International Workshop on “Knowledge Acquisition from the Social Web” KASW'08

This workshop aims to develop and bring together a community of researchers interested in discussing the manifold challenges and potentials of knowledge acquisition from the social web.

With the advent of the “Social Web”, a new breed of web applications has enriched the social dimension of the web. On the social web, actors can be understood as social agents - technological or human entities - that collaborate, pursue goals, are autonomous, and are capable of exhibiting flexible problem solving and social behavior. By participating in the social web, both technological and human agents leave complex traces of social interactions and their motivations behind, which can be studied, analyzed and utilized for a range of different purposes. The broad availability and open accessibility of these traces in social web corpora, such as in del.icio.us, Wikipedia, weblogs and others, provides researchers with opportunities for, for example, novel knowledge acquisition techniques and strategies, as well as large scale, empirically coupled “in the field” studies of social processes and structures.

This workshop aims to develop and bring together a diverse community of researchers interested in the social web by seeking submissions that are focusing on understanding and evaluating the role of agents, goals, structures, concepts, context, knowledge and social interactions in a broad range of social web applications. Examples for such applications include, but are not limited to social authoring (e.g. wikis, weblogs), social sharing (e.g. del.icio.us, flickr), social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn) and social searching (e.g. wikia, eurekster, mahalo) applications.