Building upon the series of International "Web Observatories Workshops" (2013-2014) and the "Workshop on the Theory and Practice of Social Machines" (2013-2016), this workshop brings together participants associated with Web Observatory topics including: data sharing, re-use of data and applications; study of social machines; decentralisation of Web infrastructure and services; and emerging research challenges when these are combined with the Internet of Things (IoT).

The full-day workshop explores the challenges of interoperability and distributed analytics across the growing number of Web services, Web Observatories, and most recently, IoT devices. We will also discuss the pressing issues around the decentralisation of Web infrastructure and social machines, with a specific focus on the decentralisation of scholarly communications.


Motivation
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The timing of this workshop coincides with a surge of interest around platforms, architecture and methods for data sharing and knowledge creation in emerging Internet of Things (IoT) on the Web. This requires research efforts which address technical issues like volume and velocity of real-time streams of sensors, ethical concerns about privacy, access control and support for large-scale analytical queries and applications.

Web Observatories support communities to interact, observe and share analysis over the Web and inspire more comprehensive solutions for these challenges. For example, for chronic disease management, trusted information retrieval of online medical resources, online interventions and building trusted online communities are critical challenges. Web Observatories enabled with data provenance, access control, risk assessment methods can facilitate multidisciplinary analysis across geographic boundaries.

Core to these challenges is understanding the requirements for observatories across different user groups, and orchestrating communication and interaction between business and scientific communities engaging in Web Observatory research. Questions need to be asked as to how we shall discover, acquire, construct and curate varied datasets in a way that is suitable for cross-platform use. Similarly, the discovery, construction and use of analytic and visualisation tools across platforms and disciplines presents significant challenges.

The workshop in the past has provided a platform for discussions which led to development of metadata standards and search tools for the Web Observatories. These tools support researchers who engage with the global network of Web Observatories. Similarly, we aim for discussions to position Web Observatories as a global infrastructure to facilitate research studies related to the Web.

We also draw inspiration from the ongoing debate about the production of scholarly articles. We wish to explore how academic researchers can leverage the Web as a technical platform for academic publishing, using existing Web technologies and standards, as well as take advantage of contemporary cultural norms around interacting, sharing and linking through social media. Despite the potential of the Web for greater control over publishing formats and reach to wider (non-academic) audiences, paper-based constraints, and dependencies on centralized third-parties for demonstrating academic impact remain.


Topics
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The workshop proposes a multidisciplinary discussion focused on the following themes, including:

* Architecture, Infrastructure, and models for Web Observatories and their data:
- Best practices for deploying and managing Web Observatories
- Functional aspects of Web Observatories - interoperability and standardisation challenges for data-sets and analytics.
- Sharing and re-use of data-sets between applications in the Web Observatory.
- Provenance and trust in Web Observatories.
- Designing social machine observatories: analyses of the design of effective (extant and future) social machines, including:
- Discovering and using dynamic real-time streams of sensors and devices.
- Use of metadata for interoperability, access control and data sharing.
- Re-use and sharing of intermediate IoT data analyses.

* Impact of IoT devices as intermediaries in interactions on the Web.
- Challenges for observing "Internet of Things" through the Web
- Reports, Presentations, Experiences and Tools from implementing and deploying Web and IoT Observatories
- Key challenges around mobilising existing data-sets to be available through discovering, and cataloguing data-sets on the Web and via IoT devices.

* Decentralization: development of architectures and interactions for digital scholarly publishing as a social machine
- Architecture and Decentralization: Identifiers and versioning; Provenance and accountability; Persistence and permanence; Personal data stores; Information management.
- Interfaces and Interactions: Authoring and collaboration; Web-based presentation of research; Data and metadata integration; Citation management, analysis, generation and prediction; Integration of semantics in prose and datasets; Adaptation to audiences and contexts; Search and query of research objects and social interactions; Domain-specific publishing challenges.
- Create, Reuse, Remix, and Share: Social Web paradigms applied to scholarly communication; Social and cultural aspects of academic publishing; Profiles, identity, attribution; Rights and licensing; Feedback and reviews; Connecting scholarly data with other data; Incentives and altmetrics; Human and machine-readability.

* Enhancing user-engagement and user-awareness on Web Observatories.

* Correlation between the Web Observatory resources and Knowledge Data Discovery process.


How to submit
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We welcome paper submissions (regular research papers or position papers) pertaining to the themes listed above. To encourage papers to be kept short, the page limit is 6 pages in ACM SIG template (as per the WWW2017 research track). At least one author of each paper is expected to register for the workshop and attend to present the paper.

The submissions will be evaluated based on their novelty, coherence and relevance to workshop themes and topics. The workshop welcomes interdisciplinary studies and especially encourages research studies that reflect on IoT related challenges observed through the Web.

Please submit your paper to WOW2017 on EasyChair.

The accepted submissions will be published as a companion volume for the WWW conference proceedings. We also support the publication of the papers in an open access, web-friendly format on the workshop page (as RDFa annotated HTML), if the authors wish to opt out of the ACM proceedings.

- Web-friendly proceedings
We also support the publication of the papers in an open access, web-friendly format on the workshop page (as RDFa annotated HTML), if the authors wish to opt out of the ACM proceedings. We strongly promote self-dogfooding, and will prioritise submissions from authors who can demonstrate that they use their tooling or techniques in their own practice. We also promote decentralisation and data ownership, and encourage participants to submit their contribution by publishing a document at a domain they control or have sufficient authority on the URL, e.g., personal site at an university, and sending us the URL. Reviews will be based on a persistent copy e.g., from an archive.org snapshot of the article.


Important dates
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Paper Submission deadline – 18th January 2017 (23:59 AWST - Australian Western Standard Time) [EXTENDED]
Acceptance Notifications – 31st January 2017
Workshop authors’ registration and camera-ready papers – 14th February 2017
Workshop Day – TBA (Between 3rd – 7th April 2017)


Workshop Chairs:
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Professor David Charles De Roure (University of Oxford, UK)
Professor Dame Wendy Hall (University of Southampton, UK)


Workshop Organizers:
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Dr. Ramine Tinati (University of Southampton, UK)
Dr. Aastha Madaan (University of Southampton, UK)
Dr. Dominic DiFranzo (University of Southampton, UK)
Dr. Wolfgang Mayer (University of South Australia, Australia)
Sarven Capadisli (University of Bonn, Germany)
Amy Guy (University of Edinburgh, UK)


Programme Committee- TBA
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For detailed workshop programme and any queries, please contact the workshop organizers at: wow2017[at]easychair[dot]org


The workshop is supported by the SOCIAM: The Theory and Practice of Social Machines project(http://www.sociam.org/).