The third conference in the annual Web Science series began yesterday (Wednesday 15 July) in Koblenz, Germany. This is the first conference in the series to be officially designated an ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) event.
The conference was opened by Professor Steffen Staab, Conference General Chair, Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Founder-Director of the Web Science Trust and Chair of the Conference Steering Board, and by this year’s Programme Chair, Professor David De Roure.
Professor De Roure commented on the high number and quality of the submissions to this year’s conference, and the global spread of contributors. ‘The conference is unique in the manner in which it brings multiple disciplines together in creative and critical dialogue,’ he said.
The first conference keynote was delivered by Dr Jaime Teevan, researcher in the Context, Learning and User Experience for Search (CLUES) group at Microsoft Research. She demonstrated the importance of studying and analysing historical changes to web pages over time as a way of understanding the dynamics of web search, and helping improve browser, crawler and search engine behaviour.
The first Conference session, ‘Analysis of the Web and Web Users’, included presentatons on the value of analyzing spatio-temporal dynamics on Twitter and ways of improving search experiences on the Web.
The poster session included around 100 posters, covering areas such as: Business, Semantic Web, Privacy & Security, Social Media, Multimedia, Social Networks, Linked Open Data, Social Science, Web Mining, Crowd Sourcing and E-Learning.
In the Conference Programme, Professor David De Roure and Scott Poole write: ‘As a measure of community activity, the conference demonstrates the increasing breadth and quality of research in the Web Science area, and the programme illustrates exciting developments in the study of Web Science both in results and methodologies, with a growing body of empirical work that brings new insights to the micro and macro behaviour of the Web.’
Twitter feed: websci11
Conference website: http://www.websci11.org