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            SIGIR Workshop on DISTRIBUTED INFORMATION RETRIEVAL
                    Sponsored by the MIND project
                   (http://www.mind-project.org/)

            26th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference
              July 28 - August 1, 2003, Toronto, Canada

                           PRELIMINARY CALL FOR PAPERS
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The proliferation of search engines and digital libraries during the last
decade has created a new kind of information access problem in which knowing
where to search is as important as knowing how to search.  Distributed
information retrieval and federated search systems solve this problem by
providing a single interface that helps a person decide which digital
libraries to search, how to search them, and how to integrate information
returned by multiple digital libraries.  Early research in this are focused
on text databases; more recent research includes libraries containing a
variety of media types.

This workshop will provide a venue for the presentation of recent
results in the design and implementation of methods for resource
description, resource selection, data fusion, and user interaction
in distributed multimedia information retrieval systems.

Contributions are solicited dealing with, but not limited to, the
following topics:

- Resource discovery
- Wrapper induction
- Resource description
- Resource selection
- Result merging and data fusion
- Fusion of multimedia information
- Presentation of results
- User interfaces for multi-database environments
- Distributed IR architectures
- Networked IR
- Peer-to-peer systems
- Meta search
- Large-scale distributed IR in the "real world"

The workshop is also open to people who wish to attend and participate in
discussions, but not to present their own work.


ORGANISING COMMITTEE:

- Jamie Callan, School of Computer Science (LTI), Carnegie Mellon
  University, Pittsburgh, USA. Email: callan@cmu.edu

- Fabio Crestani, Dept. Computer and Information Sciences, University
  of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK.  Email: f.crestani@cis.strath.ac.uk

- Mark Sanderson, Department of Information Studies, University of
  Sheffield, Sheffield, UK. Email: m.sanderson@shef.ac.uk


PROGRAMME COMMITTEE:

Currently being defined.


GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSION:

Submissions should be sent electronically by email in Postscript or PDF
formats to callan@cs.cmu.edu by the date shown below.  Submitted papers
are restricted to ten pages in length.

Papers accepted for presentation will be published in a pre-workshop
electronic proceedings available on the Web and in a post-workshop special
volume of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science by Springer-Verlag. In
order to speed up the publication process, we encourage authors to submit
their papers in the final format, according to the instructions to be found
at: http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html


IMPORTANT DATES:

May 30, 2003       Electronic paper submission
June 13, 2003      Author Notification
June 30, 2003      Camera-Ready Copy
August 1, 2003     Workshop takes place