IR-L Digest, Vol.XVI, No.22, Issue 458

[Nancy Gusack Crawford <nancy.gusack@ucop.edu>]

IRLIST Digest                                       ISSN 1064-6965
June 7, 1999
Volume XVI, Number 22
Issue 458

******************************************************************

  I. QUERIES
        1. Reactive E-Journals
        2. Reactive E-Journals, Response to I.1.
        3. Reactive E-Journals, Response to I.1.
        4. Reactive E-Journals, Response to I.1.
        5. Hierarchically Classified Document Collections,
           Response to I.1., Issue 454
III. NOTICES
     A. Publications
        1. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, Spring 1999
        2. Version 25, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography
        3. JASIS TOC, Volume 50, Number 9
        4. [WASHINGTON-UPDATE] -- June 7, 1999
     B. Meetings
        1. One-day Workshop on Relevance Feedback - Glasgow
        2. ACM SIGIR Workshop on MIIR: CFParticipation Reminder
        3. SIGIR'99 Workshop: Evaluation of Web Document Retrieval
     C. Miscellaneous
        1. UW: Data Mining Institute

******************************************************************

I. QUERIES

I.1.
Fr: Gerry McKiernan <gerrymck@iastate.edu>
Re: Reactive E-Journals

I am greatly interested in identifying additional e-journals that provide
an opportunity to comment on a published article within the ejournal either
as an annotation to segments of the article or as a separate component of
the e-journal such as found within
_Earth Interactions_ (EI)

[ http://EarthInteractions.org/ ]

_Earth Interactions_ " is an electronic journal dealing with the
interactions between the lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and
biosphere in the context of global issues or global change.  It exploits
the capabilities of electronic communications technology and provides its
authors the opportunity to use animations and other visualization
techniques that traditional publications cannot accommodate."

In addition to offering Embedded Multimedia, _Earth Interactions_ also
provides a moderated threaded discussion section that allows interaction
among authors and readers of both EI articles and preprint manuscripts.
For details, see

http://eij.gsfc.nasa.gov/E-JOURNAL/react/

As Always, Any and All contributions, queries, critiques, comments,
questions, concerns, etc., etc. regarding this post are Most Welcome.

Regards,
/Gerry McKiernan
Theoretical Librarian
Iowa State University
Ames IA 50011
gerrymck@iastate.edu

**********

I.2.
Fr: Steve Minton <minton@ISI.EDU>
Re: Reactive E-Journals

As the former executive editor for the Journal of Artificial
Intelligence Research (JAIR) (see http://www.jair.org/), I have a couple of
comments regarding both reactive e-journals and multi-media content.

JAIR has been around since early in 1993, so we have a fair amount of
experience at this point.  The journal is highly regarded, and we attract a
large number of submissions.

As for reactive e-journals, we've twice created facilities where readers
could comment and ask questions about articles.  Neither attempt was a
success.  To quote from an article about JAIR I recently co-authored with
Mike Wellman:

>Experiments do not always work. JAIR has tried several mechanisms for
>readers to post comments and questions about articles, much success.
>When the journal was first established, we asked readers to post
>questions and comments to the USENET newsgroup comp.ai and to preface
>the subject line of these posts with "JAIR:". In fact, a few
>interesting discussions appeared there, such as a debate about bias in
>machine learning triggered by a JAIR article by Murphy and Pazzani[].
>Thus, it seemed like a JAIR comment facility would be a useful
>contribution. Peter Turney took this on, and he created a way for
>readers to post comments. Unfortunately, almost no comments were
>posted.  The staff tried seeding a few comments of our own, with
>little result.
>
>It seemed that our readership was reluctant to post comments in a >formal,
scientific venue. So Peter tried again. He revised the format,
>modeling it after a facility called "NetQ", used by another online
>publication. The idea was that readers could send in questions, which
>would (optionally) be answered by authors. Then the question and
>answer would be posted. This Q/A format proved unpopular as well.
>
>It is hard to be sure why this never worked. One possibility is that
>people are uncomfortable sending inquiries that might be considered
>naive to an academic journal. Another possibility is that there are
>few burning issues that provoke discussion. Yet another is that
>readers prefer to take their comments and questions directly to the
>authors, in private correspondence.

