Peer-to-peer (P2P) networks have emerged as a popular way to build large scale information systems by using the principle of resource sharing. The P2P paradigm holds many promises, e.g. scalabity, failure resilience and increased autonomy of nodes. For these reasons P2P seems also to be an interesting architectural paradigm for realizing large scale information retrieval systems. However, search methods in P2P networks are still mostly limited to simple keyword queries and the use of advanced retrieval models is in its infancy.

Researchers from different areas, including database systems, distributed systems, networking and information retrieval, have recently started to work on efficient, yet semantically powerful search mechanisms in peer-to-peer systems. An important factor for making this research succesful will be an intensive exchange among researches from the relevant disciplines. Thus, this workshop--just as CIKM--aims at bringing the different communities together.

In recent years there has been increasing interest in developing information retrieval tools to access resources on the basis of geographical location. This is reflected in the appearance of geographically-specialised search facilities associated with some of the main web search engines. The proliferation of locationally-aware mobile devices can also be expected to spur development of contextually sensitive geographical search. The subject of geographical information retrieval is still at a relatively early stage of development and there are major research challenges to be addressed. These are concerned for example with determining the geographical context of text documents, building geographical ontologies, indexing documents with respect to both geographical context and textual content, interaction with spatially-aware search devices, and geographical relevance ranking. The purpose of this workshop is to bring together the growing community of researchers and practitioners working in the field of GIR to discuss progress and future research strands. It is a follow up to the very successful GIR workshop held in conjunction with ACM SIGIR 2004.

Interacting and exchanging information with internal or external partners is a key issue. If companies want to survive in the current market situation, a tight collaboration is needed. A seamless collaboration is, however, only possible, if all participating information systems are able to semantically exchange information. The system topographies in today's companies are characterized by a high heterogeneity linked with various data models and formats. Interoperability between systems is therefore a major challenge for enterprises because of the high heterogeneity.

Today there are several approaches for creating a unified possibility of accessing heterogeneous information systems. Possible solutions are, for example, found in the domain of merging ontologies, linking or mapping different standards, or using model interoperability technologies like model morphing or transformation.

This workshop aims in exchanging and presenting research activities in the area of creating interoperability between heterogeneous information systems and it will include discussions about current solutions and approaches.

This workshop builds off of a highly successful symposium that was held as part of the 2004 AAAI Spring Symposium Series entitled “Knowledge Representation and Ontologies for Autonomous Systems.” This symposium was successful in bringing together colleagues in the autonomous systems, knowledge representation, ontology, and data fusion communities to jointly address the challenge of how to best leverage existing knowledge representation technologies to aid in the advancement of autonomous systems’ capabilities. There was much agreement among the symposium’s participants that this is a prime area for exploration and that the symposium should be the first in a series of related workshops.

The objective of this workshop is to bring together colleagues in the autonomous systems, knowledge representations, ontology, and data fusion communities to find ways of leveraging existing knowledge technologies to benefit autonomous systems. This workshop will be unique in that is will be driven by the needs of the robotics community, namely, presentations will focus on the knowledge representation needs of robotic researchers and practitioners along with approaches that have been both successful and unsuccessful at addressing those needs.

ACM WIDM 2005 is the seventh in a series of workshops on Web Information and Data Management to be held in conjunction with the 14th International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2005). The objective of the workshop is to bring together researchers, industrial practitioners, and developers to study how the Web information can be extracted, stored, analyzed, and processed to provide useful knowledge to the end users for various advanced database and Web applications.

The 13th International Symposium of ACM GIS is the thirteenth of a series of symposia/workshops that began in 1993 with the aim of bringing together researchers, developers, users, and practitioners carrying out research and development in novel systems based on geo-spatial data and knowledge, and fostering interdisciplinary discussions and research in all aspects of geographic information systems. The symposium will provide a forum for original research contributions and practical system design, implementation, and applications of GIS. ACM-GIS 2005 will be held in conjunction with the 14th International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2005).

Like the previous successful DOLAP workshops held in conjunction with CIKM, the eighth edition of the Workshop on Data Warehousing and OLAP (DOLAP 2005) aims to synergistically connect the research community and industry practitioners. It provides an international forum where both researchers and practitioners can share their findings in theoretical foundations, current methodologies, and practical experiences. This year, DOLAP focus on new research directions and emerging application domains in the areas of data warehousing and OLAP.