Description of Workshops

WF01: 2nd International Cross-Disciplinary Workshop on Web Accessibility

Room: 201A
Time: 9:00 — 17:30

For submissions and other details, please refer the following workshop web page.
http://w4a.man.ac.uk

Conventional workshops on accessibility tend to be single disciplinary in nature. However, we are concerned that this focus on a single participant group prevents the cross-pollination of ideas, needs, and technologies from other related but separate fields. This workshop will be decidedly cross-disciplinary and will bring together users, accessibility experts, graphic designers, and technologists from academia and industry to discuss how accessibility can be supported. We also encourage the participation of users and other interested parties as an additional balance to the discussion. Our aim is to focus on accessibility by encouraging participation from many disciplines. Views will bridge academia, commerce, and industry and we hope that arguments encompassing a range of beliefs across the design-accessibility spectrum will be presented.

Last year's workshop outcomes suggested a number of possible themes for the 2005 edition. The theme for this second workshop, `Engineering Accessible Design', was the most requested topic for further discussions by our 2004 participants. Previous engineering approaches seem to have precluded the engineering of accessible systems. This is plainly unsatisfactory. Designers, authors, and technologist are at present playing `catch-up' with a continually moving target in an attempt to retrofit systems. In-fact engineering accessible interfaces is as important as their functionality's and should be an indivisible part of the development. We should be engineering accessibility as part of the development and not as afterthought or because government restrictions and civil law requires us to. Our workshop will bringing together a cross section of the web design and engineering communities; to report on developments, discuss the issues, and suggest cross-pollinated solutions.

WF02: Measurement and Metrics

Measurement can play a significant role in the effective management and development of Web applications. It provides the scientific basis for Web engineering to become a true engineering discipline. To date measurement has been employed in numerous areas (e.g. Web effort estimation, Web usability, Web reliability, Web testing, Web quality) and Web metrics have also been proposed. As Web engineering as a discipline is now emerging from its infancy, Web measurement and metrics will receive growing attention, acceptance, and recognition in the future, like in all other engineering disciplines.

Therefore the goals of this workshop are to: i) provide an opportunity for researchers and industry practitioners to discuss both the state-of-the art and the state-of-the-practice in Web measurement and metrics; ii) provide a much needed forum for the exchange of ideas and experiences between practitioners and researchers; iii) provide an opportunity for building a body of knowledge similar to what exists in other engineering disciplines; iv) provide a forum that will help grow a community of interest in this area.

WF03: Social Web Content Filtering and Semantic Web

For submissions and other details, please refer the following workshop web page.
http://swcf2005.tom.sfc.keio.ac.jp/

The World Wide Web allows anyone on the network to access a much wider variety of content than any previous information distribution mechanism. There are so many Web sites about every subject imaginable, and about subjects that were entirely unknown or alien to readers before encountering them in the Web. The inclusive nature of the World Wide Web can complicate effective site navigation and bring users in contact with materials they find offensive or inappropriate. Content filtering is an information seeking process in which contents are selected to satisfy a relatively stable and specific information need. There are two dominant approaches to tackle the problem of content filtering: content-based filtering and social information filtering. Content based filtering has limitation and social information filtering is developed as a complementary technique to address the limitations. Social information filtering finds potentially interesting contents by taking account of other people with similar tastes.

People can share their tastes on the Semantic Web by using RSS, shared bookmark and so on. Although individual information about their tastes in traditional social information system are closed and centralized, social information filtering on the Semantic Web is so open and widely distributed. Also existing techniques are suffering from low quality results with errors, lack of accountability of results, relatively low processing speed and `tyranny of the majority'. Web believe to explore new technologies to find out the contents we really want and need and to get rid us of the contents we do not want to be bothered with. New techniques allow us to improve navigation and personalize search engine results, and make safer Web spaces for children. In order to archive this, for example, new reasoning, inference techniques and high performance distributed queries will be needed. Among the specific topic areas we intend to address are the following:

• New framework for specifying and reasoning about metadata on the Semantic Web;
• New statistical or probabilistic reasoning techniques for social information filtering on the Semantic Web;
• Novel social information filtering architecture and techniques on the Semantic Web;
• Privacy in social information filtering on the Semantic Web;
• Dissemination of meta-data for information filtering on the Semantic Web;
• Novel techniques to harmonize existing standards (e.g., RSS, Dublin Core) with social information filtering;
• Application of social information filtering (e.g., personal navigation and search engine).

