Skip to toolbar

Community & Business Groups

Web Observatory Community Group

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.

Group's public email, repo and wiki activity over time

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.

No Reports Yet Published

Learn more about publishing.

Chairs, when logged in, may publish draft and final reports. Please see report requirements.

This group does not have a Chair and thus cannot publish new reports. Learn how to choose a Chair.

Web Observatory Workshop at WWW2014

The 2nd International Web Observatory Workshop (WOW2014) is being held today in conjunction with the 23nd International World Wide Web Conference, Seoul, Korea.

The web page for the workshop is on http://wow.oerc.ox.ac.uk/ as last year.

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

 

CFP: 2nd International Workshop on Building Web Observatories (B-WOW), 23rd June 2014

Call for Papers for 2nd International Workshop on Building Web Observatories (B-WOW), 23rd June 2014

https://sites.google.com/site/bwebobs14

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.

===================================================
TOPICS
===================================================

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.

===================================================
SUBMISSION
===================================================

*   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.

Papers need to be in LNCS format and they should be submitted at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bwebobs14

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.

===================================================
DATES
===================================================

Paper submission deadline: 20 April 2014
Acceptance notifications: 20 May 2014
Camera-ready version due: 27 May 2014

===================================================
PROCEEDINGS
===================================================

The workshop proceedings will be published on EPrints and on the WSTnet Web Observatory website http://webscience.org/web-observatory/

===================================================
ORGANISING COMMITTEE
===================================================

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

===================================================
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
===================================================

Programme chairs

Wendy Hall, University of Southampton, UK
David De Roure, University of Oxford, UK

Web Observatory Workshop today at WWW2013

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

W3C Web Observatory Group Teleconference confirmed for Wed April 24 4-5pm London time

Dear Observers

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

——————————————————-
To join the online meeting (Now from mobile devices!)
——————————————————-
1. Go to https://ox.webex.com/ox/j.php?ED=210387642&UID=1577106542&PW=NYjM4YTI1ZWIz&RT=MTgjMjE%3D
2. If requested, enter your name and email address.
3. If a password is required, enter the meeting password: webobs
4. Click “Join”.
5. Follow the instructions that appear on your screen.

To view in other time zones or languages, please click the link:
https://ox.webex.com/ox/j.php?ED=210387642&UID=1577106542&PW=NYjM4YTI1ZWIz&ORT=MTgjMjE%3D

——————————————————-
To join the audio conference only
——————————————————-
To receive a call back, provide your phone number when you join the meeting, or call the number below and enter the access code.
Call-in toll-free number (UK): 0800-051-3810
Call-in toll number (UK): +44-203-478-5289
Global call-in numbers: https://ox.webex.com/ox/globalcallin.php?serviceType=MC&ED=210387642&tollFree=1
Toll-free dialing restrictions: http://www.webex.com/pdf/tollfree_restrictions.pdf

Access code:956 616 420

——————————————————-
For assistance
——————————————————-
1. Go to https://ox.webex.com/ox/mc
2. On the left navigation bar, click “Support”.

You can contact me at:
accessgrid@oerc.ox.ac.uk
44-1865 610672

To update this meeting to your calendar program (for example Microsoft Outlook), click this link:
https://ox.webex.com/ox/j.php?ED=210387642&UID=1577106542&ICS=UMI&LD=1&RD=18&ST=1&SHA2=AAAAAqvWiQNQn9SvX8QCUtI2nH3sp6QpZitSdmZEVuDOHjHn&RT=MTgjMjE%3D

WebEx will automatically setup Meeting Manager for Windows the first time you join a meeting. To save time, you can setup prior to the meeting by clicking this link:
https://ox.webex.com/ox/meetingcenter/mcsetup.php

The playback of UCF (Universal Communications Format) rich media files requires appropriate players. To view this type of rich media files in the meeting, please check whether you have the players installed on your computer by going to https://ox.webex.com/ox/systemdiagnosis.php.

http://www.webex.com

CCP:+442034785289×956616420#

IMPORTANT NOTICE: This WebEx service includes a feature that allows audio and any documents and other materials exchanged or viewed during the session to be recorded. By joining this session, you automatically consent to such recordings. If you do not consent to the recording, discuss your concerns with the meeting host prior to the start of the recording or do not join the session. Please note that any such recordings may be subject to discovery in the event of litigation.

W3C Web Observatory Community Group April Teleconference

Greetings Observers

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

http://www.doodle.com/b23wxn27gchb5brp

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.

— Dave

CFP: 1st International workshop on Building Web Observatories @websci13 – DL: 20 March

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.

Best
Thanassis

===================================================

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
===================================================
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 20 MARCH 2013 23.59 CET
===================================================

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.

===================================================
TOPICS
===================================================

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.

===================================================
SUBMISSION
===================================================

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.

===================================================
DATES
===================================================
Paper submission deadline: 20 March 2013
Acceptance notifications: 27 March 2013
Camera-ready version due: 3 April 2013

===================================================
PROCEEDINGS
===================================================

The workshop proceedings will be published on EPrints and on the WSTnet Web Observatory website http://webscience.org/web-observatory/

===================================================
ORGANISING COMMITTEE
===================================================

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

===================================================
PROGRAMME COMMITTEE
===================================================

Programme chairs

Wendy Hall, University of Southampton, UK
David de Roure, University of Oxford, UK

F2F meeting Nov 16 final draft agenda

Here is the final draft schedule for the Web Observatory meeting on November 16.

Location: Charles River Room, 4th floor, Boston Park Plaza Hotel and Towers

Remote access instructions

9am    coffee and remote access setup (please call in)
9.30 Welcome, introductions, objectives and plan for the day – David De Roure and Wendy Hall
09.45 Short talks (Craig Gallen, Nigel Shadbolt, Prof Tat-Seng Chua)
10.45 coffee
11.00 Short talks (Karissa McKelvey, Steffen Staab, Deborah McGuiness)
12.00 Actions and planning for afternoon
12.30 lunch
1.30 Breakouts leading to description of W3C community group activity

— Dave