LocWeb2022 at WWW2022

The 12th International Workshop on Location and the Web

We are happy to announce that LocWeb2022 has been accepted as a workshop at The Web Conference WWW2022!

Fully online, Tuesday 26 April, 9:00-12:15 CEST.

For updates, watch this space and check our twitter: @locweb

Final deadline extension: 18.Feb.2022 15.Feb.2022

Workshop theme

Location and geospatial analytics are important aspects in a wide range of Web research and systems. We see the location topic as a cross-cutting issue equally concerning information access, semantics and standards, social analysis and mining, and Web-scale systems and services. The workshop explores the connection of the Web to the real physical and spatial world. LocWeb 2022 will continue a successful workshop series at the intersection of location-based analytics and Web architecture. It focuses on Web-scale services and systems for location-aware information access. Location and its integration continues to provide challenging research questions. It additionally has a role in large systems of social and societal importance, and we aim to explore this connection further under the topics of data science for social good. Furthermore, the past two years have brought massive disruptions in how we go about our lives, how we use and experience the physical world around us, and a move to virtual spaces. The workshop also examines these shifts and the changed significance of virtual vs. physical spaces and how it is reflected in research approaches or in the use of systems.

Call for Papers

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.

The objective of the workshop is to bring together a community of researchers at the intersection of location and the Web, under the main topic of location-aware information access, Web-scale systems, spatial social behavior, and societal and social good. 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.

Another topic we want to explore further this year is the blurring and simultaneous disconnect of activities in physical and virtual/online spaces, which has been accelerated with the mass move to online sessions and conferences due to Covid-19 mitigation measures. We experienced this first in 2020 with TheWebConf2020 going fully online as one of the major conferences, and this move has massively shifted the understanding and experience of physical locations for collaboration. Much work has appeared in the meantime analysing large-scale shifts in mobility patterns, thus bridging the physical and virtual implications. In a way, location has diffused into the background for certain activities that were before decidedly physical, but the understanding of experience of place can allow new perspectives. We particularly welcome work that understands and bridges conceptualisations of these spaces and develops suitable Web-based methods and techniques.

Topics

The topics are designed to reflect the multitude of fields that demand and utilize location data. We encourage submissions to take an interdisciplinary perspective at the topic of location on the Web.

  • Location-Aware Information Access
  • Location-Aware Web-Scale Systems and Services
  • Physical and virtual/online spaces for collaboration and information access
  • Experience of virtual and physical place
  • Geospatial Data Science for Social Good
  • Urban Planning and Citizen Engagement
  • Geospatial aspects of Smart Cities
  • Spatial Social Behavior and spatial social media
  • Location in the Internet/Web of Things
  • Open Geospatial Web Data
  • Geo-social computing on the Web
  • Evaluation of frameworks, metrics and algorithms
  • Large-scale Geospatial Ecosystems
  • Location-Based Social Networks
  • Mobile Search and Location-Based Recommendation
  • Geospatial Web Search and Mining
  • Standards for Location and Mobility Data
  • Modeling Location and Location Interaction

Programme 26th April & Papers

Find our sessions on the Whova platform: https://www2022.events.whova.com/Agenda (search for LocWeb)

(Papers have 20+10 minutes time for presentation + discussion)

9:00 – 10:30 Session: Digital Geographies and Geospatial Media

Introduction

Keynote: Everyday digital geographies (Stefano de Sabbata)

Abstract: As a clear-cut distinction between online and physical spaces rapidly degrades, online representations of places have become an integral part of the places they represent. The content produced through online platforms has become part and parcel of our experience of place and events, as we capture our experiences and take part in other people’s narratives through the medium of the internet. Despite the great interest and the large number of studies devoted to this topic in geography and related fields in the past decade, most of the research in this area has been conducted either using purely quantitative approaches, in the field of GIScience, or a purely qualitative and frequently critical perspective, in the field of human geography. In this talk, I will explore the opportunities offered by mixed methods approaches in digital geographies. Based on my work as part of the Mapping Multiculture project (in collaboration with Dr Katy Bennett and Dr Zoe Gardner), I will discuss the advantages and limitations of combining advanced artificial intelligence approaches with situated qualitative content analysis in exploring the everyday digital geographies of Leicester as a multicultural city.
[slides]

Paper: Exploiting Geodata to Improve Image Recognition with Deep Learning (Christian Arbinger, Martin Bullin, Andreas Henrich)

(Coffee break 10:30-10:45)

10:45-12:15 Session: Geo-Social Networks and Discussion Session

Paper: Anonymous Hyperlocal Communities: What do they talk about? (Jens Helge Reelfs, Oliver Hohlfeld, Niklas Henckell)

Paper: Predicting Spatial Spreading on Social Media (Rimjhim, Sourav Dandapat)

Discussion session: Open issues and future challenges

Closing

Important Dates

Paper Submission Deadline: 18.Feb.2022 15.Feb.2022 10.Feb.2022 3.Feb.2022 (23:59 AoE Anywhere on Earth)
Acceptance Notification: 3.Mar.2022
Deadline for early author registration: 3.Mar.2022 (hard deadline)
Final hard camera-ready: 10.Mar.2022 (hard deadline)
Workshop day: 25/26 April 2022 (to be decided)

Submission instructions

We solicit full papers of 6-8 pages (including references etc., this differs from the WWW page limits), 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. Authors are explicitly pointed to the overall WWW2022 Ethics guidelines and requested to include ethical considerations where appropriate.

Submit via easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=locweb2022

Papers must be submitted in PDF according to the ACM format published in the ACM guidelines, selecting the generic “sigconf” sample: https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template The PDF files must have all non-standard fonts embedded. Workshop papers must be self-contained and in English

Workshop papers will be included in the The Web Conf Companion proceedings, which are archived in the ACM Digital Library with an open access mechanism negotiated. For inclusion in the proceedings, at least one author of the accepted paper has to register for the workshop and present the paper (with the ‘author’ registration option).

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

Organisers

Workshop organisers

Dirk Ahlers, NTNU, Norway, dirk.ahlers@ntnu.no
Erik Wilde, Axway

Programme Committee

Andreas Henrich (University of Bamberg)
Auriol Degbelo (University of Münster)
Bruno Martins (IST and INESC-ID – Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon)
Carsten Keßler (Aalborg University Copenhagen)
Chien-Wen Shen (National Central University Taiwan)
Christopher Jones (University of Cardiff)
Claudia Hauff (TU Delft)
Clodoveu Davis (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)
Francisco J. Lopez-Pellicer (University of Zaragoza)
Jalal S. Alowibdi (University of Jeddah)
Leonidas Anthopoulos (University of Thessaly)
Luca Aiello (IT University of Copenhagen)
Marc Spaniol (Université de Caen Normandie)
Pieter Colpaert (Ghent University)
Rainer Simon (AIT – Austrian Institute of Technology)
Ross Purves (University of Zurich)
Torsten Suel (New York University)
Yana Volkovich (Xandr)