LocWeb2019 at WWW2019

The 9th International Workshop on Location and the Web

13 May 2019
In conjunction with
WWW 2019 The Web Conference
San Francisco, USA

We are excited to announce that LocWeb2019 has been accepted as a workshop at the WWW2019 conference!

The programme is now available, see below!

Location has quickly moved into the mainstream of the (mobile) Web and it continues to be a strong driver of applications and research activities. The general appeal and usefulness of geo- located data (e.g., for information access with freely available mapping services) are only some of the reasons for its fast rise. After the initial boost and consolidation of approaches based on the simple use of geospatial coordinates, we see an increasing demand for (i) more sophisticated systems, (ii) stronger retrieval, mining, and analytics solutions, and (iii) more powerful semantics. Location plays a key role as a context factor for users, and it is also of paramount importance to consider the implicit or explicit place of resources and people in the physical world. It is an important factor in mobile and geo-social applications and it drives geospatially-aware Web data mining. Focusing on static and dynamic spatio-social networks allows to understand how people are influenced by social interaction in their daily life decision, e.g., travel, flight booking, hotel recommendation, purchases, leisure, search, etc.

LocWeb 2019 will continue a successful workshop series at the intersection of location-based services and Web architecture. It focuses on Web-scale services and systems facilitating location-aware information access as well as on Spatial Social Behavior Analytics on the Web as part of social computing.

Considering the ongoing efforts related to the IoT/WoT (e.g., at different W3C groups), we expect that in principle every connected physical object will be able to exhibit location aspects.Additionally, social networks are becoming increasingly location-centric, by way of location-based social networks, and many activities in social streams exhibit complex location characteristics,ranging from points for check-ins, polygons for rough areas, movement trajectories, or geospatially defined relationships. This in turn opens up opportunities in terms of semantics and standards(e.g., for supporting richer descriptions and interaction models), and also in terms of new Semantic Web mining approaches and new ways to look at the emerging geospatial services and ecosystems.

Important Dates

Paper Submission Deadline: 20. Jan 2019 31. Jan 2019 07. Feb 2019 (23:59 AoE Anywhere on Earth)
Acceptance Notification: 15. Feb 2019 18. Feb 2019
Final hard camera-ready: 03. Mar 2019
Workshop day: 13. May 2019 14:00 – 17:30

Call for Papers

LocWeb addresses location as a cross-cutting issue in web research and technology that connects the online world to the physical spatial world. It examines location aspects in the domains of social computing, search, analytics, mobility, apps, services, standards, and systems. The aspect of social computing will have a particular focus on spatio-social networks, i.e., social network users’ behaviors, activities, interactions, news propagation, and social influence learning models in the context of available spatial or location information. We are particularly interested in new tools and techniques for the modeling and analysis of dynamic spatio-social networks. One hurdle has been the disconnect between activities in the online and physical worlds. We welcome work to understand this disconnect and develop methods and techniques to bridge this gap.

LocWeb will solicit submissions under the main theme of Web-scale Location-Aware Information Access and spatial social computing. Subtopics include (i) geospatial semantics, systems, and standards; (ii) large-scale geospatial and geo-social ecosystems; (iii) mobility; (iv) location in the Web of Things; and (v) mining and searching geospatial data on the Web. The workshop encourages work describing Web-mediated or Web-scale approaches that build on reliable foundations, and that thoroughly understand and embrace the geospatial dimension.

Topics of Interest

  • Location-Aware Information Access
  • Spatial Social Behavior
  • Location-Aware Web-Scale Systems and Services
  • Location in the Internet/Web of Things
  • Geospatial aspects of Smart Cities
  • Location prediction in social media and the Web
  • Influence modeling and processing in static and dynamic spatio-social graphs − Evaluation of frameworks, metrics and algorithms
  • Events detection and fake news on social media and the web
  • Large-scale Geospatial Ecosystems
  • Standards for Location and Mobility Data
  • Modeling Location and Location Interaction
  • Geo-Social Media and Systems
  • Location-Based Social Networks
  • Geospatial Web Search and Mining
  • Mobile Search and Location-Based Recommendation
  • Geo-Crowdsourcing

Submission Instructions

We solicit full papers of 6-8 pages, and short papers of up to 4 pages describing work-in-progress or early results. Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished research that is not being considered for publication in any other forum.

Workshop submissions will be evaluated based on the quality of the work, originality, match to the workshop themes, technical merit, and their potential to inspire interesting discussions. The review process is single blind, so please provide your name and affiliation.

