The sister organisation of W3C, the Web Science Trust (www.webscience.org) proposes to create a global "Web Observatory". The Open Data movement and the Transparency Agenda are successfully advocating the release of very large institutional and commercial data sets describing social phenomena, economic indicators and geographic trends. This proliferation of data represents great opportunity for researchers and industry but this data abundance also threatens to make it ever more difficult to locate, analyse, compare and interpret useful information in a consistent and reliable way; a situation which can only get worse unless we can help stakeholders perform useful analysis rather than drowning in a sea of data. The Web Observatory will offer an institutional framework to promote the use of W3C and other standards in the development of; Semantic Catalogues to globally locate existing data sets, Collection Systems to gather new global data sets, and Analytics Tools and methodologies to analyse these data sets. This community group seeks to articulate the business and technical requirements for the Web Observatory.
Note: Community Groups are proposed and run by the community. Although W3C hosts these conversations, the groups do not necessarily represent the views of the W3C Membership or staff.
The 2nd International Web Observatory Workshop (WOW2014) is being held today in conjunction with the 23nd International World Wide Web Conference, Seoul, Korea.
We’ll make presentations available from the website. The papers are in the companion volume to the proceedings, on pages 1023 to 1072 – here is the list:
The Design of a Live Social Observatory System
Huanbo Luan, Juanzi Li, Maosong Sun, Tat-Seng Chua
Observing the Web by Understanding the Past: Archival Internet Research
Matthew S. Weber
Fluctuation and Burst Response in Social Media Mizuki Oka, Yasuhiro Hashimoto, Takashi Ikegami
Humour Reactions in Crisis: A Proximal Analysis of Chinese Posts on Sina Weibo in Reaction to the Salt Panic of March 2011
Gareth Beeston, Manuel León Urrutia, Caroline Halcrow, Xianni Xiao, Lu Liu, Jinchuan Wang, Jinho Jay Kim, Kunwoo Park
Zooniverse: Observing the World’s Largest Citizen Science Platform
Robert Simpson, Kevin R. Page, David De Roure
Visualising Data in Web Observatories: A Proposal for Visual Analytics Development & Evaluation
Paul Booth, Wendy Hall, Nicholas Gibbins, Spyros Galanis
Legal and Ethical Considerations: Step 1b in Building a Health Web Observatory
Marie Joan Kristine T. Gloria, John S. Erickson, Joanne S. Luciano, Dominic DiFranzo, Deborah L. McGuinness
Towards a Taxonomy for Web Observatories
Ian C. Brown, Wendy Hall, Lisa Harris
co-located with the ACM Web Science Conference 2014, Bloomington Indiana, 2014 –http://www.websci14.org
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 20 April 2014 23.59 CET
Building upon the success of the first International “Building Web Observatories Workshop” (B-WOW) at Web Science 2013, B-WOW 2014 aims to examine the challenges of interoperability and distributed analytics across the growing number of Web Observatories
This workshop will examine the potential of interlinking existing and emerging Web Observatories, offering the potential as a global network of heterogeneous data, analytic and visual repositories across a range of topics and disciplinary perspectives. Web Observatories can provide vital tools for observing the complex interactions and correlations across different locations, topics and systems in an attempt to deliver insight into the socio-technical interactions between human beings and the Web.
This workshop aims to bring together researchers involved in building Web Observatories to discuss opportunities, challenges and best practices, as well as guidelines for Web Observatory interoperability.
We invite long papers to consider the following topics:
* Best practice on deploying and managing Web Observatories.
* Challenges in harvesting, cataloguing and discovering datasets and on the Web.
* Functional aspects of Web Observatories and of interoperability challenges for datasets and analytics.
* Description and cataloguing of datasets and analytic tools to be available through discoverable catalogs.
* Performance and optimisation of analytics across distributed and/or heterogeneous datasets.
* Reports, Presentations, Experiences and Tools from building observatories to inform best practice.
We also invite short papers on the topics of:
* Challenges in harvesting, cataloguing and discovering datasets and on the Web.
* Description and cataloguing of datasets and analytic tools to be available through discoverable catalogs.
* Full papers can be a maximum of 8 pages including references
* Short papers, ongoing work can be up to 3 pages, with an additional page of references.
All accepted papers will be included in the online proceedings. Authors of selected papers (independent on submission type) will be invited to give a 10 minute presentation and sit on a panel; there will be two panels, one for each of the above areas.
All accepted position papers will be included in the online proceedings and their authors will be invited to provide a poster, which will be presented in the area outside the workshop rooms during the break.
Authors of selected papers will be invited to give a 10 minute presentation as part of a series of panel sessions.
Wendy Hall, University of Southampton, UK
David De Roure, University of Oxford, UK
Thanassis Tiropanis, University of Southampton, UK
Ramine Tinati, University of Southampton, UK
Thanks to everyone for a great workshop yesterday – the papers are online on http://wow.oerc.ox.ac.uk/ and I am currently collecting presentations (several on slideshare) and linking them from the Program.
The papers from the Building Web Observatories workshop held 1 May 2013 at ACM Web Science in Paris are available from https://sites.google.com/site/bwebobs13/. Many thanks to Thanassis Tiropanis from University of Southampton for maintaining this page and also collecting the workshop presentations.