WF04: The Semantic Computing Initiative - From Semantic Web to Semantic World

Room: 201B
Time: 9:00 — 17:30

For submissions and other details, please refer the following workshop web page.
http://www.instsec.org/2005ws/

Semantic Computing is a vision of information technology based on semantics shared between people and machines, aiming at making computers more usable and useful to everybody. All the information content including not just Web pages but also software, document, and multimodal content should have explicit semantic structure, which would make it straightforward both to tell computers what people mean and to provide information services meaningful to people. For instance, incorporation of semantic structure from the authoring stage will both reduce the cost of authoring and improve the quality of the content (clarity of document, validity of program, and so on).

Semantic Computing extends Semantic Web (in the narrow sense of ontology-based augmentation of Web pages) in terms of both breadth (Semantic Computing encompasses not just the Web but the entire IT) and depth (it addresses not only skeletal meaning of Web pages but detailed semantic structure of natural language, multimodal data, programming language, etc.), hence semantically enriching a much larger realm of the human life-world. Technologies including software engineering, user interface, natural-language processing, artificial intelligence, grid computing, and ubiquitous computing, among others, need be integrated to embody this initiative. The workshop hence invites interested experts to share their new ideas on topics including, but not limited to:

• Integration of ontology-based description and semantic annotation;
• Middleware platform for Semantic Computing;
• Applications and business models based on Semantic Computing.

WF05: Interoperability of Web-based Educational Systems

Room: 302
Time: 9:00 — 17:30

For submissions and other details, please refer the following workshop web page.
http://www.l3s.de/~olmedilla/events/interoperability.html

Nowadays learning resources are increasingly available via web-based educational systems, such as learning (content) management systems, electronic market places for learning materials and courses, or knowledge repositories. With the dawn of various specialised e-learning tools, learning resources became more and more stored in closed environments, restricting accessibility to a closed user community. While standardization bodies and consortia such as ADL, CEN/ISSS, IEEE, IMS, and ISO have already identified the need for interoperability of web-based educational systems, learners' choices to fill a particular knowledge gap are in many cases still limited to the offers of the system they are registered at.

Recently, researchers have started to focus in these issues in more depth. Web technologies have appeared as promising approaches where XML, RDF, Web query languages, and ontology-based data integration approaches became essential ingredients of this infrastructure.

WF06: AIRWeb'05 — Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web

Room: 301B
Time: 9:00 — 17:30

For submissions and other details, please refer the following workshop web page.
http://airweb.cse.lehigh.edu/

Search is the single most common application used on the Web. The attraction of hundreds of millions of searches per day provide significant incentive to content providers to do whatever necessary to rank highly in search engine results. The use of techniques that push rankings higher than they belong is often called spamming a search engine. Such methods typically include textual as well as link-based techniques. Like e-mail spam, this is a form of adversarial information retrieval; the conflicting goals of accurate results of search providers and high positioning by content providers provides an interesting and real-world environment to study techniques in optimization, obfuscation, and reverse engineering, in addition to the application of information retrieval and classification.

The workshop solicits technical papers on any aspect of adversarial information retrieval on the Web. Particular areas of interest include, but are not limited to search engine spam, link-bombing, reverse engineering of ranking algorithms, advertisement blocking, and web content filtering. Papers addressing higher-level concerns (e.g., whether 'open' algorithms can succeed in an adversarial environment, whether permanent solutions are possible, etc.) are also welcome.