As for multimedia, JAIR encourages authors to submit "online appendices"
containing source code, data, demos, quicktime movies, etc.  These are not
part of the published article, but they have turned out to be an important
contribution of the journal (in my opinion). These appendices can be very
valuable.  They can turn an article into something that is more than just a
written description of the results.  They document the original experiments
in a way that it is impossible to do with just words.

An article describing JAIR's first 5 years can be found at
<http://www.isi.edu/sims/minton/papers/jairfive.pdf.  This will soon  be
appearing in AI Magazine, published by the National Association for
Artificial Intelligence.

Regards,
Steve Minton
<minton@isi.edu

**********

I.3.
Fr: Dorothy Solbrig <d_solbrig@harvard.edu
Re: Reactive E-Journals

Another ejournal allowing comments is Conservation Ecology,

http://www.consecol.org/Journal/

Links to add comments or to see comments already there are placed (rather
awkwardly) between the body of the article and the references.

Dorothy Solbrig                        d_solbrig@harvard.edu
Biological Laboratories Library        (617) 495-3944
Harvard University           http://mcb.harvard.edu/Admin_Res/Library/

**********

I.4.
Fr: Tony Barry <tonyb@dynamite.com.au
Re: Reactive E-Journals

On 1/6/99, Steve Minton <minton@isi.edu wrote:

>As for reactive e-journals, we've twice created facilities where
>readers could comment and ask questions about articles.  Neither
>attempt was a success.

I suspect this is because the journal is an artificial construct. Trying to
add discussion to it is getting the tail to wag the dog.  The discussion
and intellectual to and fro in the academic community is the "dog".  The
result of the discussion, published papers, is the tail. Almost no journal
occupies the whole publication arena for its topic and it is thus
fragmentary to seek to tie discussion to articles within an individual
journal.

I've worked with a list on network policy for some years where members
argue strongly on issues.  Often drafts of papers or policy submissions are
posted for comment yielding discussion.  Equally URLs for papers published
by members of the group are posted and result in comment - and often argument!

The point is that the discussion takes place in an online community.  The
arbitrary nature of where the material is published in a formal sense is
irrelevant.  If the publisher has only made the information available in
some clumsy format like PDF or Word someone in the community will convert
it to HTML to make it easily readable to all.

Publication is just a step in an ongoing process and where the publication
takes place is incidental to it.

Tony
phone  +61 2 6241 7659
mailto:me@Tony-Barry.emu.id.au
http://purl.oclc.org/NET/Tony.Barry

**********

I.5.
Fr: David Lewis <lewis@research.att.com>
Re: Hierarchically Classified Document Collections
    Response to I.1., Issue 454

>structure (or something like that). We have Reuter's, but it doesn't
>have such structure.

Actually, there is a shallow hierarchy for Reuters-21578. See the file
cat-descriptions_120396.txt in the distribution (available from
www.research.att.com/~lewis).

A much richer hierarchy (i.e. Mesh) is available for the OHSUMED data. Mesh
is probably more than you want to deal with, but you could pick out a small
piece of the hierarchy to use. For instance, my SIGIR '96 paper with
Schapire, Callan, and Papka used just the heart disease categories.

Dave

David D. Lewis; AT&T Labs - Research        lewis@research.att.com
Shannon Laboratory, Rm A-263; 180 Park Ave  Tel. +1 973-360-8324
Florham Park, NJ 07932-0971; USA            Fax  +1 973-360-8399
http://www.research.att.com/~lewis          Phila. Tel/Fax +1 215-413-2218
                                            Phila. Tel. +1 215-238-0190

******************************************************************

III. NOTICES

III.A.1.
Fr: Andrea Duda <duda@library.ucsb.edu>
Re: Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, Spring 1999

The Spring 1999 edition of Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship
is now available at:

http://www.library.ucsb.edu/istl/

This issues theme is Electronic Journals in Science and Technology Libraries.

Contents:

Electronic Journals as a Component of the Digital Library
by Laurie E. Stackpole and Richard James King, Naval Research
Laboratory, Washington, D.C.

