Follow a manual added link7th International
7th International
Continuing the successful conference series from the past 6 years, the #ossym25 Open Search Symposium brings together the European and international Open Search community for the seventh time. The hybrid conference provides a forum to discuss and further develop the ideas and concepts of open web search and related topics in various formats including scientific talks, panels, workshops, demonstrations, student challenges and informal discussion spaces. Participants include researchers, data centres, libraries, policy makers, legal and ethical experts, and society.
Call for Papers
We are calling for your contribution with scientific papers, sharing of practical experiences or by introducing concepts and positions in relevant fields, such as computer science, legal, economics and ethics. Full papers and abstracts presented at the #ossym25 will be published open access in online proceedings (including DOIs and ISBN) following the event.
Please submit your contribution: for research contributions we accept full papers (4-6 pages) and for any other contribution (concepts, best practices or practitioners’ experiences) an extended abstract (1 page).
All abstracts and papers have to be submitted via https://indico.cern.ch/e/OSSYM-2025 using the templates specified there. The acceptance of all full papers and extended abstracts is subject of a peer-review process.
Call for Demos
We invite young researchers and students to showcase their innovative work using the Open Web Index of the OpenWebSearch.eu project. This call is an excellent opportunity for participants to develop and present innovative search and web analytics solutions to advance to a more open search ecosystem and show them to the open search community. We are particularly interested in demonstrations that combine the Open Web Index with technologies such as Large Language Models, Knowledge Graphs, or that offer new search paradigms (e.g. Argumentation Search, Conversational Search), interesting frontends, and domain-specific search solutions. In addition, we are also looking for contributions towards web-scale, robust semantic enrichment techniques that can advance search solutions for different domains. Examples could be information quality assessments, entity extraction or Knowledge Graph alignment.
All demos have to be submitted via https://indico.cern.ch/e/OSSYM-2025 using the templates specified there. The acceptance of all demos is subject of a peer-review process.
Important Dates
Submission deadline of full papers and extended abstracts
1 March 2025
Information about contribution acceptance
1 June 2025
Registration for the #ossym25
Will open 15 June 2025
International Open Search Symposium #ossym25
8-10 October 2025
Online publication of proceedings
Autum 2025
Main Topics
Discuss interdisciplinary aspects of Open Search
technical • ethical • legal • educational • economic • applications
Topics of #ossym25 include but are not limited to
- Open search architectures and platforms
- Open Web Index and application domains
- Federated search and cross-domain search
- Web Data Analytics and Web Mining
- Natural language and multi-media processing for search
- Large Language Models, Machine learning and generative AI
- AI-based search and Retrieval Augmented Generation
- Personalization and recommendation in search
- Conversational Retrieval Experiences
- Georeferencing of web content and geospatial search and analysis
- Evaluation of open search systems
- Applications of open search in domains such as science, e-commerce, health, and education
- Search bias and trust
- Economic dimensions of open search
- Search engine advertising and business models in an open search world
- Green computing and sustainability
- Societal and ethical challenges and solutions
- Ethical and value aspects of search
- Politics and governance
- Legal aspects
Conference Chairs
Prof. Dr. Michael Granitzer | University Passau, Germany
Prof. Dr. Christian Guetl | Graz University of Technology, Austria
Dr. Megi Sharikadze | Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Munich, Germany
Dr. Stefan Voigt | Open Search Foundation, Starnberg, Germany
Dr. Andreas Wagner | CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
Local Chairs and Organization
Per Öster, PhD | CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland
Publication Chairs
Sebastian Guertl | Graz University of Technology, Austria
Elias Sandner | CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
Andreas Wagner | CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
Poster Session Chairs
Iiris Liinamaa | CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland
Heidi Laine | CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland
Conference Chairs
Prof. Dr. Michael Granitzer | University Passau, Germany
Prof. Dr. Christian Guetl | Graz University of Technology, Austria
Dr. Megi Sharikadze | Leibniz Supercomputing Centre
Dr. Stefan Voigt | Open Search Foundation, Germany
Dr. Andreas Wagner | CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
Local Chairs and Organization
Per Öster | CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland
Publication Chairs
Prof. Dr.Christian Guetl | Graz University of Technology, Austria
Elias Sandner | CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
Dr. Andreas Wagner | CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
Conference Programme
The conference programme will be published from spring 2025. To stay up to date, subscribe to the free osf newsletter.
