WWW 2012 Metadata Challenge

The winner of the metadata challenge is ConfHopper. We announced the results together with the best paper awards and the best student award on Thursday 19th April 2012. The winner of the challenge was determined partly base on public votes, partly on the extra desirable features they provide. A jury of experts participated to the final decision. See the slides announcing the decision.

The submitted applications are the following:

• ConfHopper (winner of the challenge)

  Description:

  ConfHopper is a desktop / mobile HTML5 based application designed for conference attendees. With ConfHopper, attendees can: (i) Find other persons they might be interested to meet at the conference; (ii) Find what the trending papers are at this conference and who the trending authors are; (iii) Find related books, open source software for any paper presented at the conference; (iv) easily hop from one conference to another and still use all its features. ConfHopper uses 7 datasets from the LOD cloud. In addition, we have used Information Extraction and a variety of web service APIs to enrich our database. It is a mobile friendly application built using Mobile JQUery.

  Information URL:

  http://confhopper.in/about.html

  Web access:

  http://confhopper.in/

• Gomasio

  Description:

  We extracted the most dominant clusters of hot topics throughout the years in the WWW-related Computer Science community. Each cluster encloses several themes, which are represented as a thread in a streamgraph visualization. Click on one thread to list papers about this theme in the streamgraph, and possibly add it to your Mendeley account. It is a great way to fastly browse relevant articles for your research and tag them on mendeley for later reading. Even if you are familiar with WWW, ISWC, ... conferences series, we are convinced that you will still identify relevant papers you had not yet found!

  Information URL:

  http://www12-satin.telecom-st-etienne.fr/system.html

  Web access:

  http://www12-satin.telecom-st-etienne.fr/

• Konf Connect

  Description:

  One of the main reasons for people to attend a conference is to meet and interact with other attendees who share similar interests. A typical conference runs for 3-5 days and in this short duration, it might be difficult to find the most relevant people to interact with. This is especially true for people who are new to the field (for example, first and second year PhD students). They would not be familiar with many people (and their interests) in the conference and would be confused on whom to interact with. On the other hand, seasoned campaigners would not know of the new comers in the field. Konf Connect is meant to bridge this gap by allowing people to search for others with similar interests. The other feature of Konf Connect is, it facilitates faceted browsing of events in the conference. Users can browse the events by author name, affiliation, event type, event time, interest and event location.

  Information URL:

  http://www.konf-konnect.com/about.html

  Web access:

  http://www.konf-konnect.com/

• Conference Explorer (mistakingly referred to as "Name Conference Explorer" in the poll which cannot be modified until closed)

  Description:

  We present a Web based conference explorer to conveniently browse and discover all kind of information around conferences on our database, based on semantic meta data published by those conferences. The Conference Explorer aims to serve as a one-stop-shop for the conference attendee (however, at the time of submission meta data for the current venue's details have not been loaded, yet). To this end, we make use of a series of associated RDF datasets from WWW plus various conferences in the field of the Semantic Web community, including ISWC and SemTech. The conference explorer adds value to the conference data mostly by offering various visual and statistical ways to intuitively explore different aspects of the conference. It also augments the data with external data sources such as information gathered from popular social networks, including LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Our conference explorer builds on fluid Operations' Information Workbench, a Web based open platform for Linked Data solutions.

  Information URL:

  http://conference-explorer.fluidops.net/resource/conferenceexplorer

  Web access:

  http://conference-explorer.fluidops.net/

• WWW'2012 posters app

  Description:

  Our application aims at augmenting the WWW'2012 posters session. Targeted users are conference attendees owning a recent, internet-enabled mobile device. During the conference, each poster will be given a QRCode. Flashing that code (eventually inside the Web application for browsers that support device API or capture input type) leads to a poster homepage, which provides several services: (i) information access (poster metadata, published PDF file, video presentation if any…); (ii) navigation in these metadata (following links on authors, publications and keywords); metadata are accessed through SWDF and enriched using DBLP and DuckDuckGo!, on client side. During the navigation, users construct their own local ontology and classify it on client side using OWLReasoner JS engine; (iii) chat over XMPP (about the poster or one of its keywords or with one of its authors), (iv) miscellaneous functions that will link posters metadata and user's personal metadata storage (e.g. posters that may be of interest, vote for this poster, etc.). Beta version of the application can be tested on metadata from WWW'2011 edition.

  Information URL:

  http://liris.cnrs.fr/lionel.medini/wiki/doku.php?id=www2012-posters-app

  Web access:

  http://ter.barthdeluy.com:8080/www2012-stable/paper/view/1.html

The following applications were also submitted as late submissions:

• WWW 2012 Mobile Assistant

  Description:

  The WWW 2012 Mobile Assistant webapp provides information about WWW2012, authors, papers, their main subjects and a schedule of the talks and where they will be located. It also provides information about past conferences, previous papers by authors and organizations. The WWW2012 Mobile Assistant also helps you share papers you find interesting via Facebook and Twitter and Google+ as well as following relevant hashtags posts in Twitter.