AIRWeb '05 is intended to bring together researchers and practitioners that are concerned with the on-going efforts in adversarial information retrieval on the Web. Workshop participants will hear peer-reviewed technical papers, but are also expected to contribute by helping to identify datasets and evaluation methodologies, and to provide feedback on how research in these areas can contribute to practice.

WF07: Innovations in Web Infrastructure (IWI)

Room: 204
Time: 9:00 — 17:30

For submissions and other details, please refer the following workshop web page.
http://www.wmin.ac.uk/~courtes/iwi2005/

The World-Wide Web provides us with a distributed hyperlinked document repository, but underlying the infrastructure of the web is a communications infrastructure, which is responsible for implementing much of the structure of the document repository. For example, in the current web, when a user chooses to navigate from a web page, using a hyperlink, to another page, they set in motion in a request/response transaction between their web browser and a web server, acting in a client/server relationship, which implements that navigation. Recently, there has been increasing interest in innovative network topologies such as peer-to-peer (structured and unstructured) which decentralizes network control, and communications paradigms, such as content-based networking, as well as publish/subscribe which decouples producers and consumers of information and provide asynchronous as well as synchronous information delivery. Yet there is little focus on how this research can benefit the web. At the same time, from the perspective of the web, there has been tremendous interest in extending the infrastructure of the web, for example, through the use of ontologies to structure knowledge, and through the study of web topology and its influence on web search, virtual communities, collaborations and distributed information delivery. Yet there has been little focus on how advances in communications and networking can contribute to this research. Many open research problems exist in this area, such as semantic interoperability and the scalability of ontology-based reasoning within distributed knowledge environments, which require contributions from the communications and networking community in order to advance robust solutions.

IWI will tackle this problem by providing a forum within which web infrastructure topics can be discussed in relation to communications and networking, and similarly, advances in networking can be discussed in relation to their impact on the infrastructure of the web. A possible list of workshop topics would therefore include (but not be limited to):

• Ontology-based routing by content;
• Meta-data management in P2P networks;
• Communications support for distributed reasoning;
• Web topologies and distributed agents;
• Content-based networking for distributed collaboration and virtual communities;
• Decentralized access control and trust.

WF08: Web Service Semantics: Towards Dynamic Business Integration

Room: 303
Time: 9:00 — 17:30

For submissions and other details, please refer the following workshop web page.
http://www.ai.sri.com/WSS2005/

The description of Web services in a machine-understandable fashion is expected to have a great impact in the areas of e-Commerce and Enterprise Application Integration, as it can enable dynamic and scalable cooperation between independently developed systems and organisations. These potential benefits have led to the establishment of an important class of research activities, both in industry and academia, aimed at the practical deployment of declarative, semantically rich service and process descriptions and their use across the Web service lifecycle. This research, which draws on a variety of fields such as Knowledge Representation, Automated Software Engineering, Process Modeling, Workflow, and Software Agents, goes under the heading of Semantic Web Services (SWS). We note that here, "Semantic Web" does not denote any particular set of standards or commitment to any particular vision regarding the future of the Web. In addition many SWS efforts are aligned with rapidly developing commercial Web Service standards such as WSDL and UDDI.

Many major challenges need to be addressed in this field. This workshop aims to provide a forum in which to focus on selected core technical challenges for deployment of SWS, and reach a better understanding of the relationships between commercial Web service standards, current SWS research efforts, and the ultimate requirements for full-scale deployment of these technologies. Another major focus will be on the relationship of work on SWS to the needs of business systems, and in particular the needs having to do with publishing policies associated with Web services, such as those discussed at the recent W3C Workshop on Constraints and Capabilities for Web Services (see http://www.w3.org/2004/06/ws-cc-cfp.html). We will particularly seek submissions that demonstrate innovative application of SWS technologies to the challenges involved in automating online business transactions.