Keynotes
Florian Herrmann
State Minister, Head of the Bavarian State Chancellery
Roberto Viola
Director General, Communications Networks, Content and Technology, European Commission
Richard Socher
CEO of You.com
Martin Andree
Bestselling Author and Researcher at the University of Cologne
Nina Leseberg
Head of Communities & Engagement, Wikimedia Deutschland
Science Tracks
Crawling and Infrastructure
Search Applications and Technologies
Preprocessing and ML for Search
LLMs and RAG
Sessions + Workshops
- Ethics + Society
- NGI
- Legal aspects of open web search
- Economic aspects of open web search
Industry Track
“Alternative Search Engines”
Overview timetable
Day 1 | 9 Oct. 24
08.30 | Opening of Registration
09.00 | Conference Opening
Welcome
Helmut Reiser
Deputy Director, Leibniz Supercomputing Centre
Florian Herrmann
State Minister, Head of the Bavarian State Chancellery
09.15 | Keynote
“Opening Keynote”
Roberto Viola
Director General, Communications Networks, Content and Technology, European Commission
10.00 | Coffee Break
10.30 | Science Track
“Crawling and Infrastructure”
Session Chair: Andreas Wagner (CERN, Switzerland)
10.30 “Architecting the Opensearch Service at CERN For OpenWebSearch.EU”
Noor Afshan Fathima; Andreas Wagner; Michael Dinzinger; Stavros Moiras; Michael Granitzer
10.50 “Atra: A Powerful, Lightweigt Approach to Crawling”
Felix Engl
11.10 “OWLer: A Distributed and Collaborative Open Web Crawler”
Michael Dinzinger; Michael Granitzer; Jelena Mitrovic; Saber Zerhoudi
11.30 “Federated Data Infrastructure for the Open Web Search”
Noor Afshan Fathima; Martin Golasowski; Michael Granitzer; Andreas Wagner; Chris Ariyo; Gijs Hendriksen; John Truckenbrodt; Katja Mankinen; Michael Dinzinger; Mikael Karlsson; Mohamad Hayek; Stavros Moiras; Lukas Vojacek; Stephan Hachinger; Jan Martinovič
11.50 “Open Console”
Mark Overmeer; Thao Nguyen
12.10 | Lunch Break and Guided Tours
13.40 | Science Track
“Search Applications and Technologies I”
Session Chair: Elias Sandner (CERN, Switzerland)
13.40 “An Open Source Implementation of Web Clustering Algorithms for Selective Search”
Gijs Hendriksen; Djoerd Hiemstra; Arjen de Vries
14.00 “Search reports as a way to make the (academic) search process and information evaluation comprehensible and transparent”
Anna Neovesky
14.20 “Enriching Science Search with the Open Search Framework MOSAIC”
Alexander Nussbaumer; Sebastian Gürtl; Johannes Honeder; Tobias Hecking; Christian Gütl
14.40 |NGI Track
“Next Generation Internet”
Chair: Megi Sharikadze (Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Germany)
14.45 NGI Search
“Implications of an open web index for search, discovery, and indexing projects”
Session Chair: Mirko Presser (Arrhus University, Denmark)
Michael Hamann; Aurelie Herbelot; Renaud Chaput ; Michael Granitzer
15.40 | Coffee Break
16.20 | Science Track
“Search Applications and Technologies II”
Session Chair: Gijs Hendriksen (Radboud University, Netherlands)
16.20 “NeutrinoReview: CONCEPT PROPOSAL FOR AN OPEN SOURCE REVIEW MANAGEMENT TOOL”
Elias Sandner; Christian Gütl; Igor Jakovljevic; Andreas Wagner
16.40 “Scientific QA System with Verifiable Answers”
Adela Ljajić; Miloš Košprdić; Bojana Bašaragin; Darija Medvecki; Lorenzo Cassano; Nikola Milosevic
17.00 “Design Science Research for the development of a university course on the informed use of search engines”
Melanie Platz
17.20 | Closing of Day 1
Megi Sharikadze
17.55 | Guided Tours
19.00 | Sponsored Event: “Open Web Search community meet-up”
Day 2 | 10 Oct. 24
9.00 | Keynote 2
“you.com”
Richard Socher
CEO, you.com
10.00 | Search Engine Track
“Alternative Search Engines”
Session Chair: Stefan Voigt (Open Search Foundation, Germany)
MWMBL: How to build a search engine with (almost) no money
Daoud Clarke
Founder MWMBL.org, Machine Learning Engineer at Lucid, LLC
Meta-Press.es
Simon Descarpentries
Founder of the Meta-Press.es project; CEO at Acoeuro.com; Treasurer of the Fund for Defense of Net Neutrality FDN2.org
10.40 | Coffee Break |
11.20 | Parallel Sessions
“Preprocessing and ML for Search”
Session chair: Sheikh Mastura Farzana (German Aerospace Centre, Germany)