  Information URL:

  http://aquarius.tw.rpi.edu/www2012/description.html

  Web access:

  http://bit.ly/www2012

• Presenter Dashboard

  Description:

  The presenter dashboard is an application designed to help speakers locate their information and also information about other talks and speakers. There are three main purposes of the presenter dashboard. The first purpose is to provide an information repository for the speaker (and also a repository for other people to find out information about a speaker). The second feature of the application is to allow the user to find talks related to the topics that the speaker is presenting. The third purpose of the application is to allow the user to conduct searches for other users based on a proximity radius. The presenter dashboard intends to allow networking and collaboration between the various presenters at the WWW 2012 Conference. Although specifically writter for that conference, the presenter dashboard could also be used at various other conferences who expose data in the same manner.

  Information URL:

  http://www-personal.umd.umich.edu/~dshugars/About.htm

  Web access:

  http://www-personal.umd.umich.edu/~dshugars/Index.htm

Call for applications

The call for applications is now closed. If you are interested in making a useful application using metadata of future conferences, you can get in touch with the metadata chair of the upcoming ESWC 2012 conference, Olaf Hartig.

The metadata committee is organising this year a challenge for developers in order to show case the utility of the conference metadata. Since 2007, the WWW conference is providing its metadata about papers, authors, programme, location, committees in RDF. The datasets are made available at the Semantic Web Dog Food web portal, which offers various access means to Linked Data applications. While the mere publication of such data is useful to contribute to the Web of Data, this year we will provide more diverse ways of browsing the data by encouraging data hackers to develop applications that leverage the conference metadata. To spice this up a little bit, we challenge developers to make the most interesting, most original tool and we will reward the best one with a prize. The submitted software must be made available as Web applications that the attendees can try on their laptop or their mobile phones.

Challenge criteria

The selection of the metadata tools is made according to minimal criteria. All applications that match these criteria will be made available for the attendees to try, no matter how many and how good they are. However, only few of them will be selected as "“featured application”s" before the conference, and one will be selected as best metadata application and the developers will be rewarded with a prize.

In addition to the minimal requirements, we provide additional desirable features that submissions should exhibit.

Minimal requirements

• The application should be an end-user application, that is, an application that general Web users can interact with or, even better, that WWW Conference attendees can play with during the conference.
• The application must use the data provided by the WWW Conference and exploit as much of it as possible.
• The application must be either a Web application, accessible and usable via a Web browser, or a smart phone application. There should not be any configuration files to modify and no extra library to install.

Additional Desirable Features

In addition to the above minimal requirements, we note other desirable features that will be used as criteria to evaluate submissions.

• The application provides an attractive and functional interface (for human users).
• The application may use additional information sources that:
  • can be under diverse ownership or control;
  • should have some connection with the conference metadata (for instance, a dataset about points of interest in Lyon);
  • may be in different formats other than RDF.
• The application should provide features that are useful to conference attendees.
• Functionality is different from or goes beyond pure information retrieval.
• The application is useful beyond WWW 2012 and may be used with other types of data (not necessarily conference data).
• Multimedia documents are used in some way.
• There is a use of dynamic data (e.g., workflows, GPS location), in combination with static information.
• There is support for multiple languages and accessibility on a range of devices.
• The application is usable by and adapted for mobile devices.

Important dates

The deadline has passed but you can submit extra applications that will be listed here but that will not participate in the challenge.

Submission deadline:

February 25th March 5th, 2012

Selection of featured applications:

15th April, 2012

WWW Conference (attendees can test the applications):

April 16th-20th, 2012

How to Participate

In order to participate, applicants must send by email the following information before 25th February, 2012 to antoine.zimmermann@emse.fr.

The following information must be provided:

• Name of the application.
• Abstract: no more than 200 words.
• URL of a description: a hyperlink pointing to a description of the application that should show details of the system, including which features or functions the system provides. This should be no more than 2 pages when printed, but it can link to other web pages giving technical details.
• Web access: the application should be accessible via the Web. If the application is not publicly accessible, passwords should be provided. A (short) set of instructions on how to start and use the application should also be provided on the web page.

Moreover, applicants may declare their intent to participate by sending an email to the organisers. This way, they will be notified when the dataset is available and they will get a link to a dump of the dataset.

Datasets

The datasets will be made available after the notification of acceptance. Before they are released, developers can start testing their application on previous conference datasets, such as WWW 2011 or ISWC 2011, available at The Semantic Web Dog Food server. The datasets for WWW 2012 will be available there as well using the same format and vocabularies. Participants who sent an email prior to their submission will be notified when the dataset is available.

Winners and prizes

The best application will be chosen by the committee during the conference based on the experience of using the applications in the course of the event. The winners will be rewarded a monetary prize (to be decided). A short listing of "featured applications" will be defined before the conference.

Contact

Antoine Zimmerrmann, Université de Lyon, France, antoine.zimmermann@emse.fr

Daniel Schwabe, PUC-Rio, Brazil, dschwabeinfpuc-riobr

Links

• Semantic Web Dog Food
• Second Linked Data-a-thon
• WWW 2010 metadata explorer
• ISWC 2010 metadata explorer