Workshop overview
Much of the knowledge organizations rely on is implicit: it lives in the routines, judgement, and experience of individual experts, and it is rarely written down. As workforces turn over and experts retire, this knowledge is lost before it ever reaches a document or database.
The information and knowledge management community has strong methods for extracting and organizing knowledge that already exists in text and data. Comparatively little attention is paid to the step before that: surfacing implicit knowledge from people and work practice so that it can be represented, integrated, and preserved at all.
KEEPER focuses on this gap. The workshop brings together research on an implicit-knowledge lifecycle with four stages:
- Elicitation (capture and identify). Interactive and AI-supported methods to surface implicit knowledge from experts, including LLM-driven interviewing, dialogue agents, and conversational elicitation, and methods to identify which knowledge is implicit, valuable, and at risk.
- Externalization (represent). Turning elicited knowledge into structured, reusable representations such as knowledge graphs, ontologies, and documented procedures, with attention to provenance and to what is lost in formalization.
- Integration. Linking newly externalized knowledge with existing knowledge management systems, retrieval pipelines, and organizational repositories without creating silos or contradictions.
- Preservation and organization. Maintaining elicited knowledge as durable organizational memory: versioning, curation, retrieval, and guarding against knowledge loss over time.
Throughout, KEEPER treats AI as assistive and human-in-the-loop, with the human expert as the source and validator of knowledge. The workshop complements the CIKM main tracks: it addresses knowledge that is not yet recorded at all, rather than extraction from existing data.
Topics of interest
We invite contributions on, but not limited to:
- LLM-supported and interactive elicitation of implicit and expert knowledge (interviewing, dialogue agents, conversational elicitation)
- Identifying which knowledge is implicit, valuable, and at risk within an organization
- Externalization into knowledge graphs, ontologies, and documented procedures; provenance and loss in formalization
- Integration of newly externalized knowledge with existing knowledge management and retrieval systems
- Preservation, curation, versioning, and retrieval of knowledge as organizational memory
- Human-in-the-loop and trustworthy AI for knowledge capture and validation
- Knowledge loss through workforce turnover; knowledge management in SMEs and the public sector
- Evaluation methods, datasets, benchmarks, and field studies, including honest negative or partial results from real deployments
Important dates
- Paper submission deadline24 August 2026
- Acceptance notification23 September 2026
- Camera-ready versionto be announced
- Workshop day (CIKM 2026, Rome)8 November 2026
Dates are indicative and may be refined. All deadlines 11:59 PM Anywhere on Earth (AoE).
Submission and format
KEEPER is a half-day, fully on-site workshop that combines peer-reviewed paper presentations with an interactive research-agenda session open to all registered participants. All presentation and participation is on-site; no hybrid or remote option is offered.
- Format: full papers in the single-column CEURART template, up to 12 pages excluding references (minimum 5 pages).
- Template (CEURART): Overleaf template or the offline LaTeX and ODT package. The Libertinus font family is required; do not use Word for the ODT template.
- Review: double-blind. Please anonymize submissions.
- Submission site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=keeper2026
Publication
Accepted papers are published in open-access proceedings under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license; authors retain the copyright to their papers. We intend to publish the proceedings with CEUR-WS.org. If publication with CEUR-WS is not possible, the proceedings will instead be made available on Zenodo (open access, with DOIs).
Each accepted paper requires a signed CEUR author agreement (CC BY 4.0), either without third-party material (NTP) or with third-party material (TP).
At least one author of each accepted paper registers and presents on-site in Rome.
Organizers
Program Committee
- Dr. Alina BocksheckerUniversity of Hagen, Germany
- Prof. Dr. Susanne DurstBangkok University (IKI-SEA), Thailand
- Dr. Armin GerlDeggendorf Institute of Technology, Germany
- Michael GrantnerUniversity of Passau, Germany
- Prof. Dr. Janine HackerUniversity of Bamberg, Germany
- Prof. Dr. Konstantin HopfChemnitz University of Technology, Germany
- Prof. Dr. Franz LehnerUniversity of Passau, Germany
- Natalie LippsDeggendorf Institute of Technology, Germany
- Prof. Dr. Matti MäntymäkiUniversity of Turku, Finland
- Ekaterina MashinaDeggendorf Institute of Technology, Germany
- Prof. Dr. Michael ScholzDeggendorf Institute of Technology, Germany
- Ana-Maria SîrbuUniversity of Passau, Germany
- Prof. Dr. Stefan SmolnikUniversity of Hagen, Germany
- Dr. Lorenz WendlingerDeggendorf Institute of Technology, Germany
Contact
Questions about the workshop and submissions:
cikm-keeper@ai4care.de