11.20 “Search, Find, Cite and Apply Grammar Rules for Textgeneration”
Engelbert Niehaus; Rafaela Kastor; Jörg Rapp; Svenja Müller
11.40 “Towards a systematic use of web-text data to support geospatial analysis of major natural disaster and crisis events – Evidence from the Ahrtal 2021 flooding, Germany“
Vanessa Rittlinger; Sheikh Mastura Farzana; Xuke Hu; Hema Pandey; Stefan Voigt; Christian Geiß; Hannes Taubenboeck
12.00 “Impact of Tokenization Techniques on URL Classification”
Mohammed Al-Maamari; Mahmoud Istaiti; Saber Zerhoudi; Michael Dinzinger; Michael Granitzer; Jelena Mitrovic
12.20 “Web Page Classification using Unsupervised and Semi-Supervised Clustering Technique”
Hema Pandey; Tobias Elssner; Jens Kersten
11.20 | Parallel Sessions
“LLMs, RAG and NER”
Session chair: Jelena Mitrovic (University of Passau, Germany)
11.20 “A Dataset of GDPR Compliant NER for Privacy Policies”
Harshil Darji; Stefan Becher; Jelena Mitrovic; Armin Gerl; Michael Granitzer
11.40 „Retrieval Augmented Generation and Scientific Knowledge Graphs to Support Scientific Hypotheses Generation“
Oliver Bensch; Tobias Hecking; Nathan Kutz
12.00 “Utilising Transformer Models for Controllable Scientific Abstractive Summarization”
Sarah Frank; Sebastian Johannes Weidinger; Christian Gütl; Andreas Wagner
12.20 “Creating explainable summaries for long scientific documents using large language models”
Sarah Frank; Sebastian Schäffer; Alexander Steinmaurer; Christian Gütl; Alexander Nussbaumer; Andreas Wagner
12.40 | Lunch Break
14.00 | Keynote
“The Internet of monopolies. How we are taking back the net”
Martin Andree
Bestselling Author (Big Tech Must Go) & Researcher at University of Cologne
15.00| Coffee Break
15.30 | Parallel Workshop Sessions:
Workshop 1 & 2
Workshop 1:
Economic Dimension of Open Web Search
Organisers: Olivier Blanchard; Daniel Nowakovski
Workshop 2:
Legal Challenges and Opportunities for an Open Web Index: Insights & Discussions from Leading Research Projects
Session Chair: Christian Geminn (University of Kassel, Germany)
Organizers: Matthias Wendland; RA Paul C. Johannes; Kai Erenli
17.30 | Closing of Day 2
17.45 | Guided Tours
19.30 | Conference Dinner (self-hosted)
Day 3 | 11 Oct. 24
9.00 | Keynote
“Digital Discourse: how the Wikipedia Community safeguards the quality of the digital encyclopedia”
Nina Leseberg
Head of Communities & Engagement, Wikimedia Deutschland
9.45 | Panel Session
Ethics & Society I
Session Chair: Christine Plote (Open Search Foundation, Germany)
“Exploring the ethical foundations of web search – perspectives and findings from research and practice”
Members of the osf Working Group Ethics: Christine Plote (Open Search Foundation, Germany), Alexander Nussbaumer (Graz University of Technology, Austria); Noor Afshan Fathima (CERN, Switzerland/France); Renée Ridgway (Aarhus University/SHAPE centre, Denmark); Rosie Graham (invited) (University of Birmingham, United Kingdom)
10.45 | Coffee Break
11.15 | Science Track
“Ethics & Society II”
Session Chair: Alexander Nußbaumer (Graz Technical University, Austria)
11.15 “What makes an ethical smartphone OS? Digital rights strengthened by open source, open data and open standards”
Rik Viergever
11.35 “How AI is increasing the environmental costs of search engines”
Alex de Vries
11.55 “From Free Software to Open Source: Traversing the Values and Ethics of Open Search Infrastructures”
Renée Ridgway
12.15 | Student Session
“Young Innovators for Open Web Search”
Session Chair: Stefan Voigt (German Aerospace Centre / Open Search Foundation, Germany)
“User-Driven Re-Ranking for Adapting the Variety in Search Results“
Daphne Auer
“Exploring Curation Strategies for an Open Web Index“
Felice Douglas; Susanne Krol
13.00 | Closing Session of #ossym24
Wrap-up and way ahead
13.15 | End of Symposium
Venue
Leibniz Supercomputing Centre
Garching (Munich), Germany
Address
Leibniz Supercomputing Centre
Boltzmannstraße 1
D-85748 Garching (Munich)
How to get there
By Public Transport
From the main station:
Take U4/U5 to Odeonsplatz, then U6 direction Garching Forschungszentrum.