SPARC: The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
by Alison Buckholtz, Association of Research Libraries

You Can't Get There from Here: Issues in Remote Access to Electronic
Journals for a Health Sciences Library
by Dennis Krieb, Saint Louis University Health Sciences Center
Library

Electronic Publishing of Scholarly Journals: A Bibliographic Essay of
Current Issues
by the STS Subject and Bibliograhic Access Committee

Consortia Building and Electronic Licensing as Vehicles for
Re-Engineering Academic Library Services: The Case of the Technical
Knowledge Center and Library of Denmark (DTV)
by Lars Bjoernshauge, Technical Knowledge Center and Library of
Denmark

Book Reviews

Basic HPLC and CE of Biomolecules by Robert L. Cunico, Karen M.
Gooding, and Tim Wehr
Reviewed by Venkat Raman, Chemical Abstracts Service

Science and Technology Sources on the Internet
Resources for Archaeological Lithic Analysts
by Hugh W. Jarvis, University at Buffalo

Andrea L. Duda
Networked Information Access Coordinator
Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara
E-mail: duda@library.ucsb.edu
InfoSurf: http://www.library.ucsb.edu

**********

III.A.2.
Fr: Charles W. Bailey, Jr. <LIB3@UHUPVM1.UH.EDU>
Re: Version 25, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography

Version 25 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now
available.  This selective bibliography presents over 990 articles, books,
electronic documents, and other sources that are useful in understanding
scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet and other networks.

HTML: <URL:http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html>
Acrobat: <URL:http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.pdf>
Word: <URL:http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.doc>

The HTML document is designed for interactive use.  Each major section is a
separate file.  There are live links to sources available on the Internet.
It can be can be searched using Boolean operators.

The HTML document also includes Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources,
a collection of links to related Web sites:

<URL:http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepr.htm>

The Acrobat and Word files are designed for printing.
Each file is over 200 KB.

(Revised sections in this version are marked with an asterisk.)

Table of Contents

1 Economic Issues*
2 Electronic Books and Texts
     2.1 Case Studies and History*
     2.2 General Works*
     2.3 Library Issues*
3  Electronic Serials
     3.1 Case Studies and History*
     3.2 Critiques
     3.3 Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals*
     3.4 General Works*
     3.5 Library Issues*
     3.6 Research*
4 General Works*
5 Legal Issues
     5.1 Intellectual Property Rights*
     5.2 License Agreements*
     5.3 Other Legal Issues
6  Library Issues
     6.1 Cataloging, Classification, and Metadata*
     6.2 Digital Libraries*
     6.3 General Works*
     6.4 Information Conversion, Integrity, and Preservation*
7 New Publishing Models*
8 Publisher Issues*
     8.1 Electronic Commerce/Copyright Systems
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies by the Same Author
Appendix B. About the Author

Best Regards,
Charles

Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Assistant Dean for Systems,
University Libraries, University of Houston, Houston, TX
77204-2091.  E-mail: cbailey@uh.edu.  Voice: (713) 743-9804.
Fax: (713) 743-9811.
<URL:http://info.lib.uh.edu/cwb/bailey.htm>
<URL:http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html>

**********

III.A.3.
Fr: Richard Hill <rhill@asis.org>
Re: JASIS TOC, Volume 50, Number 9

Journal of the American Society for Information Science
JASIS
VOLUME 50, NUMBER 9

[Note: URLs for viewing the contents of past JASIS issues are listed.
Below, Bert Boyce's "In This Issue" has been cut into the Table of Contents
for research articles and Mark Rorvig and Lois Lunin's introductory
material for the Perspectives section has been edited and cut into that
portion of the table of contents.]

VOLUME 50, NUMBER 9.  JULY 1999

EDITORIAL

In This Issue
Bert R. Boyce
735

RESEARCH

What Is Information Discovery About?
H. A. Proper and P. D. Bruza
737

Text Segmentation for Chinese Spell Checking
Kin Hong Lee, Qin Lu, and Mau Kit Michael Ng
751

A Fuzzy Genetic Algorithm Approach to an Adaptive Information Retrieval
Agent
Maria J. Martin-Bautista, Maria-Amparo Vila, and Henrik Legind Larsen
760

A Distance and Angle Similarity Measure Method
Jin Zhang and Robert R. Korfhage
772

DARE: Distance and Angle Retrieval Environment: A Tale of the Two Measures
Jin Zhang and Robert R. Korfhage
779

PERSPECTIVES ISSUE ON . . . VISUAL INFORMATION RETRIEVAL INTERFACES

Introduction and Overview: Visualization, Retrieval, and Knowledge
Mark Rorvig and Lois F. Lunin
790

