Deadline extended: 1st International Web Observatory Workshop (WOW2013)

       *** Deadline extended to 7th March (23:59 UTC-11) ***

                        Call for Papers
    The 1st International Web Observatory Workshop (WOW2013)
             14th May 2013, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
 in conjunction with the 22nd International World Wide Web Conference

           Workshop website http://wow.oerc.ox.ac.uk/

WOW2013 provides a focus for the emerging Web Observatory community to
share tools, methods, results and experience in the development and
deployment of Web Observatories - and to set the agenda for future work
in the field.

BACKGROUND
The Web operates at a very large scale and is dominated by emergent
phenomena with radical innovations coming from and driven by its users,
and in time scales that are faster than those exhibited by earlier
computer-based systems. We are just beginning to understand how to
conduct scientific research on the huge and constantly changing
socio-technical system formed by the web and all the people and agents
that use it. Scientific method begins with instrumentation and
measurement to describe and characterize what is actually happening -
that is, the construction and study of a Web Observatory. Only then can
we begin to develop theories and abstractions that enable better design
of future evolutions of the systems and quantitative predictions of
their behaviour.

IMPORTANT DATES
Workshop paper deadlines (extended): March 7th 2013 (23:59 UTC-11)
Workshop paper notifications: March 13th 2013
Workshop paper final copy hard deadline: April 3rd 2013

WORKSHOP OBJECTIVES
Numerous research labs around the world are building Web Observatories
and conducting studies within them, many highly advanced, but typically
developed in isolation. The objectives of the workshop are therefore:
- A forum for reporting, presenting, and evaluating this work and
disseminating new approaches to advance the discipline;
- An opportunity to explore how Web Observatories might in the future
interoperate - be that through the exchange of data, metadata, remote
access, algorithms, or results;
- A venue for critically and constructively evaluating and verifying the
operation of Web Observatories and the results that flow from them;
- Inauguration of a workshop series for the Web Observatory research
community, setting the agenda for research in the field.

TOPICS
Topics of interest for the workshop include but are not limited to:
- What is required of an Observatory so it can be used for empirical
research of Web associated phenomena? What is the taxonomy of Web
Observatories?
- What software and services are required to build a Web Observatory?
- How can we analyse and visualise the vast quantity of data captured by
the Web Observatory? Can we construct computational models for these
systems?
- How can we use the Web as a tool to study real world events and
situations?
- What kinds of temporal models and methods do we need to access and
explore the diachronic Web?
- Which methods of semantic enrichment are needed to allow ease
exploration of Web Observatory data sets and corpora?
- Can observed patterns and trends of existing communities be applied to
aid the formation and evolution of new, more effective and
collaborative, shared-interest groups?
- How can I use observatory tools to explore emerging communities /
activities on the Web?
- Can non-consumptive methods play a role in opening Web Observatories
to researchers?
- How can Web Observatories share or exchange datasets, tooling, and
methods?
- What are the ethical, legal, and commercial implications of Web
Observatories as a research resource? How might these be addressed?
- How do I know the data from a Web Observatory is correct? What methods
are required for validation and corroboration?

We invite full papers (8 pages) or short / position papers (2-4 pages).
Please produce your paper using the ACM template and submit to WOW2013
on EasyChair by 1st March 2013. Accepted papers will be published in the
ACM Digital Library.

ACM template: http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates
Submissions: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wow2013


WORKSHOP ORGANISATION

Chairs
David De Roure, University of Oxford, UK
Wolfgang Nejdl, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany

Publicity and Proceedings
Megan Meredith-Lobay, University of Oxford
Kevin Page, University of Oxford

Advisors
Wendy Hall, University of Southampton
Noshir Contractor, Northwestern University
James Hendler, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA

Executive Program Committee
Tat-Seng Chua, National University of Singapore
Thanassis Tiropanis, University of Southampton
Steffen Staab, Universität Koblenz
J. Stephen Downie, University of Illinois

Received on Friday, 1 March 2013 23:13:02 UTC