1st International Workshop on Semantics to Enable
                         Convergence for Consumer Communications and Applications      (SECCCA 2011) 

                                                         9th January, 2011, Las Vegas, Nevada

                        Satellite Workshop of 8th IEEE Consumer Communications & Networking Conference

                                                                       (IEEE CCNC 2011) 

CCNC is the premier conference for consumer communications and networking. One of the most important and growing areas in consumer communications is how previously separate networks, devices, and services can converge to offer new, exciting services. This can both enhance as well as create new devices, services, and business models. For example, new personalized services as well as new social networking devices and services can be created that facilitate group communication and interaction, as opposed to simple one-way communication. 

Service Providers are currently able to offer triple- and quadruple-play services because of network convergence. However, devices and applications have not completely converged, which impacts the type of services, as well as their ease of use, that can be offered to consumers. This is manifested in many ways, including the inability to (1) seamlessly share content across devices and networks, (2) link different services to each other to accomplish a broader set of tasks on behalf of the user, (3) enable multiple users to easily collaborate on group tasks and projects, and (4) synchronize different devices having different capabilities to render the same content. 

There are two distinct reasons that cause these problems, differentiated by how they use data. The first develops devices, services, and applications to provide services that use specific data. Currently, most networking sites, services, and applications are based on individual, not group, interactions. In addition, they use private data formats that make it difficult for a user to share and edit content among multiple devices and applications. While some efforts have been started to standardize some aspects of these data, such as the FOAF initiative (a machine-readable ontology describing people, their activities, and some simple interactions with other people), such efforts lack coordination with each other, and tend to turn into simple stovepipe systems that restrict how data is used and shared. Thus, it is difficult for devices and applications in this group to share and reuse data, let alone fuse those data to create personalized experiences that provide improved user experiences.

In contrast, the second group of applications mines data from devices, networks, and applications in order to provide users with personalized content and services. Such systems can also be used by providers (e.g., for targeted advertising) as well as by application developers (e.g., by analyzing click patterns in order to pre-fetch content). These types of systems can also be used to connect customers with product developers, facilitating the bi-directional exchange of ideas and improvements for current and future products. However, in order to connect these diverse devices and applications, integrating their underlying data is not sufficient. In addition, the underlying user models must be integrated. This would enable applications and devices to have a better understanding of what the user is trying to accomplish and proactively help the user achieve his or her goals across devices, networks, and applications. This in turn enables context-aware personalized services to be created that provide customized content that changes in accordance with changing context.

Hence, both groups of applications share a common need - to provide a set of mechanisms that enable devices and applications to integrate data to develop a comprehensive understanding of the current tasks being performed. Data integration can range from static schema matching to dynamic inferencing. However, in order to realize the true potential of services that use these integrated data, and more importantly, in order to drive new content and services, data integration is not enough. Data integration is an enabler; the underlying driver for new services and applications consists of elements that enable the user to accomplish a particular set of tasks more easily and efficiently. Such tasks are usually context-aware - the services and resources that a particular task needs is a function of user needs, business policies, environmental conditions, and other factors, and thus changes when the context changes. Increased situated awareness (i.e., the ability for agents and/or processes that exist in a dynamic environment to perceive how and why the environment is changing, and interact accordingly) will provide advances in new devices, networks, and services. When this is combined with a cognitive model of the user, then new and exciting functionality can be created that goes beyond the original content and purpose of the individual data. Context-awareness situates the data, and the user model uses those data to create new, more powerful, personalized services.

Semantic Web technologies have the potential to solve some of these problems. However, these technologies, in and of themselves, do not provide a complete solution to the interoperability problems described above. For example, in practice, different data formats and vocabularies all have different versions, as well as different mandatory and optional elements. This gives rise to different syntax and semantics for the same data. These and other problems make building a set of mappings to join data together and infer new facts automatically very difficult. As another example, there can be multiple ontologies and/or microformats to express common data; however, each ontology or microformat usually has some important differences, and in general, the semantics of these data are not specified in enough detail to determine which properties to use.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together academic and industry researchers and practitioners to investigate how to create and build new converged devices and services that support the current and future needs of device, network, and service convergence. In particular, this workshop will focus on the combination of semantics and other technologies that can be used to provide increased awareness of the environment, and how this increased awareness will facilitate both the increased convergence of different services in devices and applications as well as enabling the creation of new services. Special attention will be given to cross-disciplinary approaches to improve search, discovery, usage, management, security, and linking of related data and services. To keep the workshop very interactive and to foster discussions, the format of the workshop will combine original full paper presentations with quick hot topic presentations and a panel discussion. These will be augmented with a keynote and an invited talk.

Topics of interest for this workshop will include, but are not limited to, the following areas: 

·         Information and data models for representing users, context, and services
·         Advances in modeling and meta-modeling applied to social computing and social analytics
·         Ontologies for representing and reasoning about social information
·         Ontologies, semantic models, and inferencing applied to social computing and networking
·         User modeling to support social networking and personalized services
·         Context-awareness, and how knowledge and functionality is managed as context changes
·         Mechanisms for mapping between and integrating data and services
·         Data mining of user data and actions in order to create new services
·         Privacy, trust, and security issues in social networks
·         Human computer interaction to support social networks and services
·         Social data, device, network and services discovery
·         Smart spaces for collaboration
·         Collaborative filtering and recommending of data and services
·         Data and services to support Lifelog networks and applications
·         Knowledge management and dissemination to support social networking services
·         How current and future standards can help realize new social networks and services
·         Case studies of successful social networking activities

Guidelines for Submission
Submitted papers must represent original material that is not currently under review in any other conference or journal, and has not been previously published. The paper should be used as the basis for a 20 - 30 minute workshop presentation.

Manuscripts should be written in English conforming to the IEEE standard conference format (8.5" x 11", Two-Column) and not exceed 5 pages in length. Submission of papers should be regarded as a commitment such that, if accepted, at least one author of the paper will register and attend the conference; otherwise it will be removed from the IEEE Digital Library after the conference.

• Papers should be submitted in a .pdf or .ps format via EDAS paper submission website and then selecting the workshop submission link.
• A separate cover sheet should show the title of the paper, the author(s) name(s) and affiliation(s), and the address (including e-mail, telephone, and fax) to which the correspondence should be sent.

Important Dates
Paper Submission:                               1 September 2010
Author Notification:                               15 September 2010
Camera-ready Copy:                             1 October 2010
Workshop date:                                    9 January 2011

Workshop Co-Chairs
Prof. John Strassner, POSTECH
Soohong Daniel Park, Samsung Electronics