CyberInfrastructure: Information Management in eScience

CyberInfrastructure: Information Management in eScience (CIMS)

Collocated with ACM CIKM 2007, Lisboa, Portugal, Nov. 9th, 2007

Paper Submission Site: http://www.easychair.org/CIMS07

New Submission Deadline: 15th August

The CIMS workshop seeks to be a forum for interaction, discussion, and exchange of novel ideas and results for scientists, and technologists engaged in research and development of cyberinfrastructure for scientific communities. We expect researchers to interact and advance the state-of-the art in algorithms, systems architectures and exchange platforms for scientific information, especially, in the form of (but not limited to) data and digital documents. The focus will be on scientific domains that employ automated or semi-automated tools to share and disseminate the data to the public domain. While we welcome research papers on individual components of a cyberinfrastructure, (a) a systematic integration architecture is missing, and (b) several challenge problems still require substantial research efforts. We list a sample of the research challenges below:

Interoperability: In attempting to build a robust cyberinfrastructure, a problem that is still a major impediment is the issue of interoperability. In the sciences, this problem is even more acute because of the various data formats and structures used by different communities that could benefit by exchanging data. Aggravating the problem is the lack of standard data formats. Different tools used by different practitioners produce data in different formats. Data exchange is also hampered because of different protocols and incompatible interfaces. We encourage submissions from researchers proposing solutions to a wide range of issues related to data interoperation and information sharing.

Security: Although in some sciences, the data is often made freely available, the adoption and use of the cyberinfrastructure will be more widespread if it can ensure the security of the data and documents. Publishers of the data can then retain control of their data and decide whom to share the data with. Secure sharing of data and information is an important priority for eScience projects.

Metadata Extraction: To enable meaningful searches from the data and to help machine processing of the data and the documents residing in the repositories connected by the cyberinfrastructure, one must deploy metadata. Automatic metadata extraction and creation is an important problem that must be addressed to improve the quality of the information served to the end-user. Good metadata is also a vital cog for enabling interoperation. Researchers have utilized techniques from machine-learning, pattern recognition, data mining and text mining, information theory, etc. to derive meaningful metadata corresponding to data and documents. Extracting metadata from large scale scientific data is a challenging problem that must be resolved to enable progress in the eSciences. To augment the effort to automatically harvest the metadata, efforts are on to design schemes to collect metadata directly from the publishers of the data and using user collaboration. Communities are building domain-specific ontologies to specify the semantics of concepts and their relationships. Advances in the creation and maintenance of metadata for cyberinfrastructure will be discussed in the workshop.

The topics of interest for CIMS include (but are not certainly limited to):

--- Federated databases

--- Data interoperation

--- Scientific data warehouses

--- Access control and security

--- Knowledge representation and management

--- Ontology creation and reuse

--- Ontology mapping and management

--- Automatic metadata extraction

--- Information extraction

--- Scientific data Mining

--- Creation and maintainance of Digital Libraries

--- Crawling, indexing and search

--- Digital preservation

--- Web services and workflows

--- Simulations and analytic tools

--- Scientific data visualization

--- Evaluation metrics for CI

Workshop Organizers

Prasenjit Mitra, The Pennsylvania State University

C. Lee Giles, The Pennsylvania State University

Leslie Carr, University of Southampton

Important Dates

Paper submission deadline: ~~July 28th~~ August 15th, 2007

Notification to Authors: August 27th, 2007

Camera-ready papers due: August 29th, 2007

Submission Guidelines

Submitted papers should present innovative ideas on the topics of interest and not be published or under consideration elsewhere.

We solicit three types of papers:

Full Paper:This type of paper reports research problems, solution ideas and preliminary results and should be at most eight pages long.
Short Paper: The paper should contain a summary of research problems, solution ideas and preliminary results and should be at most four pages long.
Poster Paper: This paper should describe a poster describing research problems and projects and a summary of the solution and results (if available) that will be presented during the workshop. The author will present a short advertisement for the poster during the workshop. Poster papers should be at least one page long but no longer than two pages.
Vision Paper: This paper should describe the rationale and vision for cyberinfrastructure in general or in domains of interest. Vision papers should not exceed two pages.

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically as PDF files and be formatted using the ACM camera-ready templates available at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html. Please submit your papers no later than August 15th, 2007 for full consideration. All accepted papers will appear in the CIKM workshops' proceedings published electronically.

News :

7/07/07: Deadline extended to 8/15/07.

7/29/07: Deadline extended to 8/05/07.

7/20/07: Short Papers, Poster Papers, Vision Papers solicited.

7/01/07: Submissions Open.

4/12/07: Workshop Announced.

First Workshop on CyberInfrastructure: Information Management in eScience