Long awaited: proceedings of the #ossym22 conference are here!

Foreword of the editors

The 4th International Open Search – #ossym – was held at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland from 10-12 October 2022. It was a great experience to meet everyone in person again after two years of online meetings due to the pandemic. The participants on site enjoyed the personal exchanges, discussions, coffee-breaks, and social events to exchange and advance scientific and personal topics. The symposium saw a series of inspiring keynotes as well as many interesting talks in the research tracks and in the industry and application-oriented sessions. Furthermore, very interesting considerations were shared in the more interactive sessions on search quality and ethics as well as in search literacy and education parts.

The community flagship project OpenWebSearch.eu had just begun a few weeks prior to the symposium, thus many talks and presentation gave a perspective on what research and piloting activities are expected happen during the three years of this project. All in all, it was a very lively and inspiring meeting, fostering the exchange of many different disciplines involved in the Open Search Initiative: from computer science, information retrieval, law, ethics, economy, industry, education, media-science and many more.

We are very happy to present herewith the 2022 volume of #ossym proceedings, which document the symposium in 2022 and its many innovative and interdisciplinary contributions, advancing Open Search. We kindly want to thank all the authors, presenters, panellists, and keynote speakers for sharing their science work, ideas, expertise and thoughts at #ossym and within these proceedings.

Finally, we want to extend a warm thanks to CERN as local host and co-organiser of #ossym2023! CERN in its structure, scope and organisational set-up demonstrates impressively that some largescale science tasks can only be achieved in systematic and humble cooperation of sharp minds, working in synergy with large scale technological facilities. Furthermore, is reminds us, that with impactful and fundamental research findings – as is the case with nuclear physics – large responsibilities emerge for scientists, technicians, decision-makers, and society as a whole: to mindfully and responsibly handle the capabilities that science and technology provide us with! Although very different in nature, Open Search and open, unbiased access to data and information via a public open Web index, similarly, require cutting edge science, large-scale and distributed computing-facilities, clear ethical and legal guard-rails as well as a sound governance to be operated as a public and open infrastructure in future. We hope that #ossym2022 marked another tiny, and we are hopefully worthwhile, stepping-stone on our joint venture towards open and unbiased information access in the Web and Open Search in general.

Enjoy reading these proceedings and we are looking forward to the next instances of #ossym in the years to come.

Together, for a better net.
Andreas Wagner, Michael Granitzer, Christian Gütl, Christine Plote and Stefan Voigt