DELOS is an EU-funded interdisciplinary Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries (www.delos.info) with a broad vision: Future digital libraries (DLs) should enable any citizen to access human knowledge any time and anywhere, in a friendly, multi-modal, efficient and effective way. Achieving this vision requires development of a next generation of Digital Library Management Systems (DLMSs) that will dramatically change Digital Libraries from the form we know them currently. At the forefront of such development are two main issues:

System Architecture
Information Access

This workshop, the 8th in the DELOS series of Thematic Workshops, is devoted to these two critical themes. The objective of the workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in these two areas and their inter-connections, to identify fundamental system services that allow the development and operation of future Digital Libraries, and to explore the main relevant technical directions.

With respect to system architecture, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Data Management, Grid Middleware (Grid), and Service-oriented Architecture (SoA) are the topics of primary interest. P2P architectures allow for loosely-coupled integration of information services and sharing of information. Different aspects of P2P systems (e.g., indexes and application platforms) must be combined to achieve the desired functionality. On the other hand, Grid computing middleware is needed because certain services within Digital Libraries are complex and computationally intensive (e.g., for extraction of features in multimedia documents to support content-based similarity search or for information mining in bio-medical data). Finally, SoA provides mechanisms to describe the semantics and usage of information services. In addition, in an SoA, we have mechanisms to combine services into workflow processes for sophisticated search and maintenance of dependencies.

With respect to information access, a fundamental challenge arises from the great variety of content that future Digital Libraries are called to manage, each one with its own characteristics and particularities, with respect to both format and meaning. Organization of information within an individual source and efficient and effective search are key issues that need to be addressed. An additional challenge arises from the user interfaces planned for future systems, where the general trend is towards richer languages and diverse interaction styles both at the syntactic and at the semantic level. New interaction management, optimization, execution, and result consolidation algorithms need to be devised to support the emerging functionalities.

Clearly, the two themes are closely interrelated and some of the most exciting problems arise at the intersection of the two. The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for discussing the latest advances and on-going efforts in these and related areas as the field moves towards future DLMSs.

A non-exclusive list of topics of interest includes the following:
I kernel system services such as resource allocation, load monitoring and balancing
I reliability and availability
I information replication and cache management
I transactional workflows
I disconnection and re-connection management
I distribution and parallelisation
I feature extraction services
I feature space indexing
I complex document indexing
I query routing
I intelligent search combining exact match with similarity and vagueness
I multi-object, multi-feature queries
I mobile-information session management
I relevance feedback mechanisms
I curation and annotations
I data provenance
I document composition
I information access optimization
I special data types

start: Thuesday, March 29th, 12:00 Lunch
end: Friday, April 1st, 12:00 Lunch

keynote
I Peter Buneman
The two Cultures of Digital Curation

invited talks
I Stefan Gradmann
Specific Aspects of e-science scenarios in the hermeneutical disciplines
I Keith Jeffery
Digital Libraries in a Grid Environment
I Michalis Vazirgiannis
Semantic overlay generation in P2P architectures

session 1: "Architectural Issues"
I Wurz, Schuldt
Dynamically Making Use of Distributed Data Sources in a Grid Environment
I Warns, Hasselbring, Roantree
Influence of Replication on Availability within P2P Systems
I Bischofs, Giesecke, Hasselbring, Niemann, Steffens
Adaptive replication strategies and software architectures for P2P systems
I Mazurek, Werla
Distributed Services Architecture in dLibra Digital Library Framework
session 2: "Semantics and Context"
I Koffina, Serfiotis, Christophides, Tannen, Deutsch
Integrating XML Data Sources using RDF/S Schemas: The ICS-FORTH Semantic Web Integration Middleware (SWIM)
I Kokkinidis, Sidirourgos, Dalamagas, Christophides
Semantic Query Routing and Processing in P2P Digital Libraries
I Tryfonopoulos, Idreos, Koubarakis
Publish/Subscribe Functionalities for Future Digital Libraries using Structured Overlay Networks
I Meghini, Spyratos
Information Access in Digital Libraries: Steps Towards a Conceptual Schema

session 3: "Search and Indexing I"
I Bender, Michel, Weikum, Zimmer
Challenges of Distributed Search Across Digital Libraries
I Di Nunzio, Ferro
DIRECT: a Distributed Tool for Information Retrieval Evaluation Campaigns
I Barton, Zezula
p-index - An Index for Graph Structured Data
I Springmann, Balko, Schek
Efficient and Effective Matching of Compound Patient Records

session 4: "Search and Indexing II"
I Damjanovic, Plant, Balko, Schek
User-Adaptable Browsing and Relevance Feedback in Image Databases
I Novak, Zezula
Indexing the Distance Using Chord: A Distributed Similarity Search Structure
I Meghini, Spyratos
Query Tuning through Refinement / Enlargement in a Formal Context
I Nejdl, Paiu
I know I stored it somewhere-Contextual Information and Ranking on our Desktop

Complementing the technical program, there will be a "gong show" like event in an evening session where participants may introduce and discuss own ideas. In addition, there will be administrative sessions on DELOS WP1 and WP2 management issues followed by dedicated working group meetings that are to be held in parallel. Workshop participants are invited to propose ideas in a brainstorming session. The workshop will be concluded by presenting the working group results. A hiking tour to the area surrounding Dagstuhl will be taking place as social event.

In the spirit of a workshop, we ask for extended abstracts describing ongoing research and development. Submissions not exceeding 5 pages should be sent electronically in PDF, following Springer LNCS style, to one of the two PC co-chairs by February 8, 2005. Submissions should indicate which of the two main themes of the workshop (possibly both) is most relevant to them. Full-paper versions of all accepted abstracts will be published as DELOS workshop proceedings (in electronic form), while revised papers will be requested after the workshop for publication in post-proceedings by a formal publisher.

Abstract Submission Deadline: February 8, 2005
Notification of Acceptance: February 21, 2005
Full-Paper Version: March 7, 2005 (to prepare handouts for the participants)
Workshop: March 29 - April 1st, 2005
Revised Papers: July, 2005 (for the DELOS Post-Proceedings)

I Maristella Agosti (Univ. of Padua, Italy)
I Elisa Bertino (Univ. of Milano, Italy & Purdue Univ, USA)
I Donatella Castelli (CNR-ISTI, Italy)
I Hsinchun Chen (Univ. of Arizona, Tuscon, AZ, USA)
I Stavros Christodoulakis (Technical Univ. of Crete, Greece)
I Bruce Croft (Univ. of Massachussetts, Amherst, MA, USA)
I Alex Delis (Univ. of Athens, Greece)
I Ed Fox (Virginia Tech., VA, USA)
I Michael Fresston (UC Santa Barbara, CA, USA)
I Norbert Fuhr (Univ. of Duisburg, Germany)
I Wilhelm Hasselbring (OFFIS Oldenburg, Germany)
I Yannis Ioannidis (Univ. of Athens, Greece)
I Carlo Meghini (CNR-ISTI, Pisa, Italy)
I Reagan Moore (SDSC, San Diego, CA, USA)
I Erich Neuhold (FhG Darmstadt, Germany)
I Hans-Jorg Schek (ETH Zurich, Switzerland & UMIT Innsbruck, Austria)
I Timos Sellis (Nat. Technical Univ. of Athens, Greece)
I Can Turker (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)
I Heiko Schuldt (UMIT Innsbruck, Austria)
I Stratis Viglas (Univ. of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scottland)
I Gerhard Weikum (MPI Saarbrucken, Germany)
I Pavel Zezula (Masaryk Univ. Brno, Czech Republic)