Workshop Web Science (WSW 2010) –Social Computing Applications–
S¨oren Auer(1), Claudia M¨uller-Birn(2), Steffen Staab(3)
(1)University of Leipzig AKSW/Institute for Computer Science
auer@informatik.uni-leipzig.de
(2)Carnegie Mellon University Institute for Software Research
clmb@cs.cmu.edu
(3)University of Koblenz-Landau Institute for Web Science and Technologies
staab@uni-koblenz.de
Preamble
Web Science is often referred to as the “science of decentralized information systems”
[BLHH+06a], [Shn07]. [It] [...] aims to map how decentralized information structures can serve [...] scientific, representational and communicational requirements, and to pro- duce designs and design principles governing such structures.[BLHH+06b] While tech- nologies such as Semantic Web, Web Services, and Cloud Computing are germane to the broad proliferation of Web technologies, we also need to understand the human side of the Web, in order to retain its usefulness and benefit to people. This is at the center of attention of Web Science and includes, in addition to the aforementioned technological ap- proaches, research related to online communities, information diffusion, Web governance, global network structures beyond the individual communities on the Web, and incentive and monetization systems [HSH+08].
Because the Web itself is socially embedded, a particular focus of this first GI work- shop on Web Science is Social Computing applications, such as Wikipedia, Facebook, or del.icio.us, which are analyzed with regard to the complex interdependencies between constraints imposed by the technical system as well as with regard to their use in social actions and interactions under varying social contexts. Understanding the dynamics and evolution of these systems as they depend on inherent social and informational structures is of particular interest, because it is the dynamics of such communities that determines their final success or failure. In order to analyze Social Computing applications, the in- terplay between aspects of Computer Science, including computational network analysis, visualization techniques, graph theoretic models, semantic web techniques, and machine learning techniques, with social science and psychology is required.
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In this interdisciplinary workshop we aim to bridge the gap between paradigms and en- courage interdisciplinary collaborations as well as advance and deepen our understanding of web science. Joint efforts are needed to take advantage of the state-of-the-art research from multiple disciplines, such as Computer Science, information systems, sociology, and psychology. Moreover, this workshop provides a platform for researchers and practitioners to exchange preliminary results, new concepts and methodologies in this area.
For this first GI Workshop on Web Science we selected four contributions to be presented.
Laura Hollink and Mark van Assem are specifically interested in on how people search or navigate in the so-called “Culture Web”. In their contribution“Estimating the relevance of search results in the Culture-Web: a study of semantic distance measures”, they present a recent study in which the relevance of search results is evaluated based on semantic dis- tance measures. Wolfgang Orthuber and Stefan Dietze propose in their contribution“Pro- posal: Standardized Vectorial Resource Descriptors on the Web”a new similarity-based representation of resources, so-called Vectorial Resource Descriptors (VRDs). Existing approaches such as Linked Data could be augmented by this technique. Christian Thurau and Christian Bauckhage study the temporal evolution of different player roles in a multi- player online game. In their contribution“Group Evolution Patterns in World of Warcraft”
they specifically investigate different formation patterns. Robert Tolksdorf argues in his contribution“Towards Quality Measures for Web Network Extraction”how the quality of data that are obtained by information extraction techniques can be measured. In an exemplary case study, he shows how such a quality measure can be used.
References
[BLHH+06a] Tim Berners-Lee, Wendy Hall, James Hendler, Nigel Shadbolt, and Daniel J.
Weitzner. Creating a Science of the Web.Science, 313(5788):769–771, 2006.
[BLHH+06b] Tim Berners-Lee, Wendy Hall, James A. Hendler, Kieron O’Hara, Nigel Shadbolt, and Daniel J. Weitzner. A Framework for Web Science. Web Science, 1(1):1–130, 2006.
[HSH+08] James Hendler, Nigel Shadbolt, Wendy Hall, Tim Berners-Lee, and Daniel Weitzner.
Web science: an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the web. Commun.
ACM, 51(7):60–69, 2008.
[Shn07] Ben Shneiderman. Web Science: A Provocative Invitation to Computer Science.
Communication of the ACM, 50(6):25–27, June 2007.
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