I³: Identity, Identifiers, Identification.

Review Process Finished

The review process is finished and 8 highly interesting papers have been selected for presentation. Together with the invited talks, these contributions form an exciting program for the workshop which we are very much looking forward to. The notification letters will be sent out in the course of today (Friday Mar 23).

Acceptance Notification Postponed

Due to delays in the review process we will have to postpone the acceptance notification by a few days. We hope to complete the process ASAP to give the authors enough time to finish their camera-readies.

Second Invited Speaker Confirmed

We are proud to announce that Prof. Pierre Levy, Professor at the University of Ottawa, has agreed to give an invited talk at I³. His philosophical perspective will be a great contribution to the discussions at the workshop. More details will be announced soon.

The program is evolving.

We are proud to announce that Dr. Wei-Ying Ma, Research Manager, Microsoft Research Asia, has agreed to give an invited talk at I³. The topic of the talk will be announced soon.

Current approaches to Information and Knowledge Management (IKM) on the Web are keyword-based, document-centric and ranking-dependent searches: keywords are used to find and retrieve possibly long lists of documents that are then presented in a ranked order. Users will find what they need by opening and reading through one or more documents in the list. A substantially different yet perhaps complementary approach to IKM on the Web is to adopt an ID-based, entity-centric, and profile-dependent view, where information and knowledge are accessed and searched for by using unique IDs to access relevant entities and build their profiles by gathering what the Web has to offer about these entities.

We call this Entity-Centric Information and Knowledge Management.

The use of techniques from statistical natural language processing for named entity recognition has also reached a high level of maturity, and so this approach is also of interest to many search engines. Finally, by using URIs to identify entities, this approach easily is seen as a practical application of the Semantic Web to the search problem. The Semantic Web and search engines, long viewed as incompatible, may actually be complementary and compatible.

However, an entity-centric approach needs to address and solve some very difficult yet critical issues, such as: the identification of entities across different documents, large-scale ID reuse, creating entity-based indexes of content resources, entity-based web browsing, and so on. The intended content of the proposed workshop can roughly be grouped as follows:
- Contributions from research and industry that illustrate projects going in this direction,
- Overview papers presenting state-of-the art in the area
- Critical discussions of advantages and disadvantages of such an approach compared to other approaches

The anticipated outcome of the workshop is to assess the state of the art in the area, as well as to discuss the approach and evaluate critically the next steps in pursuing this topic. There is the potential for creating the core of a consortium for future R&D projects on the topic for both academia and industry. Furthermore, the results of this workshop will feed into relevant W3C Working Groups.