Vol. 6 (2024): Proceedings 6th International Open Search Symposium #ossym2024, 9–11 October 2024, LRZ - Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Garching, Germany

Dear readers,

in the continuation of our #ossym conference series, it is our great pleasure to present the proceedings of the 6th International Open Search Symposium, #ossym24, which takes place from 9 to 11 October 2024 in Garching – Munich, Germany, hosted by the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ).

In this year’s conference we have 22 accepted papers from 68 authors. The increasing interest in open search and artificial intelligence is reflected in the recent contributions including topics such as “Crawling and Infrastructure”, “Preprocessing and ML for Search”, “Search Applications and Technologies”, “Large Language Models, Retrieval-Augmented Generation and Named Entity Recognition”, and “Economics, Ethics and Society”.

All in all, the #ossym conference addresses a variety of formats, from scientific presentations, to interactive workshops on horizontal aspects of open search topics, to a panel discussion with industry players and policy makers. It provides also a platform for researchers from two EU projects “Open Web Search” and “NGI Search” to present their results and share knowledge.

Not covered in these proceedings, but nevertheless worth mentioning are the keynote speeches, providing valuable insights into technical, governmental, community-related and ethical aspects:

• Roberto Viola (Director General, Communications Networks, Content and Technology, European Commission) – Opening Keynote
• Prof. Dr. Martin Andree (Researcher at the University of Cologne, and bestselling Author “Big Tech Must Go”) – “How we are taking back the net”
• Dr. Richard Socher (CEO of You.com) – You.com
• Nina Leseberg (Head of Communities & Engagement, Wikimedia Deutschland) – “Digital Discourse: how the Wikipedia Community safeguards the quality of the digital encyclopedia”

We want to express our special thanks to all authors for their sound contributions, to the programme committee for their valuable reviews and recommendations, to all keynote and featured speakers for their valuable insights, to all sponsors for their financial support, as well to the local team for their organisational efforts. Without all this great input and helpful support, it would not be possible to successfully run the #ossym conference series.

Our initial motivation was, and still is, the belief that the #ossym conference is an exemplary demonstration of how multifaceted the vibrant Open Web Search community approaches the topic and explores it from a wide range of disciplines and angles. Every #ossym conference brings the Open Web Search Initiative and
related disciplines a big step forward year after year.

In this spirit: We are very happy to announce and look forward to the next year's conference – the #ossym25, taking place from 8 - 10 October 2025 in Helsinki hosted by CSC - IT Center for Science!

On behalf of #ossym24

Andreas Wagner, Michael Granitzer, Christian Gütl, Christine Plote, Stefan Voigt and Per Öster
Conference Chairs