The 2nd ESWC Summer School, sponsored by RENDER, will run in southern Crete in the week before the EWSC2012 conference –  from the morning of Monday May 21st  to midday Saturday May 26th 2012. Applications are open now until 15 of February 2012! The ESWC summer school will be aligned with the most prominent and emerging topics of the ESWC conference. We will also provide opportunities for attendees to network with their peers, the school tutors and keynotes as well as senior members of STI International and senior members of the Semantic Web community who are participating in the conference.

Keynotes include

• Lora Aroyo (Free University of Amsterdam, NL)
• Enrico Franconi (Free University of Bolzano, IT)
• Mark Greaves (Vulcan Inc. US)
• Jim Hendler (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, US)
• Chris Welty (IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, New York, US)

Topics include

• Knowledge representation languages and Web-scale reasoning
• Linked Data publishing and consumption
• Developing and using ontologies
• Semantically enabled Web APIs and services
• Social semantics

The organization and tutorial team for this summer school have extensive experience in these types of events having organized similar events in Europe, the US and Asia over a number of years. Building from this experience, and also knowledge of pedagogy we know that learning-by-doing leads to successful learning. We also know the true value of networking in the research context and that this is best supported by an informal atmosphere coupled with an enjoyable inclusive social program. Supporting the above will be a dominant theme of the EWSC summer school and a significant portion of the school will involve hands-on sessions with the latest generation of Semantic Web tools.

The summer school is open to anyone studying in a Semantic Web related post-graduate course or is at an early stage of a Semantic Web related career and is engaged in suitable Semantic Web activities. Places will be limited to 50 in order to ensure that all participating students receive quality time with their tutors. Accepted students will be obliged to attend the whole week.

We encourage anyone who is at an early stage of their Semantic Web career to apply our school which benefits from its close association with the conference.

The ESWC summer school is supported by a number of European projects including PlanetData and also videolectures.net.

You can find out more details including the whole program at our website at: http://summerschool2012.eswc-conferences.org/

Dates

• Application opens: December 1st 2011
• Application closes: February 15th 2012
• Decision on acceptance: March 1st 2012
• Summer school: May 21st (9am) to midday May 26th

Fees

• STI Members: 650 Euros
• Non STI Members: 700 Euros

Fees include registration fee, accommodation and meals.

RENDER is very happy to announce the 1st International Workshop on Common Value Management (CVM2012). The workshop will take place during ESWC2012 in Heraklion, Greece from 27th to 31st of May, 2012.

The term Common Value Management (CVM) serves as an umbrella for three major aspects of today’s organization on-line communication:

Yield Management
also known as Revenue Management “is an economic discipline appropriate to many service industries in which market segment pricing is combined with statistical analysis to expand the market for the service and increase the revenue per unit of available capacity” [1]. Yield management is mostly about maximizing the short term gain of an enterprise. One has to monitor price offers of competitors and has to reflect various constraints over offering products and prices in various booking channels.

Brand Management
“is the application of marketing techniques to a specific product, product line, or brand” [2]. Here, the long term value of a company is the focus of interest. A brand has been carefully monitored, has an active dissemination strategy and can furthermore be used to maintain and increase the value of the brand. Finally crisis management, i.e., rapid cycles of monitoring and disseminating, has to be performed to protect against significant value loss of a brand.

Reputation Management
“also known as directory management, is the process of tracking an entity’s actions and other entities’ opinions about those actions; reporting on those actions and opinions; and reacting to that report creating a feedback loop” [3]. It can be the general reputation of an enterprise, as well as a public body, political parties etc. Here it is not directly about an economic value, however, about maximizing the impact of a campaign in relation to a certain budget.

CVM addresses these challenges especially in regard to the increasing number of on-line communication channels such as:

* Broadcasting, e.g.: web sites, news, email, RSS feeds, Twitter, chats, blogs
* Sharing of information items such as: booksmarks, images, slides, and videos
* Collaboration through wikis
* Group communication and interaction through sites such as Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, XING, and a multitude of specific recommendation and feedback places for certain vertical domains.
* Semantic-based Dissemination through formats such as microdata, RDF, RDFa, and SPARQL; and vocabularies such as Dublin Core, foaf, and GoodRelations, schema.org, etc.

We want to emphasize the aspect of bidirectionality in these interactions. This means multichannel dissemination, market and feedback analysis of various communication events, and communication in general as integrated loops of both activities.

The first International CVM workshop focuses on the scientific and technical aspects of semantics in relation to this topic. In this context, it aims to get an insight in the current state of the art in this field and also to mark current academic and industrial trends in this field. Semantics can hereby be used to describe and establish content, channels, and their alignments.

Please find the workshop website here: http://cvm2012.sti-innsbruck.at/

References
1. THE BASICS OF REVENUE MANAGEMENT, Integrated Decisions and Systems, Inc., 2005
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_management
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reputation_management