In recent years, multiple dataspace initiatives were formed and are growing in both implementation and memberships. Dozens of individual dataspaces and use-cases are arising in their context, as listed in the International Data Spaces Association’s "Data Space Radar" and Gaia-X’ initial list, and even more from other initiatives. The European Union pushes this trend even more by including dataspaces as key element in their data strategy and spending 4-6 billion Euros on establishing these in various domains. The main challenges of this trend on dataspaces are twofold. First, no common definition of dataspaces and their core components exist, which complicates interoperability and FAIRness even at conceptual level. This probably produces isolated solutions tailored to specific use-cases only. Second, the various arising dataspaces in the wild follow different goals and have individual implementations and technology readiness levels. The lack of reusable core components forces stakeholders to reinvent these and leads to diverging implementations and therefore high costs.

The workshop intends to bring together people interested in dataspaces and the role of semantics in these, who may be from different communities such as dataspace drivers, law and policymakers as well as the researchers from the Semantic Web community. Since members of these different communities rarely have chances to interact, we design the workshop to be highly interactive and communicative. We aim at a full-day workshop with ⅔ formal presentations and ⅓ collaboration using the Open Space technique. This approach enables us to identify promising topics for collaboration and follow-up activities by enabling a dynamic agenda driven by the participants’ shared interests.


Submission Guidelines:

Please submit your papers to the [Workshop] Proposal for Workshop on Semantics in Dataspaces (SDS 2023) track on the WWW 2023's EasyChair submission at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=thewebconf2023iwpd.

Workshop papers that have been previously published or are under review for another journal, conference or workshop should not be considered for publication. Workshop papers should not exceed 12 pages in length (maximum 8 pages for the main paper content + maximum 2 pages for appendixes + maximum 2 pages for references). Shorter papers are also welcome, and we encourage you to not squeeze in too much material. Papers must be submitted in PDF format according to the ACM template published in the ACM guidelines, selecting the generic “sigconf” sample. The PDF files must have all non-standard fonts embedded. Workshop papers must be self-contained and in English. Each paper will be peer-reviewed.


List of Topics:

The topics of this workshop aim to discuss both conceptual definitions and actual implementations of dataspaces, and to promote the role of semantics in these. The main topics of this workshop include but are not limited to:

Conceptual Perspective:
- Surveys on definitions and visions
- What are dataspaces and what are their core elements?
- How are components and data life cycles structured?
- Formal models of dataspaces
- The role of stakeholders in decision processes
- Impact and potential of unique identifiers
- Conceptual reusable assets

State-of-the-art Implementations:
- How do arising dataspaces coincide/differ with each other?
- Requirements of customers, stakeholders, and politics
- Who drives their implementations and what are their technology readiness levels?
- Common reusable elements and standards
- Gap between academic definitions and actual implementations

Semantics for Dataspaces:
- Review of arising dataspaces with a focus on the Semantic Web and FAIR data
- Potential of methods and solutions from the Semantic Web for dataspaces
- Tailored benefits of ontologies, unique identifiers, algorithms, etc.
- Measuring political, practical, scientific, performance, etc. challenges for adoption


Program Committee:
Please consult the workshop website at https://dbis.rwth-aachen.de/SDS23/ for latest updates on the workshop and our program committee.

Publication:
Papers accepted by the workshop will be published in the WWW 2023 conference proceedings (companion volume).

Venue:
The workshop will be in  Austin, Texas, USA (format: tbd, likely hybrid) in conjunction with The Web Conference (formerly WWW conference, see https://www2023.thewebconf.org/).

Contact:
All questions about submissions should be emailed to sds@dbis.rwth-aachen.de. Up-to-date information will continuously be posted on https://dbis.rwth-aachen.de/SDS23/ - please check it for latest updates.