Diversity on the Web Workshop @WWW2012 -- Call for Paper

[Please feel free to spread the word. We would love a diverse audience and
set of presentations.]


Call for papers for DiversiWeb 2012


Second international workshop on knowledge diversity on the Web



Workshop at WWW 2012, Lyon, France


April 16, 2012


Supported by the EU FP7 projects RENDER and


<https://sites.google.com/site/diversiweb2012/>


Almost 20 years after its introduction, the Web provides a platform for the
publication, use and exchange of information, at planetary scale, on
virtually every topic, and representing an amazing diversity of opinions,
viewpoints, mindsets and backgrounds. The success of the Web can be
attributed to several factors, most notably to its principled scalable
design, but also to a number of subsequent ICT developments such as smart
user-generated content, mobile devices, and most recently cloud computing.
The first two of these have dramatically lowered the last barriers of entry
when it comes to producing and consuming information online, leading to an
unprecedented growth and mass collaboration. They are responsible for
hundreds of millions of users all over the globe creating high-quality
encyclopedias, publishing Terabytes of multimedia content, contributing to
world‐class software, and lively taking part in defining the agenda of many
aspects of our society by raising their voices, and publicly expressing and
sharing their ideas, viewpoints, and resources.


The other side of the coin in this unique success story is, nevertheless,
the great challenges associated with managing the sheer amounts of
information continuously being published online, whilst allowing for
purposeful use, and leveraging the diversity inherently unfolding through
global-scale collaboration. In this context, diversity includes different
opinions, sentiments, preferences, or worldviews that are reflected in the
way information is expressed on the Web. These challenges are still to be
solved at many levels, from the infrastructure to store and access the
information, through the methods and techniques to make sense out of it, to
the paradigms underlying the processes of Web‐based information provision
and consumption. As an example, when searching for blog posts,
state-of-the-art technology – be that popularity-based algorithms,
recommendation engines or collaborative filters – tends to return either
the most popular posts, or those which correspond with a personal profile
and therefore with the known opinions and tastes of the reader. Alternative
points of view, and new unexpected content, are not taken into account as
they are not highly ranked, and posts expressing different opinions are
sometimes even discarded. This behavior has particularly negative
consequences when dealing with information that is expected and intended to
be subject to diverse opinion – as is the case with news reports, ratings
of products or media content, customer reviews, or any other type of
subjective assessment. The same negative effects apply in a
community-driven environment that is designed for collaboration – the most
obvious example here being Wikipedia and the blogosphere. The information
diversity exposed in such an environment, impressive both with respect to
scale and the richness of opinions and viewpoints expressed, cannot be
handled without adequate computer support in an economically feasible
manner. In the long run, maintaining the current state-of-affairs will
change the ways and the extent to which people are informed (or not) on a
particular topic, tremendously influencing how they look into that topic,
what they find about it and what they think about it. On top of all this,
it is meanwhile acknowledged that the current state of affairs hampers true
collaboration. Wikipedia is a tremendous success, but it is also a largely
meritocratic system with a decreasing number of active contributors,
whereas the blogosphere has to deal with the limited attention of the blog
authors. What is needed are novel concepts, methods and tools that allow
humans and machines to leverage the huge amounts of information created by
a community, based on interaction models that support expressing,
communicating and reasoning about divergent models simultaneously. This
would not only enhance true collaboration, but would also significantly
improve various aspects of the information management life cycle, thus
addressing information overload in sectors which rely on opinions-driven
information sources and mass participation – news, ratings, reviews, and
social and information sharing portals of any kind.


== Objectives of the workshop ==


The overall aim of this workshop is to provide an interdisciplinary forum
for researchers and practitioners to present and discuss their ideas
related to these challenges. We aim to address a wide array of
interdisciplinary questions around knowledge diversity on the Web, which
need to be tackled in order to preserve the fragile balance between a world
that is continually converging and growing together, the rich diversity of
the global society, and the dangers of fragmentation and splintering. This
includes but is not limited to questions such as ‘How to model diversity?’,
‘How to discover bias and opinion in blog posts, tweets, forum items, wiki
edits, etc.?’, ‘How to use provenance information for
diversity-awareness?’, ‘How to rank, aggregate, summarize, and exploit
information in a diversity--‐aware manner?’, ‘What are the applications of
diversity-¬‐rich information sources?’, ‘How can we use diversity as an
asset instead of regarding it as a barrier?’.

The objective of the workshop is to engage and foster research, as well as
technology and application development towards enhanced knowledge diversity
on the Web. In particular we welcome submissions that


* analyze the capabilities of current information management models,
algorithms and technologies to leverage knowledge diversity,

* extend existing models, methods, techniques and tools to accommodate the
requirements arising from paying a proper account to diversity-¬‐expressed
information provenance and communication and collaboration environments
characterized by a rich variety of opinions and viewpoints.

* discuss the foundations of knowledge diversity on the Web and propose
alternative paradigms,

* propose novel evaluation strategies, methods and techniques to assess the
impact of diversity-¬‐ minded information management.



== Topics ==


Topics of the workshop include, but are not limited to:


* risks and advantages of diversity and diversification on the Web

* facets of knowledge diversity and conceptual and formal models for
representing and understanding diversity

* provenance of diversity and its role in diversity-aware access to data

* discovery and mining of corpora for diversity-ÂŹrelated information

* use of natural language processing techniques for diversity mining

* classifying Web 2.0 content items such as blog posts, videos, tweets, and
wiki-¬‐edits by their biases

* usage and benefits of diversity in the corporate context, e.g., in order
to understand feedback and communication with the customer

* enabling or improving communication and collaboration over barriers
induced by diversity

* extensions to Web applications taking diversity into account

* exposing and explaining diversity to end users

* user experiences avoiding the radicalization of groups by exposing them
to alternatives

* user interfaces allowing the explicit annotation of content with
diversity markers

* studies on the acceptance by end-¬‐users of diversified applications.





== Submissions ==


We aim at full papers submissions of the length of six pages presenting
mature research work, technology, and applications; as well as experience
reports of case studies which have to deal with socio-economic and
technical diversity-related challenges. We also welcome short papers of up
to four pages describing new ideas and visions, as well as recent work in
progress and preliminary findings.


Submission format is the same as for WWW 2011, formatting guidelines are
available at http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates.


Selected papers will be invited for a special issue of a journal or as
bookchapters, pending negotiations.


Submissions can be submitted via EasyChair at
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=diversiweb2012


== Important dates ==


All papers will undergo a pre-reviewing procedure according to which on
February 1 we will notify all authors about


* Submission deadline: February 8, 2012

* Notification of acceptance for full papers: February 29, 2012

* Registration to the workshop: March, 7 2012

* Camera ready versions of accepted papers: March 7, 2012

* Workshop program due: March 8, 2012

* Workshop date: April 16, 2012



== Organization committee ==


* Elena Simperl, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany

* Paul Groth, VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands

* Paolo Massa, Fundazione Bruno Kessler, Italy

* Denny Vrandecic, Wikimedia Deutschland e.V., Germany


== Contact ==


For further questions please contact Elena Simperl at elena.simperl AT
kit.edu