The First Joint International Workshop on Entity-oriented and Semantic Search (JIWES) was held on Aug 16, 2012 in Portland, Oregon, USA, in conjunction with the 35th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference (SIGIR 2012). The objective for the workshop was to bring together academic researchers and industry practitioners working on entity-oriented search to discuss tasks and challenges, and to uncover the next frontiers for academic research on the topic. The workshop program accommodated two invited talks, eight refereed papers divided into two technical paper sessions, and a group discussion.
In the forthcoming issue of SIGIR Forum we give a detailed summary of the workshop; the preprint of this article is available here. The workshop papers are available online in the ACM Digital library and at the workshop website. The latter also contains copies of the slides for most presentations.