The NASA Image Collection Visual Thesaurus
M. E. Rorvig, C. H. Turner, and J. Moncada
794

Visualizing Science by Citation Mapping
Henry Small
799

The Ecological Approach to Text Visualization
James A. Wise
814

Interactive Graphical Queries for Bibliographic Search
Martin Brooks and Jennifer Campbell
824

A Collection of Visual Thesauri for Browsing Large Collections of
Geographic Images
Marshall C. Ramsey, Hsinchun Chen, Bin Zhu, and Bruce R. Schatz
836

Conference Notes--1996: Foundations of Advanced Information
Visualization for Visual Information (Retrieval) Systems
Mark Rorvig and Matthias Hemmje
845

BOOK REVIEWS

Foundations of Library and Information Science, by Richard E. Rubin
Boyd P. Holmes
848

Into the Future: The Foundation of Library and Information Services in the
Post-Industrial Era, by Michael Harris, Stan A. Hannah, and Pamela C. Harris
Ebrahim Afshar
849

Newspapers of Record in a Digital Age: From Hot Type to Hot Link, by
Shannon E. Martin and Kathleen A. Hansen
Amy E. Sanidas
850

ERRATUM
852
------------------------------------------------------
The ASIS home page <http://www.asis.org> contains the Table of Contents and
brief abstracts as above from January 1993 (Volume 44) to date.

The John Wiley Interscience site <http://www.interscience.wiley.com>
includes issues from 1986 (Volume 37) to date.  Guests have access only to
tables of contents and abstracts.  Registered users of the Interscience
site have access to the full text of these issues and to preprints.  We are
still working on restoring access for ASIS members as "registered users."

---------------
Richard Hill
American Society for Information Science
8720 Georgia Avenue, Suite 501
Silver Spring, MD  20910
(301) 495-0900
FAX: (301) 495-0810
http://www.asis.org

**********

III.A.4.
Fr: EDUCAUSE <EDUCAUSE@EDUCAUSE.EDU>
Re: [WASHINGTON-UPDATE] -- June 7, 1999

EDUCAUSE: Transforming Education Through Information Technologies
http://www.educause.edu

IN THIS ISSUE:

IT RESEARCH FUNDING: REP. SENSENBRENNER INTRODUCES "NETWORKING AND
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT ACT", CALLING FOR $4.8
BILLION OVER FIVE YEARS

COPYRIGHT AND DISTANCE EDUCATION: COPYRIGHT OFFICE ISSUES REPORT TO CONGRESS

COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES MAY SEE INCREASED TELECOM COSTS AS FCC PREPARES TO
INCREASE PER-LINE ACCESS CHARGES
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Written from EDUCAUSE'S Washington office, "The EDUCAUSE Washington Update"
is a free service of EDUCAUSE, an international nonprofit association
dedicated to transforming higher education through information technologies.

Anyone may subscribe to the Update by sending e-mail to
listserv@listserv.educause.edu with "subscribe update firstname lastname"
in the body of the message. To unsubscribe, send  a "signoff update"
command to the same address. If you would like more information about the
Update or would like to offer comments or suggestions, please contact
Garret Sern at gsern@educause.edu.

**********

III.B.1.
Fr: Mark Dunlop <mark@dcs.gla.ac.uk>
Re: One-day Workshop on Relevance Feedback - Glasgow

BCS IRSG Workshop on Relevance Feedback in IR
6 September, 1999
Hosted by the Glasgow IR Group
Department of Computing Science
University of Glasgow
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/rf

Relevance feedback (RF) provides techniques to improve a search by
utilising relevance information given by a user. This information can be
used in a number of ways, e.g. reweighting query terms, adding or deleting
query terms, or altering a user profile. As a rule, RF is a successful,
practical solution to the uncertainty inherent in information seeking,
however the performance of individual techniques can vary over queries,
collections and users. RF has also been criticised for not being accessible
to users: the basic operation is simple (marking documents relevant) but
how users' should make relevance decisions to get the best performance from
a RF system is not always obvious. In the current environment of large,
diverse collections of multimedia articles, it is important to develop
precise, adaptable RF techniques and a more complete understanding of the
characteristics of RF.

In this workshop we are keen to investigate the diversity of work on RF:
from novel algorithms for RF, through theoretical aspects of RF to users'
understanding of the techniques.

In order to facilitate a discussion-oriented meeting, we are asking for
submissions of extended abstracts only. These will be published as a
technical report of the meeting.

