Held in conjunction with the 23nd International World Wide Web Conference

Building on a successful inaugural workshop at the WWW conference last
year, WOW2014 provides a focus for the emerging Web Observatory
community to share tools, methods, results and experience in the
development and deployment of Web Observatories - and to set the agenda
for future work in the field.

BACKGROUND
The Web operates at a very large scale and is dominated by emergent
phenomena with radical innovations coming from and driven by its users
and in time scales that are faster than those exhibited by earlier
computer-based systems. We are just beginning to understand how to
conduct scientific research on the huge and constantly changing
socio-technical system formed by the web and all the people and agents
that use it. There are significant challenges in deploying
methodologies, datasets, and analytic and visualisation tools, which are
fundamental elements of Web Observatories. Scientific method begins with
instrumentation and measurement to describe and characterize what is
actually happening. Only then can we begin to develop theories and
abstractions that enable better design of future evolutions of the
systems and quantitative predictions of their behaviour.

IMPORTANT DATES
Workshop paper deadlines: 7th January 2014 (23:59 UTC-11)
Workshop paper notifications: 4th February 2014
Workshop paper final copy hard deadline: 12th February 2014

WORKSHOP OBJECTIVES
Numerous research labs around the world are building Web Observatories
and conducting studies within them, many highly advanced, but typically
developed in isolation. The objectives of the workshop are therefore:
* A forum for reporting, presenting, and evaluating this work and
disseminating new approaches to advance the discipline;
* An opportunity to explore how Web Observatories might in the future
interoperate - be that through the exchange of data, metadata, remote
access, algorithms, or results;
* A venue for critically and constructively evaluating and verifying the
operation of Web Observatories and the results that flow from them;
* Continuation of a workshop series for the Web Observatory research
community, setting the agenda for research in the field.

TOPICS
Topics of interest for the workshop include but are not limited to:
* What is required of an Observatory so it can be used for empirical
research of Web associated phenomena? What is the taxonomy of Web
Observatories?
* What software and services are required to build a Web Observatory?
* How can we analyse and visualise the vast quantity of data captured by
Web Observatories? Can we construct computational models for these
systems?
* How can we use the Web as a tool to study real world events and
situations?
* What kinds of temporal models and methods do we need to access and
explore the diachronic Web?
* Which methods of semantic enrichment are needed to allow ease
exploration of Web Observatory data sets and corpora?
* Can observed patterns and trends of existing communities be applied to
aid the formation and evolution of new, more effective and
collaborative, shared-interest groups?
* How can I use observatory tools to explore emerging communities /
activities on the Web and to understand the evolution of the Web?
* Can non-consumptive methods play a role in opening Web Observatories
to researchers?
* How can Web Observatories share or exchange datasets, tooling, and
methods?
* What are the ethical, legal, and commercial implications of Web
Observatories as a research resource? How might these be addressed?
How do I know the data from a Web Observatory is correct? What methods
are required for validation and corroboration?

We invite full papers (8 pages) or short / position papers (2-4 pages).
Please produce your paper using the ACM template and submit to WOW2014
on EasyChair by 7th January 2014. Accepted papers will be published in
the ACM Digital Library.

ACM template: http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates
Submissions: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wow2014


WORKSHOP ORGANISATION

Programme Chairs
David De Roure, University of Oxford, UK
Wolfgang Nejdl, L3S and Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany

Organising chair
Kevin Page, University of Oxford

Proceedings chair
Thanassis Tiropanis, University of Southampton

Advisers
Tat-Seng Chua, National University of Singapore
Noshir Contractor, Northwestern University
Wendy Hall, University of Southampton