Please submit to the LocWeb workshop through Easychair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=locweb2019

Submissions should follow the ACM styles and guidelines of the WebConf conference proceedings. Accepted workshop papers will be published in the WWW companion proceedings and the ACM Digital Library. For inclusion in the proceedings, at least one author of the accepted paper has to register for the workshop and present the paper.

Presenters are encouraged to bring demos to the workshop, to facilitate discussion and make the workshop more interactive

Organizers

Workshop team

Dirk Ahlers, NTNU, Norway
Erik Wilde, CA Technologies, Switzerland
Rossano Schifanella, University of Turin, Italy
Jalal S. Alowibdi, University of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

contact: locweb2019@easychair.org

Programme Committee

  • Arjen de Vries, Radboud University
  • Bart Thomee, Google
  • Bruno Martins, IST and INESC-ID – Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon
  • Carsten  Keßler, Department of Planning, Aalborg University Copenhagen
  • Chien-Wen Shen, National Central University
  • Clodoveu Davis, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
  • Francisco López Pellicer, University of Zaragoza
  • Leonidas Anthopoulos, University of Applied Science (TEI) of Larissa, Greece
  • Lisette Espín Noboa, GESIS – Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, University of Koblenz-Landau
  • Luca Maria Aiello, Nokia Belle Labs
  • Rainer Simon, AIT – Austrian Institute of Technology
  • Salem  Alelyani, King Khalid University
  • Torsten  Suel, New York University
  • Yana  Volkovich, Xandr
  • Muhammad Usman Ilyas, University of Jeddah
  • Marcos Oliveira, GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences

Programme

LocWeb takes place Monday May 13th, 14:00 – 17:30, at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco hotel, San Francisco, California (https://www2019.thewebconf.org/location). We have a keynote, 4 full papers, and a discussion session. (https://www2019.thewebconf.org/workshops)

14:00-15:30 Session 1

14:00-14:10 Introduction

14:10-15:10 Keynote: Indoor Towers, DPIs, and More People in Parks at Night. Leo Ferres (Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile)

Abstract: We are more connected than ever. In part, this is due to the high availability
(in both developed and developing countries) of relatively cheap smartphones that we
carry with us all the time. In fact, in 2018, more than 52% of the whole website traffic
was generated by mobile phones. Unlike desktops or laptops, one defining characteristic of
mobile phones is that they are always geo-located, either by GPS, antenna triangulation,
or simply antenna connections. Thus, mobile phone data sets, either Call Detail Records
(CDRs) or the “data channel” (called XDRs) constitute a potential treasure trove of
information about what people do in the physical world, not only when interacting with
it, but also when accessing information online.
Through our association to Telefónica Chile R&D department, we have been privileged
in our access to mobile phone data sets to study socially relevant issues. In this talk, I will
present results from several studies done using ecologically-valid data sets of mobile phone
usage (CDRs, XDRs, and a bit of an even lower level of analysis, deep packet inspection)
and the towers they connect to, drawing conclusions and predicting different kinds of
behaviors, from social mixing, to news consumption, to gender equality. All these studies
were conducted by analyzing web traffic either by proxy to applications like Pokemon
Go, or effectively through DNS resolution as in the news study. I will conclude by talking
about the coming trends in the field of mobile phone data analysis, its limitations, and
spend some time discussing issues of privacy, data security, anonymization and general
data responsibility for researchers and the company providing the data. 
[slides]

15:10: Location Embeddings for Next Trip Recommendation. Amine Dadoun (Eurecom), Raphael Troncy (Eurecom), Olivier Ratier (Amadeus), Riccardo Petitti (Amadeus) [slides] [code]

15:30-16:00 Coffee Break

16:00-17:30 Session 2

16:00 GViz – An Interactive WebApp to Support GeoSPARQL over Integrated Building Information. Kris McGlinn (Trinity College Dublin), Darragh Blake (Trinity College Dublin), Declan O’sullivan (Trinity College Dublin)

16:20 Hashtag Usage in a Geographically-Local Microblogging App. Jens Helge Reelfs (RWTH Aachen University), Timon Mohaupt (RWTH Aachen University), Oliver Hohlfeld (RWTH Aachen University), Niklas Henckell (The Jodel Venture GmbH)

16:40 Geolocation in the Browser—From Google Gears to Geolocation Sensors. Thomas Steiner (Google), Anssi Kostiainen (Intel), Marijn Kruisselbrink (Google) [slides]

17:00 Discussion Session, Open Questions, Future Work

Papers will have 15 minutes presentation and 5 minutes discussion (20 minutes overall).