A reminder to those of you at WWW2013 in Rio – our workshop today is in room Queluz II and runs from 1pm-8pm. Our keynote speaker is Professor Ramesh Jain at 5pm on “Observing Personal and Societal Health using EventShop” . The workshop program is on http://wow.oerc.ox.ac.uk/ and our twitter hashtag is #WOW2013
— Dave
Session 3 13:00-14:30 OBSERVATORY CASE STUDIES
Introduction to workshop and participant intros (please indicate if you wish to give a short talk later)
* Karissa Mckelvey and Filippo Menczer. Design and Prototyping of a Social Media Observatory
* Jérôme Kunegis. KONECT – The Koblenz Network Collection
Marie Joan Kristine Gloria, Deborah L. McGuinness, Joanne S. Luciano and Qingpeng Zhang.Exploration in Web Science: Instruments for Web Observatories
Session 4 15:00-16:30 USING OBSERVATORIES
* Nattiya Kanhabua and Wolfgang Nejdl. Understanding the Diversity of Tweets in the Time of Outbreaks
Ramine Tinati, Thanassis Tiropanis and Leslie Carr. An Approach for Using Wikipedia to Measure the Flow of Trends across Countries
Ionut Trestian, Chunjing Xiao and Aleksandar Kuzmanovic. A Glance at an Overlooked Part of the World Wide Web
Short introductions of other observatory activities represented in the room
Session 5 17:00-18:30 KEYNOTE AND OBSERVATORY ENGINEERING
Keynote: Prof Ramesh Jain “Observing Personal and Societal Health using EventShop”
Patrice Seyed, Tim Lebo, Evan Patton, James Mccusker and Deborah McGuinness.SemantEco: A Next-Generation Web Observatory
Ernesto Diaz-Aviles. Living Analytics Methods for the Web Observatory
Session 6 18:30-20:00 OBSERVATORY ECOSYSTEM
* Paul Booth, Paul Gaskell and Christopher Hughes. The Economics of Data: Quality, Value & Exchange in Web Observatories
Ian Brown, Wendy Hall and Lisa Harris. From search to observation
Discussion of the future Web Observatory R&D agenda
I am pleased to confirm that our April Teleconference will be on Wednesday, April 24, 2013 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM London (15:00-16:00 UTC).
We’ve booked a webex conference for flexibility in joining by phone or also online for those who wish – details below (including links to toll free numbers etc).
Thanks – looking forward to the meeting.
— Dave
Topic: W3C Web Observatory teleconference
Date: Wednesday, 24 April 2013
Time: 16:00, GMT Summer Time (London, GMT+01:00)
Meeting Number: 956 616 420
Meeting Password: webobs
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It’s time for a teleconference, so that we can introduce ourselves, our observatory activities and do some planning. If you’re interested in attending please could you complete the doodle poll (times are all in London afternoons) on
The favourite date as of 29 March is Wednesday, April 24, 2013 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM UK time. Poll closes Tuesday 2nd.
Agenda:
1. Introductions (5mins)
2. Background and purpose of the Community Group (5mins)
3. Update on related events (5mins)
4. Brief summaries of observatory activities by group members (20mins) – more at next meeting
5. Forward planning discussion (15mins)
6. Summary of next steps (5mins)
I’ll review the poll on April 2 and announce the date and call details.
Thanks and look forward to talking with you in April.
Hello All – we are organising a workshop on building Web Obervatories at ACM WebSci13. 2-3 page position papers are invited – the deadline is 20 March.
It will be a great opportunity for discussion on the challenges of building interoperable Web Observatories.
1st International workshop on Building Web Observatories
Paris, 1 May 2013
https://sites.google.com/site/bwebobs13
co-located with the ACM Web Science Conference 2013
http://www.websci13.org
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SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 20 MARCH 2013 23.59 CET
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In an age of “big data” it is no longer a concern to get access to data per se but rather to find the relevant data in a vast ocean of keyword search results. As the store of data grows inexorably our focus inevitably moves from an unsorted Web of documents to a collated, curated and contextualised Web of data. Web Observatories are providing unique opportunities to bring together datasets and analytic tools by actively engaging with research communities. There are significant challenges in deploying Web Observatories that need to be discussed. At the same time, performing analytics on a global scale across interoperable Web Observatories holds the promise of further insights and value to the academia, business and society.
This workshop aims to bring together researchers involved in building Web Observatories to discuss opportunities, challenges and best practices, as well as guidelines for Web Observatory interoperability. Discussion will involve the following topics:
* Building consensus on the functional aspects of Web observatories.
* Best practice on deploying and managing Web observatories.
* Harvesting, cataloguing and discovering datasets on the Web.
* Interoperability of datasets and analytics methods and tools.
Position papers in the following areas are invited:
* Building Web Observatories; functional aspects, architectures and best practices.
* Linking Web Observatories; interoperability challenges and guidelines.
Position papers need to be 2-3 pages long in LNCS format and they can be submitted at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bwebobs13
All accepted position papers will be included in the online proceedings and their authors will be invited to provide a poster, which will be presented in the area outside the workshop rooms during the break.
Authors of selected papers will be invited to give a 10 minute presentation and sit on a panel; there will be two panels, one for each of the above areas.
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DATES
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Paper submission deadline: 20 March 2013
Acceptance notifications: 27 March 2013
Camera-ready version due: 3 April 2013
Wendy Hall, University of Southampton, UK
David de Roure, University of Oxford, UK
Thanassis Tiropanis, University of Southampton, UK
Ramine Tinati, University of Southampton, UK