Bücher von Dunja Mladenic

The two premier annual European conferences in the areas of machine learning and data mining have been collocated ever since the ?rst joint conference in Freiburg, 2001. The European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML) traces its origins to 1986, when the ?rst European Working Session on Learning was held in Orsay, France. The European Conference on Principles and Practice of KnowledgeDiscoveryinDatabases(PKDD) was?rstheldin1997inTrondheim, Norway. Over the years, the ECML/PKDD series has evolved into one of the largest and most selective international conferences in machine learning and data mining. In 2007, the seventh collocated ECML/PKDD took place during September 17-21 on the centralcampus of WarsawUniversityand in the nearby Staszic Palace of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The conference for the third time used a hierarchical reviewing process. We nominated 30 Area Chairs, each of them responsible for one sub-?eld or several closely related research topics. Suitable areas were selected on the basis of the submission statistics for ECML/PKDD 2006 and for last year's International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2006) to ensure a proper load balance amongtheAreaChairs.AjointProgramCommittee(PC)wasnominatedforthe two conferences, consisting of some 300 renowned researchers, mostly proposed by the Area Chairs. This joint PC, the largest of the series to date, allowed us to exploit synergies and deal competently with topic overlaps between ECML and PKDD. ECML/PKDD 2007 received 592 abstract submissions. As in previous years, toassistthereviewersandtheAreaChairsintheir?nalrecommendationauthors had the opportunity to communicate their feedback after the reviewing phase.

The World Wide Web is a rich source of information about human behavior. It containslarge amount of data organizedvia interconnected Web pages,traces of information search, user feedback on items of interest, etc. In addition to large data volumes, one of the important characteristics of the Web is its dynamics, where content,structure and usagearechanging over time. This showsup in the rise of related research areas like communities of practice, knowledge mana- ment, Web communities, and peer-to-peer. In particular the notion of colla- rative work and thus the need of its systematic analysis become more and more important. For instance, to develop e?ective Web applications, it is essential to analyze patterns hidden in the usage of Web resources, their contents and their interconnections. Machine learning and data mining methods have been used extensively to ?nd patterns in usage of the network by exploiting both contents and link structures. We have investigated these topics in a series of workshops on Semantic Web Mining (2001, 2002) at the European Conference on Machine Learning / Pr- ciples and Practice of Knowledge Discovery from Databases (ECML/PKDD) conference series, in the selection of papers for the post-proceedings of the - ropean Web Mining Forum 2003 Workshop, published as the Springer LNAI volume 3209 "e;Web Mining: From Web to Semantic Web"e; in 2004, as well as in the Knowledge Discovery and Ontologies workshop in 2004 and in the selection ofpapersfor thepost-proceedingsofthe ECML/PKDD2005jointworkshopson Web Mining (European Web Mining Forum) and on Knowledge Discovery and

Finding knowledge - or meaning - in data is the goal of every knowledge d- covery e?ort. Subsequent goals and questions regarding this knowledge di?er amongknowledgediscovery(KD) projectsandapproaches. Onecentralquestion is whether and to what extent the meaning extracted from the data is expressed in a formal way that allows not only humans but also machines to understand and re-use it, i. e. , whether the semantics are formal semantics. Conversely, the input to KD processes di?ers between KD projects and approaches. One central questioniswhetherthebackgroundknowledge,businessunderstanding,etc. that the analyst employs to improve the results of KD is a set of natural-language statements, a theory in a formal language, or somewhere in between. Also, the data that are being mined can be more or less structured and/or accompanied by formal semantics. These questions must be asked in every KD e?ort. Nowhere may they be more pertinent, however, than in KD from Web data ("e;Web mining"e;). This is due especially to the vast amounts and heterogeneity of data and ba- ground knowledge available for Web mining (content, link structure, and - age), and to the re-use of background knowledge and KD results over the Web as a global knowledge repository and activity space. In addition, the (Sem- tic) Web can serve as a publishing space for the results of knowledge discovery from other resources, especially if the whole process is underpinned by common ontologies.