LocWeb2023 at WWW2023

The 13th International Workshop on Location and the Web

Update Mar.2023: We unfortunately have to cancel the workshop due to a too low number of submissions, which would not have been enough for a half-day workshop. Apologies to the authors and prospective participants.

LocWeb2023 has been accepted as a workshop at The Web Conference WWW2023!

Physical, April 30 – May 4, 2023 – TheWebConf has recently updated their attendance policy, which means that hybrid options are limited and presenters will not receive significant support for online presentations. Presenters will be expected to provide short videos of their contributions. The new wording is “in-person conference with virtual components” “All speakers, presenters, organizers participating in any way at The Web Conference are expected to attend the conference in person. For exceptional reasons, if you are not able to attend in person to present, you may assign a proxy who must be in person. For special cases, we may make an exception for a live remote presentation.”. We know this will be an issue for some of our participants and we will try to facilitate as well as possible.

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

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 2023 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.

This year, we particularly want to explore the use of location in Web-scale work around emission reduction and #ClimateAction as a main global societal concern. Furthermore, the past two-three years have brought massive disruptions in how we go about our lives, how we (could) use and experience the physical world around us, and a move to virtual spaces to replace or complement on-site meetings and work. 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 observed 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; (v) mining and searching geospatial data on the Web; and (vi) novel use of location in emerging systems. 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.

A topic we want to explore further 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.

To further develop our topics and make an implicit question of social good more explicit, we particularly want to explore the global challenges of emission reduction and #ClimateAction and how location and Web-mediated work can contribute.

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
  • Emission reduction and Climate Action
  • Geospatial Data Science for Social Good
  • Physical and virtual/online spaces for collaboration and information access
  • Experience of virtual and physical place
  • 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
  • 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

Important Dates

Paper Submission Deadline: 06.Feb.2023 20.Feb.2023 25.Feb.2023 (23:59 AoE Anywhere on Earth)
Acceptance Notification: 06.Mar.2023
Deadline for early author registration: 15.Mar.2023 (hard deadline)
Final hard camera-ready: 20.Mar.2023 15.Mar.2023 (hard deadline, moved by the WWW organisers)
Workshop day: 30 April / 1 May 2022 (TBD)

Submission instructions

We solicit full papers of 6-8 pages (including references, 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 WWW2023 Ethics guidelines and requested to include ethical considerations where appropriate.

Submit via easychair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=thewebconf2023iwpd (Select the LocWeb track from the WWW workshops)

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.

We aim to have Workshop papers included in the The Web Conf Companion proceedings, which are archived in the ACM Digital Library (usually with an open access mechanism negotiated, not clear yet for 2023). For inclusion in the proceedings, at least one author of the accepted paper has to register for the workshop and present the paper in-person or online (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

Arjen de Vries (Radboud Universiteit)
Auriol Degbelo (University of Münster)
Bruno Martins (IST and INESC-ID – Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon)
Carsten Keßler (Aalborg University Copenhagen)
Christopher Jones (University of Cardiff)
Claudia Hauff (TU Delft)
Clodoveu Davis (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais)
Francisco López-Pellicer (University of Zaragoza)
Jens Helge Reelfs (Brandenburg University of Technology)
Marc Spaniol (Université de Caen Normandie)
Pieter Colpaert (Ghent University)
Ross Purves (University of Zurich)
Stefano de Sabbata (University of Leicester)
Yana Volkovich (Xandr)