Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Call for Papers: DATAWEB session on Open Data


Call for Papers - Special Session on the Web of Data (DATAWEB)
Production and deployment of Open, Linked and Big Data

To be held in conjunction with the 17th Panhellenic Conference on Informatics (PCI 2013), September 19-21, 2013, Thessaloniki, Greece, http://pci2013.epy-mathra.gr/  
Proceedings to be published by ACM.

Organizers:
Ioannis Anagnostopoulos, University of Central Greece, Greece
Yannis Charalabidis, University of the Aegean, Greece
Agisilaos Papantoniou, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Michalis Vafopoulos, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

Special Session description:
The evolution of technologies now effectively supports the creation and existence of the Web of Data. However, the production and mass consumption of data have been a matter of debate over methodologies that should be employed in the technological and business domain. Data over the Web can be seen under three major perspectives. One that deals with their “openness”, one that addresses their interconnection and one that discusses new ways of managing their performance.
This special session aims to stimulate a multi-origin discussion about data production and deployment within the Web corpus. It is focused on new models, languages and applications that exploit the Web of data in order to act as a global repository of interlinked resources.
We seek original articles balanced between theoretical and practical approaches in research aspects and/or applications that utilize either Open, Linked and Big Data. We further encourage the submission of contributions that discuss and address exploitation issues of data in different disciplines. Submitted papers may deal with methods, models, case studies, practical experiences and technologies, but also with work in progress solutions. The thematic categories are divided in three parts:

1. Open Data
Definition@wikipedia: “Open data is the idea that certain data should be freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "Open" movements such as open source, open content, and open access.”

Topics of interest cover the following areas (but are not limited to):
     Business models, marketplaces and crowdsourcing platforms for Open Data
     Policies, strategies for the development of data ecosystems
     Country/nationwide challenges and opportunities
     Privacy and provenance issues
     Reliability and trustworthiness of Open Data
     Case studies for domain/sector-specific open data strategies (smart cities, environmental and geospatial research, social media)
     Methodologies for open data production, cleansing and utilization
     Heterogeneity, quality assurance, vocabulary repair and maintenance
     Benchmarks and metrics in Open Data usage
     Open Data usability, user interaction and case studies with lessons learned


2. Linked Data
From the moment they were officially introduced in 2008, Linked Open Data (LOD) and their applications are flourishing. The Open Data movement, along with the maturity of Web 3.0 technologies has led various Organizations to publish their data, making them accessible worldwide. One of the fundamental issues that follows the initial success of these LOD initiatives is a way to standardize the effort according to effective functional and technical specifications.

Topics of interest cover the following areas (but are not limited to):
     Methodologies for Linked Data production and deployment
     Assessing trustworthiness in Linked Data
     Linked Data publication and visualization
     AI technologies for Linked Data
     Engineering Linked Data stems
     Searching and ranking methodologies and algorithms
     Linked Data real world applications and uses (e-Government, health, energy, finance)
     Rule interchange formats
     Reasoning
     Query languages
     Data cleansing techniques
     Social media interactivity
     Adaptive Linked Data systems
     Services development and orchestration
     Provenance and right management
     Dataset description, discovery and consolidation
     Architectural paradigms
     Mobile Linked Data
     Business models

3. Big Data
In this thematic category we aim to investigate how the well-defined concepts of data utilization can be applied in order to develop new techniques and methods for the sustainable and socially balanced exploitation of huge data pools.

Topics of interest cover the following areas (but are not limited to):
     Scalable, distributed and parallel algorithms for solving Big Data
     Harvesting Linked Data from large heterogeneous sources
     Connecting massive unstructured data with well-defined linked formats
     Semantic models and environments to support Big Data
     Data management for mobile and pervasive computing
     Data Management in large social graphs
     Crowdsourcing as a solution to Big Data handling
     Big Data analytics in government and society (public sector, social security, etc.)
     Visualization and presentation of Big Data
     Security, privacy issues derived from Big Data handling
     Complex applications in:
     Science, scientific data mining
     Large scale recommendation systems (e.g. medicine, biology, finance, business, etc.)
     Communications and social media applications
     Real-life problems (urban, transportation, weather, energy consumption, etc.)


Program committee: (to be extended)
Jose Maria Alvarez Rodriguez, Web Semantics Oviedo – WESO, Spain
Christos-Nikolaos, Anagnostopoulos, University of the Aegean, Greece
Lefteris Angelis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Phil Archer, W3C
Maria Bielikova, Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava, Slovakia
Alvaro Graves, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, US
Harry Halpin, W3C
Marijn Janssen, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands
Keith Jeffery, STFC, UK
Vangelis Karkaletsis, NCSR Demokritos, Greece
Theodoros Karounos, Greek Free / Open Source Software Society (GFOSS), Greece
Nikolaos Loutas, PwC
Ioanna, Lykourentzou, INRIA – Nancy, France
Phivos Mylonas, Ionian University, Greece
Petros Stefaneas, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
Nicolaos Tsapatsoulis, Cyprus University of Technology, Cyprus
Prodromos Tsiavos, London School of Economics, UK
Athina Vakali, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Manolis Wallace, University of the Peloponnese, Greece

Submission Guidelines - Proceedings
The submitted papers will be evaluated by the members of the Special Session Technical Program Committee (see below). The paper submission, as well as the publication procedures after acceptance, follow the PCI 2013 Paper Submission and Proceedings Guidelines as described in the official web page of the conference -->

Important Dates:
Special Session paper submissions: April 5, 2013
Notification of paper acceptance: May 3, 2013
Camera-ready paper due: May 31, 2013

Friday, February 8, 2013

Upcoming: New book on electronic participation and urban crowdsourcing


Citizen E-Participation in Urban Governance Crowdsourcing and Collaborative Creativity
A new book on goverance innovation has been announced by IGI Global, edited by Carlos Nunes Silva, from University of Lisbon.  The book will be made available in June 2013.

Citizen E-Participation in Urban Governance Crowdsourcing and Collaborative Creativity explores the nature of the new challenges confronting citizens and local governments in the field of urban governance.

This comprehensive reference source explores the role that Web 2.0 technologies play in promoting citizen participation and empowerment in the city government and is intended for scholars, researchers, students, and practitioners in the field of urban studies, urban planning, political science, public administration. Topics covered by the various sections include crowdsourcing, e-democracy,  e-participation, geographic information management, open source in urban governance and more.

In this book we have contributed the chapter on social media pilicy making, consolidating and reflectng upon  the PADGETS project experiences in Italy:

Policy Gadgets for Urban Governance in the Era of Social Computing: An Italian Pilot on Telemedicine

Enrico Ferro and Michele Osella (Istituto Superiore Mario Boella), Euripidis Loukis and Yannis Charalabidis

The book is to be made available by IGI and global electronic retailers in June 2013.