Although we have observed an explosion of the number of structured data sources shared on the “Web of Data”, the majority of the available Web content is still unstructured or semi-structured — e.g. encoded in (hyper-) textual documents. As a general trend, unstructured data seems to be growing faster than structured data. According to a 2011 IDC study, unstructured data will account for 90 percent of all data created in the next decade.

Web content (structured, unstructured and semi-structured) often makes references to other documents or to entities described in structured data sources (e.g. Linked Data). Furthermore, structured data sources provide entity to entity interconnections, resulting in a Web of Linked Entities spanning structured and unstructured data. Therefore, it has become evident the need to study the impact of associating textual and structured content on information retrieval, extraction, integration and exploration.

The proposed workshop envisions a Web of Linked Entities (WoLE), which transparently connects the World Wide Web (WWW) and the Giant Global Graph (GGG) using methods from Information Retrieval (IR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Database Systems (DB).

The focus of this workshop is on reconciling the discussion from related communities in Information Retrieval, Semantic Web, Database Systems and NLP.

The PC will choose one paper based on its originality and scientific merit to be given a best paper award and a prize (an iPad 2 with 16GB).

We are also organizing a developer’s challenge for the best applications “Doing Good By Linking Entities“. A total of two iPads 2 will be given to the best applications. More information about the challenge is available here.

• WoLE2013: Web of Linked Entities (#WoLE2013)