From the airport:
S-Bahn S8 (direction Hauptbahnhof) to the third stop, Ismaning (about 13 minutes). Take the regional bus 230 in the direction of Garching-Forschungszentrum, stop Boltzmannstraße.
Important note: The bus line 230 bypasses the research site only in one direction. To save you long waiting times, we recommend leaving the bus at the Garching-Forschungszentrum stop for the return journey in the direction of Ismaning.
From the S-Bahn area:
with all S-Bahn trains to Marienplatz, there in U6 direction Garching-Forschungszentrum.
By taxi
from airport: approx. 20-30 min., 30-40 Euro
from Ismaning: approx. 10 min., 12-15 Euro
from the city centre: approx. 20-30 min: 25-35 Euro
By car
From the south (e.g. Munich) as well as from the north (e.g. airport) preferably the motorway (A9) to the exit Garching Nord (exit 70). After the exit (either right or left) in the direction of research institutes, cross the intersection with the B11 and turn into Ludwig-Prandtl-Straße. Parking spaces are available on the left. The LRZ computer cube can be seen from a distance.
Speaker Info
Prof. Dr. Martin Andree
Bestselling Author (Big Tech Must Go) + Researcher at the University of Cologne
10 October | Keynote: The Internet of monopolies. How we are taking back the net | 14.00 pm
Prof. Dr. Martin Andree is a media scientist and teaches digital media at the University of Cologne. He has been researching the dominance of digital corporations for more than 15 years and is the author of seven books, including the highly acclaimed “Atlas of the Digital World”, the first “zero measurement” of digital media use in Germany, as well as the political interpretation in the current book “Big Tech must go!”.
He is a sought-after interview partner, keynote speaker and regularly publishes articles in leading media as a guest author. He completed his studies in Cologne, Münster, Cambridge and Harvard.
Dr. Florian Herrmann
MdL, State Minister
Head of the Bavarian State Chancellery
State Minister for Federal and Media Affairs
9 October | Welcome Speech | 9.00 am
Dr. Florian Herrmann is Head of the Bavarian State Chancellery and State Minister for Federal and Media Affairs.
He is a Member of the Bundesrat for the Free State of Bavaria, a full Member of the Mediation Committee of the German Bundestag and the Bundesrat and a Substitute member of the Joint Committee of the German Bundestag and Bundesrat.
Nina Leseberg
Head of Communities & Engagement, Wikimedia Deutschland
11 October | Keynote | 09.00 am
Nina Leseberg has been Head of Communities & Engagement at Wikimedia Deutschland since January 2024. The social scientist helped build up “Deutsche Stiftung für Engagement und Ehrenamt“ (German Foundation for Engagement and Volunteering) as Head of Department for Structural Strengthening and Research, was Deputy Head of the Department for Civic Engagement and Democracy Promotion in the Berlin Senate Chancellery and worked for around ten years at “Bundesverband Deutscher Stiftungen“ (Association of German Foundations).
