Workshop Description

The Web presents a key driving force for a large spectrum of applications in which a user interacts with a company, a governmental authority, a non-governmental organization or other non-profit institution or other users. User preferences and expectations, together with usage patterns, form the basis for personalized, user-friendly and optimal services. Key metrics enabled by proper data capture and processing are essential to run an effective business or service. Enabling technologies include data mining, scalable warehousing and preprocessing, sequence discovery, real time processing, document classification, user modeling and quality evaluation models for them. Recipient technologies that demand for user profiling and usage patterns include recommendation systems, Web analytics applications, application servers coupled with content management systems and fraud detectors. Research advances associated with knowledge discovery on the Web observe the Web as a social medium for exchange and cooperation, as a semantic network where people find information and contribute information (by means of documents, annotations and comments) and as a place for doing business, launching business and promoting business. WEBKDD 2008 will bring together researchers and practitioners on these aspects of the Web. The emphasis is on lessons learned, recent advances and open issues for the next decade. WEBKDD 2008 will be the 10th anniversary workshop on knowledge discovery on the Web, taking place at the KDD since 1999. WebKDD presentations have historically been of high quality and influence, and workshops have in the past attracted not only audience from academia, but also a significant audience from industry and government agencies. Altogether, the papers at the past WEBKDD workshops have accumulated about 940 citations, including 7 patent citations that cite the workshop as the premier reference on the topic of Web usage analysis. (The citations are from Google Scholar, accessed between Feb. 10 and Feb. 12, 2008.) In WEBKDD 2008, we anticipate a wrap-up and lessons-learned from 10 years of research on mining the Web, the Semantic Web(s) and the social Web and a research agenda for the years to come.

Workshop Topics

The WEBKDD 2008 workshop will invite contributions on mining of all aspects of users' activities in the Web, in particular: Mining server log (clickstream) data Mining query log data Mining users' activities in social venues, ranging from chat fora with emphasis on interaction, to recommendation networks with emphasis on spread of influence Mining users' activities in venues that foster the capturing of data semantics, e.g. for building the Semantic Web or for the building of folksonomies

Paper Submission

All submissions must be made electronically at the paper submission website. Papers should be no longer than 14 pages inclusive of all references and figures. Papers should be submitted using the formatting guidelines for authors of Springer LNCS or LNAI which can be found at: http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0-164-2-72376-0. All papers must be submitted in PDF format. Please ensure that any special fonts used are included in the submitted documents. All papers must be original, and have not been published elsewhere, with the exception of concurrent submissions to KDD 2008 (if accepted to KDD 2008, then your paper should be withdrawn). The workshop proceedings will be published by Springer and distributed during the workshop. Yahoo! Best Paper Award for Web Mining: The best paper of the workshop will be selected using a peer-review process that includes the workshop organizing and program committees. Judging shall be based on technical quality, innovativeness, and contribution to the field as judged by the joint committee. Through the support of Yahoo! Research, the authors of the selected paper will receive a 500 USD prize. Authors of accepted papers will be invited to submit an extended version of their papers to the Journal “Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery” for a special issue that serve as a wrap up of the most recent developments in Web Mining.

Important Dates

June 2, 2008: Electronic submission of full papers June 30, 2008: Author notification July 20, 2008: Submission of Camera-ready papers (hard deadline) August 24, 2006: Workshop at ACM SIGKDD, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

Workshop Co-Chairs

Note: for inquiries please send e-mail to myra @ iti . cs . uni-magdeburg . de Myra Spiliopoulou, Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg Olfa Nasraoui, University of Louisville Osmar Zaiane , University of Alberta Jaideep Srivastava, University of Minnesota Bamshad Mobasher, DePaul University