CALL FOR PAPERS Web Information-Seeking and Interaction (WISI) A workshop at SIGIR 2007 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands Friday July 27, 2007 http://research.microsoft.com/~ryenw/wisi Submission deadline: May 16 Notification of acceptance: June 8 Camera-ready copy due: June 22 OBJECTIVES The World Wide Web has provided access to a diverse range of information sources and systems. People engaging with this rich network of information may need to interact with different technologies, interfaces, and information providers in the course of a single search task. These systems may offer different interaction affordances and require users to adapt their information-seeking strategies. Not only is this challenging for users, but it also presents challenges for the designers of interactive systems, who need to make their own system useful and usable to broad user groups. The popularity of Web browsing and Web search engines has given rise to distinct forms of information-seeking behaviour, and new interaction styles, but we do not yet fully understand these or their implications for the development of new systems. Web information seeking and interaction (i.e., the interaction of users with Web-based content and applications during information-seeking activities) is a topic that unites many strands of academic and commercial research, from studies of information-seeking behaviour to the design and construction of large-scale interactive systems. Designing components to support this interaction (and evaluating these components) is particularly challenging given the scale of the Web, the diversity of the user population, the diversity in tasks being undertaken, and the dynamic nature of the information. This workshop is intended to act as a focal point for researchers and practitioners whose work is related to web information seeking and interaction, to enable them to share experiences and collaborate. We aim to * bring together perspectives from different areas: as well as researchers in the information retrieval field, we encourage submissions from developers of Web sites and services, human-computer interaction researchers, and the information seeking community * connect industrial and academic researchers and practitioners who provide online services, both commercial and non-commercial * initiate possible collaborations between participants with complementary interests, from the different communities. WORKSHOP THEMES Themes include, but are not limited to: * models or studies of information-seeking behaviour on the Web * user studies of interaction with Web search engines (either general or domain/media specific engines) * models or studies of query formulation, relevance assessment, browsing, or other factors that affect interaction with Web information * user characteristics and their effect on Web searching or browsing behaviour * personal information management and the Web * evaluation methodologies for information seeking and interaction studies * new paradigms for Web information seeking * social search behaviour on the Web * novel log analyses of Web search behaviour * novel interactive Web services deriving from studies of human behaviour The workshop will open with a panel entitled: “Challenges and Opportunities in Supporting Web Search Interaction” that includes an expert in: a) information seeking, b) user interfaces for search, and c) large-scale Web search interface development and/or evaluation. The aim of the panel is to provide a broad overview of the issues in this area. We hope to provide an opportunity for all attendees to hear perspectives with which they may not be familiar. SUBMISSION The one day workshop will be a mixture of short paper presentations, discussion and activities. Papers may be up to 4 pages long in the SIGIR conference format http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html (Option 2) and should be submitted as PDF files through the workshop website at http://research.microsoft.com/~ryenw/wisi/submit.html by May 16 2007 (midnight US Pacific time). Papers may describe completed work, work in progress, or the author's position on one or more of the workshop themes. A subset of the accepted papers will be selected for oral presentation at the workshop, and others will be selected as background papers for the proceedings. The main selection criteria are quality, and appropriateness to the workshop themes. We will aim to ensure that papers selected for oral presentation have topics that will provide a good focus for the later discussions (the main activity of the workshop), while covering a broad range of areas overall. Notification of acceptance: June 8 Camera-ready copy due: June 22 ORGANIZERS Kerry Rodden (Google) Ian Ruthven (University of Strathclyde) Ryen White (Microsoft Research) PROGRAMME COMMITTEE Anne Aula, Google Peter Bailey, Synop Pia Borlund, Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark Luanne Freund, University of Toronto, Canada Marti Hearst, UC Berkeley, US David Hendry, University of Washington, US Jim Jansen, Penn State, US Melanie Kellar, Dalhousie University, Canada Diane Kelly, University of North Carolina, US Jimmy Lin, University of Maryland Xuehua Shen, UIUC, US Amanda Spink, Queensland University of Technology, Australia Jaime Teevan, Microsoft Research Anastasios Tombros, Queen Mary, University of London, UK Pertti Vakkari, University of Tampere, Finland Ross Wilkinson, CSIRO, Australia -- Ian Ruthven Department of Computer and Information Sciences University of Strathclyde Glasgow G1 1XH Email: [log in to unmask] Tel: +44 141 548 3098 Fax: +44 141 548 4523 http://www.cis.strath.ac.uk/~ir