Attendance will be limited, so please register with the organisers. It is
not necessary to submit an abstract in order to attend the event.

Topics of interest: Papers are solicited dealing with, but not limited to,
the following areas:
Practical applications of RF
Theoretical investigations of RF
RF and multimedia
Machine learning and RF
Semantic RF
RF and the user
Negative RF
RF and user profiling
Interactive RF techniques

Submission of papers:
Deadlines: Authors should submit extended abstracts (approximately 5 sides
of A4/US letter) to Ian Ruthven, see below, to arrive no later than July
7th, 1999. Authors will be notified of the programme committee's decision
by the 8th August 1999.

Program committee:
Nathalie Denos, CLIPS-IMAG
Mark Dunlop, University of Glasgow/Risoe (workshop co-chair)
Ayse Goker-Arslan, The Robert Gordon University
Kerry Rodden, University of Cambridge
Ian Ruthven, University of Glasgow  (worshop co-chair)

Correspondence:
Direct correspondence, inquiries and submissions relating to this workshop
should be addressed to:

Ian Ruthven, Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow,
Glasgow, G12 8QQ, Scotland. Email: igr@dcs.gla.ac.uk

Ian Ruthven and Mark Dunlop

Ian Ruthven                             Tel: +44 (0)141 330 6292
Research Assistant                      Fax: +44 (0)141 330 4913
Department of Computing Science
University of Glasgow
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~igr

Dr Mark D Dunlop                Phone:  +44 (0)141 330 6035
Computing Science               Fax:    +44 (0)141 330 4913
University of Glasgow           mailto:mark@dcs.gla.ac.uk
Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland       http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~mark/

-- From 1 July 1999
        Dr Mark D Dunlop
        Centre for Human-Machine Interaction
        Risoe National Laboratory
        P.O. Box 49
        DK-4000 Roskilde        http://www.chmi.dk
        Denmark                 mailto:mark.dunlop@risoe.dk

**********

III.B.2.
Fr: Zhongfei Zhang <zhongfei@cedar.Buffalo.EDU>
Re: ACM SIGIR Workshop on MIIR: CFParticipation Reminder

ACM SIGIR'99 Post-Conference Workshop on
Multimedia Indexing and Retrieval
Berkeley, CA, Call For Participation

Background
This workshop is a follow-up to last year's very successful workshop on the
same topic. Since the field is advancing so rapidly, it was felt that an
annual workshop would be worthwhile.

The focus is on the required functionality, techniques, and evaluation
criteria for multimedia information retrieval systems. Researchers have
been investigating content-based retrieval from non-text sources such as
images, audio and video. Initially, the focus of these efforts were on
content analysis and retrieval techniques tailored to a specific media;
more recently, researchers have started to combine attributes from various
media. The goal of multimedia IR systems is to handle general queries such
as "find outdoor pictures or video of Clinton and Gore discussing
environmental issues". Answering such queries requires intelligent
exploitation of both text/speech and visual content. Multimedia IR is a
very broad area covering both infrastructure issues (e.g. efficient storage
criteria, networking, client-server models) and intelligent content
analysis and retrieval. Since this is a one-day workshop, we have chosen
three focus areas in the intelligent analysis and retrieval area.

About the workshop
The first focus of this workshop is on integrating information from various
media sources in order to handle multimodal queries on large, diverse
databases. An example of such a collection would be the WWW. In such cases,
a query may be decomposed into a set of media queries, each involving a
different indexing scheme. The interaction of various media sources that
occur in the same context (e.g., text accompanying pictures, audio
accompanying video) is of special interest; such interaction can be
exploited in both the content analysis and retrieval phases.

The second focus deals with examples of research using content and
organization of multimedia information into semantic classes. Users pose
and expect a retrieval to provide answers to semantic questions. In
practice this is difficult to achieve. Building structures that encode
semantic information in a fairly domain independent and robust manner is
extremely difficult. A quick review of computer vision research over the
last few years points to this difficulty. In many cases, image content can
be used in conjunction with user interaction and domain specificity to
retrieve semantically meaningful information. However, it is clear that
retrieval by similarity of visual attributes when used arbitrarily cannot
provide semantically meaningful information. For example, a search for a
red flower by color red on a very heterogeneous database cannot be expected
to yield meaningful results. On the other hand retrieval of red flowers in
a database of flowers can be achieved using color. In context therefore,
examples of research using content and organization of multimedia
information into semantic classes will be discussed.

