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Note a firm submission deadline: 15 January 2013 (Hawwaii time 23:59)
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Special Issue Call for Papers: Trusting the Social

Web World Wide Web Journal http://WWWJ.edmgr.com


Guest Editors:
Surya Nepal, CSIRO ICT Centre, Australia, Email: Surya.Nepal@CSIRO.AU
Cecile Paris, CSIRO ICT Centre, Australia Email: Cecile.Paris@CSIRO.AU
Athman Bouguettaya, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia, Email: athman.bouguettaya@rmit.edu.au


Social media has increasingly become mainstream for a variety of purposes ranging from online journalism (e.g., blogs),
online knowledge base (e.g., Wikepedia), online marketing (e.g., Twitter), to keep in touch with friends, family and
professional colleagues online (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). These technologies have given a birth of social media
oriented Web, also known as Social Web. The popularity of the Social Web is increasing exponentially. It is reported
that 66 percent of online adults are connected to one or more social media platforms and 50 percent of them say they
check in to their favorite social media site first thing in the morning everyday. This trend is likely to grow as the
number of smartphones shipments is expected to reach 1 billion by 2015 and the value of social commerce is expected to
reach 30 billion dollars within next five years. Similarly, 13 percent of digital news consumers follow the recommendations
from Twitter and FaceBook. Therefore, the Social Web is here to stay for the next decade and will revolutionise the way
we live right from communicating with our family and friends to conducting businesses. In a nutshell, the Social Web
provides a unique platform for digitising our behavior which has enormous potential to change the way we conduct ourselves.

The phenomenon of the Social Web has caught the attention of research communities in the last decade. Researchers from
diverse disciplines ranging from social and behavior science to computer science have started looking at the issues and
challenges in the Social Web. Within computer science, researchers from established research areas such as language
technologies and machine learning to emerging research areas such as service and cloud computing have started looking
at computational and development challenges brought by Social Web. With the continued reports of breach of trust and
hoax news spreading from social media to mainstream news, trusting the Social Web has become one of the major challenges
that need to be addressed. This special issue focuses on this challenge.

The Social Web provides a unique platform for sharing information and knowledge for individuals as well as businesses.
As the Social Web is inherently open and free, it lacks the central control or authority that asserts the trustworthiness
of the people and content in it. It is hard to distinguish what is rumor and what is truth. For example, many
statesmen/stateswomen (e.g., Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, etc) and celebrities (e.g, Lady Gaga,
Eddie Murphy, etc.) have witness their own death in the Social Web. This fake death news has been filtered into the mainstream
newspapers and televisions without much scrutiny and verification due to the high competition of being the first to report
the news. On the flip side, Social Media plays a major role in reporting political news (such as the Arab Spring) and
natural disasters (such as the Japan Tsunami and the New Zealand earthquakes), and it helps to consolidate the global
efforts towards them. Furthermore, people have started relying on Social Web from travel to healthcare advice. Therefore,
it is important to address the issue of trust in the Social Web in order to take full advantage of it for the betterment
of human society. In the Social Web, there are three essential entities that are involved in trust directly: people,
service providers and contents. In this special issue, we are looking for innovative technologies and solutions from
diverse disciplines that address the issue of trust in the Social Web.

The topics of interest for this special issue include, but are not limited to:

- Algorithms and protocol of establishing trust in the Social Web
- Propagation of trust/rumor in the Social Web
- Mechanisms of establishing credibility of people in the Social Web
- Provenance of content in the Social Web
- Privacy in the Social Web
- Analysis of trust in existing Social Web platforms
- Case studies

Paper Submission:

Authors are encouraged to submit high-quality, original work that has neither appeared in, nor is under consideration
by, other journals.

Springer offers authors, editors and reviewers of World Wide Web Journal a web-enabled online manuscript submission
and review system. Our online system offers authors the ability to track the review process of their manuscript.
Manuscripts should be submitted to: http://WWWJ.edmgr.com under the article type “Trusting the Social Web.” This
online system offers easy and straightforward log-in and submission procedures, and supports a wide range of
submission file formats.

Important Dates:

- Submission due: 15 January 2013 (Hawwaii time 23:59)
- Notification of review results: March 2013
- Submission of revised version: May 2013
- Notification of second round: June 2013
- Final manuscript due: July 2013