search, based on one or several high-dimensional feature
   representations; approximative evaluation techniques for similarity
   queries,
- semistructured data models and respective query mechanisms,
- information retrieval based on vague query formulation and
   uncertain document representations, considering document structure
   and hyperlinks,
- approaches to cluster documents based on content and other novel IR
   techniques,
- relevance feedback and other interaction mechanisms for supporting
   implicit query reformulation, both for text and multimedia document
   collections.

These approaches are currently maturing. However, query evaluation
schemes based on only one such approach are not always sufficient to
cover an information need. Instead, it is promising to integrate the
different approaches to obtain better results, though there are a
number of open problems, in particular
- semantics of such complex queries,
- good models for relevance feedback,
- efficient evaluation, be it over independent components, be it in a
more monolithic setting,
- quality aspects, e.g., which combination of techniques yields better
results under which circumstances,
- user interfaces to formulate complex similarity queries and to
express relevance feedback,
- system support, architectural and implementation issues.

The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers and
practitioners interested in Digital Libraries to present and discuss
recent results as well as future research directions. The workshop will
feature invit ed talks by the following speakers:

              Bruce Croft (U Mass., USA)

              Ophir Frieder (IIT, USA)

              John R. Smith (IBM Research, USA)

Furthermore, it will consist of presentations of accepted submissions
and demo sessions. Ample time will be allowed for discussion of the
issues raised.

We invite contributions in the form of position papers addressing topics
relevant to the theme of the workshop.


Submissions:

Short position paper (2 pages) outlining the work or ideas to be presented.

To: [log in to unmask]
Before: 29 September 2000
Format: plain text or HTML

Notification of acceptance will be e-mailed by 6 November 2000.

Each presentation should provide a technical note of not more than five
or six pages by 22 November. The final programme with workshop project
notes will be posted on the web by 30 November. Revised versions of the
technical notes will be published in the workshop proceedings.


Formatting instructions:

              size:       A4
              format:     ps, pdf, HTML or MS Word (rtf)
              borders:    top, left, right 2.5 cm; bottom 3 cm
              title:      Times 14 pt bold centered
              author(s):  Times 10 pt centered
              abstract:   Times 10 pt justified
              body text:  Times 10 pt justified
              headlines:  Times 12 pt bold left aligned
              emphasis:   Times 10 pt italic



The workshop will be held in the premises of the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology Zurich, Switzerland, 11-12 December, 2000.

Information on registration and hotel reservations will be available
shortly.

Any enquiries should be addressed to:
Antoinette Foerster
ETH Zurich
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel: ++41 1 63 27241



This workshop is an activity of the DELOS Network of Excellence on
Digital Libraries funded by the European Union. The workshop is also
supported by NSF. See http://www.ercim.org/delos/ for more information
on DELOS in general and http://www.lib.uoa.gr/delos for more
information on the DELOS Thematic Workshop Series of the Research
Forum.

DELOS will be able to reimburse the costs of one or more researchers per
DELOS member. For non-DELOS members, partial reimbursement will depend on
availability of funds.



ORGANIZING COMMITTEE:

Klemens Böhm (ETH Zurich, Switzerland; co-chair)
Ophir Frieder (IIT, USA)
Norbert Fuhr (U Dortmund, Germany)
Preben Hansen (SICS, Sweden)
Silvia Hollfelder (GMD-IPSI, Germany)
Yannis Ioannidis (U Athens, Greece)
Daniel Keim (U Halle, Germany)
Wolfgang Klas (U Vienna, Austria)
Tamer Ozsu (U Waterloo, Canada)
Fausto Rabitti (CNR, Italy)
M.V. Ramakrishna (Monash Univ., Australia)
Ron Sacks-Davis (RMIT, Australia)
Giuseppe Santucci (U. of Rome, Italy)
Hans Schek (ETH Zurich, Switzerland; co-chair)
Pavel Zezula (U Brno, Czech Republic)