GI 2010 Workshop on “Web Science”

co-located with the annual meeting of the German Society for Computer Science (GI) 2010 http://www.informatik2010.de/

Web science is often referred to as the “science of decentralized information systems”.
While novel technologies such as semantic web, web services, and cloud computing are germane to the broad proliferation of Web technologies, we also need to understand phenomena of the Web in the small as well as in the large, in order to retain its usefulness and benefit to people. This is in the center of attention of Web science and includes besides the mentioned technological approaches, research related to online communities, information diffusion on the Web, Web governance, global network structures beyond the individual communities on the Web, growth analysis, incentive and monetization systems.

Because the web itself is socially embedded a particular focus of this first GI workshop on Web Science are social computing applications, such as Wikipedia, Facebook, or del.icio.us, which are analysed with regard to the complex interdependencies between constraints imposed by the technical system as well as with regard to their use in social actions and interactions under varying social contexts. Understanding dynamics and evolution of these systems, as they depend on inherent social and informational structures, is of particular interest, because it is the dynamics of such communities that determines their final success or failure. In order to analyze social computing applications, interplay between aspects of computer science, for example computational network analysis, visualization techniques, graph theoretic models, semantic web technologies, and machine learning techniques, with social science and psychology is required.

In this interdisciplinary workshop we are aiming to bridge the gap between paradigms and encourage interdisciplinary collaborations as well as advance and deepen our understanding of web science. Joint efforts are needed to take advantage of the state-of-the-art research from multiple disciplines, such as computer science, information systems, sociology, and psychology. Moreover, this workshop provides a platform for researchers and practitioners to exchange preliminary results, new concepts and methodologies in this area.

Topics of interest

Topics of interest include but not limited to:

• Web Governance incl. Provenance, Licensing, Data Security, Access Control
• Open Knowledge ecosystems on the Web, such as Open Governmental Data, Open Scientific Data
• Information quality assessment
• Quality, coherence and user interaction on the Linked Data Web 
• Social computing applications such as collaborative filtering, community-based information retrieval and recommendation, collaborative bookmarking, tagging and multi-agent systems
• Static and dynamic models of Web structure and Web growth
• Analysis of network structures within and beyond individual communities on the Web 
• Incentive and monetization systems
• Information diffusion on the Web,
• Web and Web application governance,
• Novel visualisation techniques for Web related data
• Integrating computational network analysis and semantic web techniques, for example to enhance the mainly structure-based network analysis by semantic information
• Case studies of communities such as Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, World of Warcraft, open source software as well as empirical findings in social computing-related applications

In particular, we aim at collecting a set of requirements, architectural styles and metaphors for Web science.
It is the target of such terminology and figures to build bridges of understanding between the different communities serving the need to appropriately analyse and develop social Web applications.

Where and when

Tuesday, 09/28/2010, 2pm to 5:30pm, S 21

Program

Session 1
14:00
Welcome / Opening Remarks (Claudia Mueller-Birn)
14:00 – 15:00
“Model-Driven Research for Web-Science” (Markus Stromaier)
15:00 – 15:30
“Towards Quality Measures for Web Network Extraction” (Robert Tolksdorf)

15:30-16:00 Uhr: Break

Session 2
16:00 – 16: 30
“Group Evolution Patterns in World of Warcraft” (Christian Thurau and Christian Bauckhage)
16:30 – 17:00
“Estimating the relevance of search results in the Culture-Web: a study of semantic distance measures” (Laura Hollink and Mark van Assem)
17:00 – 17:30
“Proposal: Standardized Vectorial Resource Descriptors on the Web” (Wolfgang Orthuber and Stefan Dietze)
17:30
Concluding remarks (Claudia Mueller-Birn)

Contact and Organisation

Sören Auer (auer@informatik.uni-leipzig.de), AKSW/Institute for Computer Science, University of Leipzig
Claudia Müller-Birn (clmb@cs.cmu.edu), Institute for Software Research, Carnegie Mellon University
Steffen Staab (staab@uni-koblenz.de), Institute for Web Science and Technologies, University of Koblenz-Landau

Program committee

Christian Bauckhage, International Center for Information Technology (B-IT), Bonn-Aachen
Ulrike Cress, Knowledge Media Research Center, Tuebingen
Daniel Dietrich, Open Data Network
Rainer Fröse, IFM-Geomar / Fish Base
Andreas Geyer-Schulz, Institute of Technology Karlsruhe
Jonathan Gray, Open Knowledge Foundation
Daniel Hladky, Ontos AG 
Andreas Hotho, University of Würzburg
Stefanie Lindstaedt, Graz University of Technology / Know- Center, Graz
Ulf Morgenstern, Historisches Seminar Uni Leipzig
Wolfgang Nejdl, University of Hanover
Christian Stegbauer, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main
York Sure, GESIS-Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Bonn
Robert Tolksdorf, Freie Universität Berlin