WF09: Policy Management for the World Wide Web

Room: 205
Time: 9:00 — 17:30

For submissions and other details, please refer the following workshop web page.
http://cs.umbc.edu/pm4w

In order to realize the full potential of the World Wide Web as an open, dynamic, and distributed ``universe of network-accessible information'', it is important for web entities to behave appropriately. Policy management provides the openness, flexibility, and autonomy required to regulate this environment as entities can reason over their own policies and the policies of other entities to decide how to behave. Using policies also allows entities to specify expected behavior of entities they interact with. Entities can also adapt to increasingly complex requirements without the need for substantial changes to the structure or implementation through the use of policies.

Policy management includes policy specification, deployment, reasoning over policies, updating and maintaining policies, and enforcement. We propose that policy management is required for the web for (i) constraining different kinds of behavior including security, privacy, conversation, and collaboration, (ii) configuration management, (iii) describing business processes, and (iv) establishing trust and reputation.

WF10: 2nd Annual Workshop on the Weblogging Ecosystem - Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics

Room: 304
Time: 9:00 — 17:30

Please refer the following workshop web page for the program.
http://www.blogpulse.com/www2005-workshop.html

The weblogging microcosm has evolved into a distinct form, into a community of publishers. The strong sense of community amongst bloggers distinguishes weblogs from the various forms of online publications such as online journals, magazines and newsletters that flourished in the early days of the web and from traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and television. The use of weblogs primarily for publishing, as opposed to discussion, differentiates blogs from other online community forums, such as Usenet newsgroups and message boards. Often referred to as the blogsphere, the network of bloggers is a thriving ecosystem, with its own internally driven dynamics.

The cross-linking that takes place between blogs, through blogrolls, explicit linking, trackbacks, and referrals creates implicit and explicit networks which define the communities of the weblogging world. create a strong sense of community in the weblogging world. There is work underway to understand the dynamics of the weblogging network, much of which springs from bloggers themselves. The self-publishing aspect of weblogs, the time-stamped entries, the highly interlinked nature of the blogging community and the significant impact of weblog content on politics, ideas, and culture make them a fascinating subject of study.

The objective of this workshop is to provide a forum for sharing research on the blogging ecosystem. The workshop will consist of technical papers, panel discussions, and demonstrations of research prototypes.

WF11: Activities on Semantic Web Technologies in Japan

Room: Rindo (East)
Time: 9:00 — 17:30

For submissions and other details, please refer the following workshop web page.
http://www.intap.or.jp/www2005/index.html

The Semantic Web is a new Web technology that has potentiality of innovating the existing information society. In Japan, research institutes and industries are advancing various research projects on the Semantic Web and developing various practical applications.

In this workshop, each of presenters will speak about outlines of their research projects or practical applications on the Semantic Web in Japan, including some demonstrations of software. One of the purposes of the workshop is introducing Japanese activities in the Semantic Web field to many other country's participants, as the host country.

WF12: MobEA III - Customer Focused Mobile Services

Room: Rindo (West)
Time: 9:00 — 17:30

For submissions and other details, please refer the following workshop web page.
http://www.research.att.com/~rjana/mobea2005.htm

We are in the midst of a mobile revolution. In order to realize the vision of pervasive mobile computing, the services provided have to be adapted to the users wants and needs. To do this, we need to go beyond technology, and understand the human-centric aspects of mobile computing. The objective of this workshop is to provide a single forum for researchers and technologists to discuss the state-of-the-art, present their contributions, and set future directions in emerging innovative applications for mobile wireless access.

Topics of interest for technical papers include, but are not limited to the following:

• Mobile web usage analysis
• Peer-to-peer mobile computing
• Security of mobile applications
• Methods for measuring mobile application usage
• Models and methods for qualitative analysis of applications usage
• User interface for mobile devices
• Multimedia applications
• Enterprise applications
• Open-standards and applications
• Performance studies of mobile applications
• Context-Aware services and applications
• Mobility issues of web services