Together with my co-chairs Marko Grobelnik, Thanh Tran Duc and Haofen Wang, we again got the opportunity of organizing the 4th Semantic Search Workshop, the premier event for research on retrieving information from structured data collections or text collections annotated with metadata. Like last year, the Workshop will take place at the WWW conference, to be held March 29, 2011, in Hyderabad, India. If you wish to submit a paper, there are still a few days left: the deadline is Feb 26, 2011. We welcome both short and long submissions.

In conjunction with the workshop, and with a number of co-organizers helping us, we are also launching a Semantic Search Challenge (sponsored by Yahoo! Labs), which is hosted at semsearch.yahoo.com. The competition will feature two tracks. The first track (entity retrieval) is the same task we evaluated last year: retrieving resources that match a keyword query, where the query contains the name of an entity, with possibly some context (such as “starbucks barcelona”). We are adding this year a new task (list retrieval) which represents the next level of difficulty: finding resources that belong to a particular set of entities, such as “countries in africa”. These queries are more complex to answer since they don’t name a particular entity. Unlike in other similar competitions, the task is to retrieve the answers from a real (messy…) dataset crawled from the Semantic Web. There is a small prize ($500) to win in each track.

The entry period will start March 1, and run through March 15. Please consider participating in either of these tracks: it’s early days in Semantic Search, and there is so much to discover.