Wikipedia is a dynamic and constantly growing source of knowledge that is created by a self-organised global community of volunteers. In her keynote “Digital Discourse: how the Wikipedia Community safeguards the quality of the digital encyclopedia”, Nina will shed light on the mechanisms and strategies of the Wikipedia community to ensure the quality of the encyclopaedia while remaining open to new authors and topics.
Dr. Richard Socher
CEO of You.com
10 October | Keynote: You.com | 09.00 am
Richard Socher is the founder and CEO of you.com. Richard previously served as the Chief Scientist and EVP at Salesforce. Before that, Richard was the CEO/CTO of AI startup MetaMind, acquired by Salesforce in 2016. Richard received his Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford. He is widely recognized as having brought neural networks into the field of natural language processing, inventing the most widely used word vectors, contextual vectors and prompt engineering. He has over 180,000 citations and served as an adjunct professor in the computer science department at Stanford.
Dr. Roberto Viola
Director General, Communications Networks, Content and Technology, European Commission
9 October | Opening Keynote | 9.15 am
Roberto Viola is Director General of DG CONNECT (Directorate General of Communication, Networks, Content and Technology) at the European Commission.
He was the Deputy Director-General of DG CONNECT, European Commission from 2012 to 2015.
Roberto Viola served as Chairman of the European Radio Spectrum Policy group (RSPG) from 2012 to 2013, as Deputy Chairman in 2011 and Chairman in 2010. He was a member of the BEREC Board (Body of European Telecom Regulators), and Chairman of the European Regulatory Group (ERG) in 2007.
He held the position of Secretary General in charge of managing AGCOM, from 2005 to 2012. Prior to this, he served as Director of Regulation Department and Technical Director in AGCOM from 1999 to 2004.
From 1985-1999 he served in various positions including as Head of Telecommunication and Broadcasting Satellite Services at the European Space Agency (ESA).
Roberto Viola holds a Doctorate in Electronic Engineering and a Masters in Business Administration (MBA).
Registration
You can register for the conference via the system of our conference partner CERN.
*How to register*
In order to register for #ossym24 you have to follow 2 steps:
- You will need first to create a CERN Guest Account and log in with it: On the CERN Single Sign-On page click on “External email – Guest access” and then “Register”. Alternatively you can sign-in with eduGAIN or an external social account (GitHub, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook). If you already have an account with CERN, you can use it.
- After logging in with your (new) CERN account, please fill in the form at CERN to register for the #ossym24. Once registered you will receive an email confirmation.
Programme Committee
Prof. Emmanuel Cartier | European Commission JRCProf.
Dr. Alexander Decker | Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt, Germany
Prof. Dr. Kai Erenli | University of Applied Sciences BFI Vienna, Austria
Msc. Maik Fröbe | Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, Jena, Germany
Priv.-Doz Dr. Christian Geminn | University Kassel, Germany
Prof. Dr. Michael Granitzer | University Passau, Germany
Prof. Dr. Christian Guetl | Graz University of Technology, Austria
Prof. Dr. Andreas Henrich | University Bamberg, Germany
Prof. Djoerd Hiemstra | University of Twente, Radboud University, Netherlands
Prof. Dr. Robert Jäschke | Humboldt University Berlin & L3S, Hannover, Germany
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Nils Jensen | Ostfalia University of Applied Science, Wolfenbüttel, Germany
Prof. Dr. Mohammed Kaicer | Faculty of Sciences Kenitra, Morocco
Dr. Jens Kersten | German Aerospace Centre, Jena, Germany
Dr. Jelena Mitrovic | University of Passau, Germany
Prof. Dr. Engelbert Niehaus | University Koblenz-Landau, Landau, Germany
Dr. Jakub Piskorski | European Commission
Prof. Dr. Melanie Platz | Saarland University, Germany
Prof. Dr. Martin Potthast | Leipzig University, Germany
Prof. Dr. Mirko Presser | Aarhus University, Denmark
Prof. Dr. Georg Rehm | German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), Berlin, Germany
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Gianmaria Silvello | University of Padova, Italy
Dr. Tim Smith | CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
Prof. Dr. Arjen P. de Vries | Radboud University, Netherlands
Dr. Stefan Voigt | Open Search Foundation, Germany
Dr. Andreas Wagner | CERN, Geneva, Switzerland