Many systems, particularly image and video based ones require an example
picture which can be used as a query (alternatively, the user may be
required to draw a picture). It may be unrealistic to expect an example
image to be always available. Thus, it would be useful to find ways of
generating new queries. Can NLP techniques be combined with computer vision
techniques to generate such queries? Or can multimodal retrieval techniques
be combined to create queries suitable for image, video and audio
retrieval? In general, a question is how can we create realistic queries
for realistic systems.

The third focus of this workshop is on evaluation techniques for multimedia
retrieval. Currently, most researchers are using the standard evaluation
measures defined for text documents; these need to be extended/modified for
multimedia documents. There is also a high degree of subjectivity involved
that needs to be addressed.

Finally, we will also devote one session to discussing MPEG-7 standards and
content. By the time of the workshop, the selection committee would have
made their choices for standards.

We will focus on the following specific topics:
- content analysis and retrieval from various media (text, images, video,
audio)
- interaction of modalities (e.g. text, images) in indexing, retrieval
- effective user interfaces (permitting query refinement etc.)
- evaluation methodologies for multimedia information. We have found that
researchers pay insufficient attention to it.
- techniques for relevance ranking
- multimodal query formation/decomposition
- logic formalisms for multimodal queries
- indexing and retrieval from scanned documents - e.g extracting text from
images, word spotting - as a retrieval technique for both handwritten and
printed documents.
- testbeds for evaluating multimodal retrieval: it would be nice to have
some resource sharing here since annotating these, and coming up with a
good query set are difficult

Participation
Two types of participation are expected. Those interested in making a
presentation at this workshop should submit their full papers either in
online postscript version or in hardcopy by regular mail to the address
given below. The papers should not exceed 5,000 words, including figures,
tables, and references. Those interested in participating, but not
presenting papers, should submit a statement of interest, not to exceed 500
words. This should clearly state what aspect(s) of the workshop reflect
their research interest. These will be used to select panelists. Both types
of submissions are due on Friday, June 18th. Decisions will be made no
later than Friday, July 2nd. In the case of paper submission, the final
camera-ready papers are due on July 23rd. Working notes will be made
available to all participants at the workshop. All the submissions should
be sent to:

Dr. Rohini K. Srihari
CEDAR/SUNY at Buffalo
UB Commons
520 Lee Entrance, Suite 202
Amherst, NY 14228 - 2583
Email: rohini@cedar.buffalo.edu
Phone: (716) 645-6164 ext. 102 Fax: (716) 645-6176

Organization
Workshop chairs (also program chairs):
Rohini K. Srihari
                CEDAR, SUNY at Buffalo
                Amherst, NY 14228 - 2583
                rohini@cedar.buffalo.edu
 Zhongfei Zhang
                CEDAR, SUNY at Buffalo
                Amherst, NY 14228 - 2583
                zhongfei@cedar.buffalo.edu
 R. Manmatha
                Computer Science Dept., Univ. of Massachusetts
                Amherst, MA 01003
                manmatha@cs.umass.edu
 S. Ravela
                Computer Science Dept., Univ. of Massachusetts
                Amherst, MA 01003
                ravela@cs.umass.edu

Timetable
Paper or statement of interest submission: June 18th, 1999.
Decision:                                  July 2nd, 1999.
Camera-Ready Paper Due:                    July 23rd, 1999
SIGIR Conference:                          August 15 - 19, 1999
Workshop Date:                             to be announced.

Further information
Further questions may be directed to the address above, or go to the Web
page of this workshop at

http://www.cedar.buffalo.edu/sigir99/

or the SIGIR Conference main Web Page at

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/conferences/sigir99/

**********

III.B.3.
Fr: Massimo Melucci <melo@dei.unipd.it>
Re: SIGIR'99 Workshop: Evaluation of Web Document Retrieval

ACM SIGIR '99 Workshop on
Evaluation of Web Document Retrieval
http://www.dei.unipd.it/~ims/sigir99/
University of California, Berkeley, USA - August 19, 1999
Call for Papers and Participation
Deadline postponed to June 18, 1999

Background
Since the early days of Information Retrieval evaluation permitted to have
insights about IR processes and then to improve retrieval systems
effectiveness. Diverse projects, such as TREC and Mira have been addressing
for some years different issues of evaluation.

