Co-Located with The Web Conference 2020, Taipei 20-24 April 2020

The Web is increasingly becoming a centralised story: we rely on large-scale server-side infrastructures to perform intense reasoning, data mining, and query execution, and we are expected to trust the outputs. This kind of centralisation leads to a number of problems, including lock-in effects, lack of user control of their data, limited incentives for interoperability and openness, and the resulting detrimental effects on privacy and innovation. Therefore, we urgently need research and engineering to decentralise the Web once more, aiming for intelligent clients—instead of intelligent servers.

We accept the following contributions:

Research papers: Up to 10 pages

Short papers and vision: For presentation of preliminary results and/or visions addressing current issues, relevant questions and/or future directions. Up to 5 pages

Demonstrations: Description of decentralised systems. Describe how it was built, emphasising the importance of decentralisation and the necessity of Semantic Web or Linked Data.

Submissions in pdf should adhere to the ACM format published in the ACM guidelines (https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template), selecting the generic “sigconf” sample. Note however, that contrary to the WebConf Research Papers guidelines we do not operate a double-blind review process (no need to anonymise author list). The formatting is required by WebConf organisers for publication in the companion volume of the Web Conference proceedings.

We also strongly encourage authors to submit and publish their contributions according to the Linked Research principles and the Linked Open Research Cloud initiative. For this authors can use dokieli – a decentralised authoring and annotation tooling. Authors may submit either an URL to their paper (in HTML+RDFa, CSS, JavaScript etc.) with supporting files, or an archived zip file including all the material. However, note that in case of acceptance, the paper will need to be formatted in .pdf according to ACM rules described above if the authors wish to see it published in the proceedings.