Second international workshop on knowledge diversity on the Web

Workshop at WWW 2012, Lyon, France

Almost 20 years after its introduction, the Web provides a platform for the publication, use and exchange of information, at planetary scale, on virtually every topic, and representing an amazing diversity of opinions, viewpoints, mindsets and backgrounds. The success of the Web can be attributed to several factors, most notably to its principled scalable design, but also to a number of subsequent ICT developments such as smart user-generated content, mobile devices, and most recently cloud computing. The first two of these have dramatically lowered the last barriers of entry when it comes to producing and consuming information online, leading to an unprecedented growth and mass collaboration. They are responsible for hundreds of millions of users all over the globe creating high-quality encyclopedias, publishing Terabytes of multimedia content, contributing to world‐class software, and lively taking part in defining the agenda of many aspects of our society by raising their voices, and publicly expressing and sharing their ideas, viewpoints, and resources.

The other side of the coin in this unique success story is, nevertheless, the great challenges associated with managing the sheer amounts of information continuously being published online, whilst allowing for purposeful use, and leveraging the diversity inherently unfolding through global-scale collaboration. In this context, diversity includes different opinions, sentiments, preferences, or worldviews that are reflected in the way information is expressed on the Web. These challenges are still to be solved at many levels, from the infrastructure to store and access the information, through the methods and techniques to make sense out of it, to the paradigms underlying the processes of Web‐based information provision and consumption. As an example, when searching for blog posts, state-of-the-art technology – be that popularity-based algorithms, recommendation engines or collaborative filters – tends to return either the most popular posts, or those which correspond with a personal profile and therefore with the known opinions and tastes of the reader. Alternative points of view, and new unexpected content, are not taken into account as they are not highly ranked, and posts expressing different opinions are sometimes even discarded. This behavior has particularly negative consequences when dealing with information that is expected and intended to be subject to diverse opinion – as is the case with news reports, ratings of products or media content, customer reviews, or any other type of subjective assessment. The same negative effects apply in a community-driven environment that is designed for collaboration – the most obvious example here being Wikipedia and the blogosphere. The information diversity exposed in such an environment, impressive both with respect to scale and the richness of opinions and viewpoints expressed, cannot be handled without adequate computer support in an economically feasible manner. In the long run, maintaining the current state-of-affairs will change the ways and the extent to which people are informed (or not) on a particular topic, tremendously influencing how they look into that topic, what they find about it and what they think about it. On top of all this, it is meanwhile acknowledged that the current state of affairs hampers true collaboration. Wikipedia is a tremendous success, but it is also a largely meritocratic system with a decreasing number of active contributors, whereas the blogosphere has to deal with the limited attention of the blog authors. What is needed are novel concepts, methods and tools that allow humans and machines to leverage the huge amounts of information created by a community, based on interaction models that support expressing, communicating and reasoning about divergent models simultaneously. This would not only enhance true collaboration, but would also significantly improve various aspects of the information management life cycle, thus addressing information overload in sectors which rely on opinions-driven information sources and mass participation – news, ratings, reviews, and social and information sharing portals of any kind.

== Objectives of the workshop ==

The overall aim of this workshop is to provide an interdisciplinary forum for researchers and practitioners to present and discuss their ideas related to these challenges. We aim to address a wide array of interdisciplinary questions around knowledge diversity on the Web, which need to be tackled in order to preserve the fragile balance between a world that is continually converging and growing together, the rich diversity of the global society, and the dangers of fragmentation and splintering. This includes but is not limited to questions such as ‘How to model diversity?’, ‘How to discover bias and opinion in blog posts, tweets, forum items, wiki edits, etc.?’, ‘How to use provenance information for diversity-awareness?’, ‘How to rank, aggregate, summarize, and exploit information in a diversity--‐aware manner?’, ‘What are the applications of diversity-¬‐rich information sources?’, ‘How can we use diversity as an asset instead of regarding it as a barrier?’.

The objective of the workshop is to engage and foster research, as well as technology and application development towards enhanced knowledge diversity on the Web. In particular we welcome submissions that

* analyze the capabilities of current information management models, algorithms and technologies to leverage knowledge diversity,
* extend existing models, methods, techniques and tools to accommodate the requirements arising from paying a proper account to diversity-¬‐expressed information provenance and communication and collaboration environments characterized by a rich variety of opinions and viewpoints.
* discuss the foundations of knowledge diversity on the Web and propose alternative paradigms,
* propose novel evaluation strategies, methods and techniques to assess the impact of diversity-¬‐ minded information management.

== Topics ==
Topics of the workshop include, but are not limited to:
* risks and advantages of diversity and diversification on the Web
* facets of knowledge diversity and conceptual and formal models for representing and understanding diversity
* provenance of diversity and its role in diversity-aware access to data
* discovery and mining of corpora for diversity-¬related information
* use of natural language processing techniques for diversity mining
* classifying Web 2.0 content items such as blog posts, videos, tweets, and wiki‐edits by their biases
* usage and benefits of diversity in the corporate context, e.g., in order to understand feedback and communication with the customer
* enabling or improving communication and collaboration over barriers induced by diversity
* extensions to Web applications taking diversity into account
* exposing and explaining diversity to end users
* user experiences avoiding the radicalization of groups by exposing them to alternatives
* user interfaces allowing the explicit annotation of content with diversity markers
* studies on the acceptance by end-¬‐users of diversified applications.

== Submissions ==
We aim at full papers submissions of the length of six pages presenting mature research work, technology, and applications; as well as experience reports of case studies which have to deal with socio-economic and technical diversity-related challenges. We also welcome short papers of up to four pages describing new ideas and visions, as well as recent work in progress and preliminary findings.

Submission format is the same as for WWW 2011, formatting guidelines are available at http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates.

Selected papers will be invited for a special issue of a journal or as bookchapters, pending negotiations.

Submissions can be submitted via EasyChair at http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=diversiweb2012

== Organization committee ==
* Elena Simperl, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
* Paul Groth, VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands
* Paolo Massa, Fundazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
* Denny Vrandecic, Wikimedia Deutschland e.V., Germany

== Contact ==
For further questions please contact Elena Simperl at elena.simperl AT kit.edu