Many issues of the Web pose new challenges on evaluating Web document
retrieval processes. To name but a few, hypertextual structure, rapid
evolution, high heterogeneity, and metadata make evaluation of Web document
retrieval rather different from classical evaluation methodologies. The
presence of links make browsing-based retrieval a rule than an exception,
and then browsing effectiveness should be evaluated as integrated with
traditional query-based functions. The rapid evolution of the Web may make
retrieval system effectiveness difficult to keep over time. The
heterogeneity of Web documents make classical IR techniques poorly
effective. Content description-oriented metadata would allow to reduce and
control Web document heterogeneity, but their usefulness is still to be
evaluated.

About the workshop
In this workshop we will investigate in depth the evaluation of the use of
diverse content descriptive data (e.g. metadata) and search strategies for
Web document retrieval.

Topics include, but are not limited to, innovative evaluation methodologies
concerning:

   * the use of metadata and other content descriptive data,
   * browsing and querying Web documents,
   * the construction of Web document collections, and
   * search engines and search tools.

The workshop will include position paper presentations and discussion, with
an emphasis on the discussion. The organizers will select position papers
for presentation and arrange the presentations and discussion based on the
interests of the attendees. The organizers may invite other presentations
as well.

Participation
Two types of participation are expected:

* Those interested in making a presentation at this workshop should submit
a position paper of no more than 2,000 words in HTML on the WWW and submit
the URL for the paper.
* Those interested in participating, but not presenting papers, should
submit via e-mail a statement of interest, not to exceed 500 words. This
should clearly state what aspect(s) of the workshop reflect their research
interest. These will be used to select papers.

Both types of submissions are due on Friday, June 18th. Decisions will be
made no later than Friday, June 25th. In the case of paper submission, the
final camera-ready papers are due in Postscript on Friday, July 9th.
Working notes will be made available to all participants at the workshop.

All the submissions should be sent both to: Maristella Agosti
(agosti@dei.unipd.it) and Massimo Melucci (melo@dei.unipd.it).

Note to authors: we are seeking preliminary or draft papers - you will
retain copyright ownership and may submit your paper elsewhere for more
formal, subsequent publication.

Requests for further information should be sent to Massimo Melucci
(melo@dei.unipd.it).

Organization
Workshop organizers:
Maristella Agosti E-mail: agosti@dei.unipd.it
                  Phone: +39 049 827 7650
Massimo Melucci   E-mail: melo@dei.unipd.it
                  Phone: +39 049 827 7694
                  Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informatica
                  Universita' di Padova
                  Via Gradenigo 6/a
                  35131 Padova, Italy
                  Fax: +39 049 827 7699

Timetable
Position Paper or Statement of Interest
Submission:                                   June 18, 1999.
Notification:                                 June 25, 1999.
Camera-ready copy of final paper:             July 9, 1999.
SIGIR Conference:                             August 15th - 18th, 1999
Workshop:                                     August 19, 1999

Further information
General information on SIGIR '99 is available through the SIGIR '99 home page.
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/conferences/sigir99/

Information on all SIGIR workshops can be found at the URL:
http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/conferences/sigir99/workshops.html

If you are considering attending SIGIR or this workshop, use the SIGIR page
to register your interest in participation.

Massimo Melucci, Phd.                       http://www.dei.unipd.it/~melo
Padua University - Assistant Professor      melo@dei.unipd.it
Dept. of Electronics and Computing Science  +39-049-827-7694 (telephone)
Via Gradenigo, 6/A - 35131 Padova - Italy   +39-049-827-7699 (fax)

**********

III.C.1.
Fr: Olvi Mangasarian <olvi@cs.wisc.edu>
Re: UW: Data Mining Institute

A Data Mining Institute has been established in the Computer Sciences
Department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison with support from
Microsoft Corporation. The goals of the DMI are to bring together the
powerful tools of the database and the mathematical programming communities
to harness and extract knowledge from the vast store of data that is being
accumulated by industrial, research and internet organizations.

Co-directors of the DMI are Olvi Mangasarian and Raghu Ramakrishnan and
faculty members are Michael Ferris and Jeff Naughton.

For further information please see:
www.news.wisc.edu/thisweek/Research/Engr/Y99/datamine.html

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