In cooperation with ACM SIGWEB and the Scandinavian Chapter of the AIS (IRIS)

TRUST AND COMMITMENT: Whether we look at our geo-political and environmental context, work within and between organizations, or our local communities, there has never been a greater need for interaction and understanding across cultural, intellectual, and other boundaries. Whether the context is international policy, distributed teamwork, e-business, or community mobilization, fundamentally, people must build trust and commitment to common goals by talking and acting together.

What role does the Web have to play in these complex processes?

GET PRAGMATIC: The study of "pragmatics" is driven by an interest in action. It illuminates how it is that we manage to evolve mutual understanding and commitments in conversation. Central to this perspective is the understanding that the meaning of everything we say and do is contextual. When contexts change, meanings change in conversations, documents, and models of the world. This is something that we manage fluently in face-to-face conversation, but when working on the Web over space and time, tools must still support adaptation to new contexts. A focus on pragmatics draws attention to how communicative actions are performed via Web media.

THE PRAGMATIC WEB CONFERENCE is a unique forum to envision and debate how the emerging social, semantic, multimedia Web mediates the ways in which we construct shared meaning. While there is much research and development into topics relevant to this challenge such as collaboration, usability, knowledge representation, media, and social informatics, the Pragmatic Web conference provides common ground for dialogue at the nexus of these topics.

WE INVITE YOU as a researcher or practitioner working on these challenges to join us in September to share your work, and to come and find out what others are doing. This is an emerging network of people exploring the intersection of established intellectual traditions and the fast changing Web: come and help shape the community!
Challenges

Challenges include:

* How can we better understand the usefulness, and limitations, of a concept such as "Web Pragmatics"
* What pragmatic design principles improve websites where trust and commitment to action are central?
* What are the tradeoffs for users of more structured Web collaboration media? (e.g. in learnability, scaleability, intelligibility)
* How can participatory work practices and collaboration tools be orchestrated in the design of the standards, data models and ontologies that underpin data-driven Web applications?
* What role does pragmatics play in the design of personalized information and personalized actions channelled through the Web?
* What impact (intended or unintended, productive or disruptive) do different levels of computational infrastructure have on Web pragmatics?
* How can we clarify our understandings of increasingly important concepts on the Web such as "social ties", "metadata", "knowledge representation", and "transaction"?
* If "context" is pivotal in making human interaction meaningful, how can we take context into account to improve Web applications?
* Previous work has identified the following as relevant topics to consider:
* Theories, Frameworks, Models and Methods

...inspired by Pragmatics and Pragmatism, or less formally, case study reflections on "pragmatic" uses of the Web that supported the negotiation of social/work relationships and common ground

* Applied pragmatic theory
* Communication, dialogue and argumentation models
* Context models
* Design processes from requirements to maintenance
* Evaluation perspectives and methods
* Linguistic metaphor: its value for framing the Syntactic, Semantic and Pragmatic Web
* Knowledge Federation
* Technology acceptance/media choice theories
* Identity and integrity
* Integrative frameworks: approaches to integrating insights from component disciplines (e.g. language-action perspectives, cognition, linguistics, semiotics, knowledge representation, philosophy, interaction design, negotiation, media studies)

Pragmatic Perspectives on Technologies, e.g.

* Collaboration and coordination tools, both synchronous and asynchronous
* Modelling tools
* Tagging and other annotation tools
* Software for forging and evolving social networks

Activities in which pragmatics play a key role, e.g.

* Argumentation, dialogue and debate
* Business and other organizational transactions
* Collaboration, social networking and coordination
* Engaging and mobilizing the public to act
* Information brokering
* Learning
* Managing collective knowledge
* Managing virtual teams
* Public debate
* Negotiation, mediation and conflict resolution
* Sensemaking, analysis and decision-making
* Social software in a corporate context
* Strategic communication

Key Dates

We invite full papers (max. 10 pages in conference format), short papers and design case studies (max. 4 pages), and poster displays:

Submission Deadline: 30 May (17:00 GMT)

Notification of Acceptance: 15 July 2008

Final Version: 31 August 2008

Conference: 29â??30 Sept. 2008

Conference paper template: Please use the ACM template http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html.

Submit papers via e-mail: (Address to be annouced).
Publication

Proceedings will be published through the ACM Digital Library.
Organization

Conference Chair

* Pär J. Ã?gerfalk, Uppsala University, Sweden and Lero â?? The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre

Program Chairs

* Harry Delugach, University of Alabama in Huntsville, USA
* Mikael Lind, University College of Borås, Sweden and Jönköping International Business School, Sweden

Programme Committee

* Mark Aakhus, Rutgers University, USA
* Jens Allwood, Gothenburg University, Sweden
* Robert Biuk-Aghai, University of Macau, China
* Simon Buckingham Shum, The Open University, UK
* Jan Dietz, Technology University of Delft, The Netherlands
* Göran Goldkuhl, Linköping University, Sweden
* Mike Gurstein, Community Informatics Research Network, Canada
* Lowe Hedman, Uppsala University, Sweden
* Christian Huemer, University of Vienna, Austria
* Myriam Lewkowicz, Univ. de Technologie Troyes, France
* Kalle Lyytinen, Case Western Reserve University, USA
* Clara Mancini, Open University, UK
* Aldo de Moor, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
* Ambjörn Naeve, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
* Else Nygren, Uppsala University, Sweden
* Willy Picard, Poznan University of Economics, Poland
* Simon Polovina, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
* Wolfgang Prinz, Fraunhofer FIT and Aachen University, Germany
* Andrew Ravenscroft, London Metropolitan University, UK
* Gary Richmond, City University of New York, USA
* Daniel Rochowiak, University of Alabama in Huntsville, USA
* Nicklas Salomonson, University College of Borås, Sweden
* Mareike Schoop, University of Hohenheim, Germany
* Peter Spyns, Ministry of Flanders, Belgium
* Yao-Hua Tan, Free University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
* James Taylor, University of Montreal, Canada
* Dov Te'eni, Tel-Aviv University, Israel
* Bill Turner, LIMSI Paris, France
* Hans Weigand, Tilburg University, The Netherlands
* Brian Whitworth, Massey University, New Zealand

Organizing Committee

* Stefan Hrastinski, Uppsala University, Sweden (Chair)
* Else Nygren, Uppsala University, Sweden
* Göran Svensson, Uppsala University, Sweden

Last Updated ( Tuesday, 11 March 2008 )

PragmaticWeb on Wikipedia
Written by Frank Kohne
Thursday, 14 February 2008
There is currently some discussion on the mailing list what the Pragmatic Web (vision) actually is and how it relates to other ideas and communities such as the Semantic Web or the Language Action Perspective (LAP).
Hopefully this fruitful discussion will culminate in a comprehensive overview, either in a paper or a wiki page. Everyone is encouraged to contribute here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatic_web.
Last Updated ( Thursday, 14 February 2008 )