A Decentralised Web Workshop 2020

** Deadline extended: 27th January 2020 **

Co-located with The Web Conference Taipei 2020 – 20-24th April 2020

The Web is increasingly becoming a centralised story: we rely on large-scale server-side infrastructures to perform intense reasoning, data mining, and query execution, and we are expected to trust the outputs. This kind of centralisation leads to a number of problems, including lock-in effects, lack of user control of their data, limited incentives for interoperability and openness, and the resulting detrimental effects on privacy and innovation. Therefore, we urgently need research and engineering to decentralise the Web once more, aiming for intelligent clients—instead of intelligent servers. Following the success of our previous workshops (DeSemWeb, LD-DL) at both the Web Conference, ISWC, and ESWC, ADecentWeb 2020 focuses on decentralised and client-side applications, and decentralised trust. Our aim is to put different topics on the Web community’s research agenda, which should lead to new inspiration and initiatives to build future decentralised Web applications which put humans first.

We consider two major themes around decentralisation: technical and human.

On the technical side, the topics are:

Neutral and balanced Web architectures
Decentralised data management
Decentralised query processing and indexing
Multi-agent and collaborative systems on top of Web technologies
Collective Intelligence, including peer production, collaborative, and edge computation
Privacy and anonymity versus security and transparency
“Well behaved” systems: technical aspects of trust, policies, governance, compliance, accountability and transparency
Consensus algorithms and Blockchains
Web and Internet of things

On the human side, the topics are:

Computational Social Science: network effect, post-truth, filter bubbles, echo chambers, nudging
User experience of decentralisation: control, understanding, explanation
Developer experience of decentralisation: languages, standards, software development tools
Human and social aspects of privacy and anonymity, and its relationship with security and transparency
“Well behaved” systems: human and social aspects of trust, policies, governance, compliance, accountability and transparency
Economics and business models of decentralised systems
Decentralisation as a mean for inclusion

Important Dates

** Deadline Extended **
Deadline: ~~20th January 2020~~ 27th January 2020

Notifications: 8th February 2020

Camera ready: 17th February 2020

Workshop: 20th – 24th April 2020

Call for Participation

We accept the following contributions:

Research papers: Up to 10 pages

Short papers and vision: For presentation of preliminary results and/or visions addressing current issues, relevant questions and/or future directions. Up to 5 pages

Demonstrations: Description of decentralised systems. Describe how it was built, emphasising the importance of decentralisation and the necessity of Semantic Web or Linked Data.

Submissions in pdf should adhere to the ACM format published in the ACM guidelines (https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template), selecting the generic “sigconf” sample. Note however, that contrary to the WebConf Research Papers guidelines we do not operate a double-blind review process (no need to anonymise author list). The formatting is required by WebConf organisers for publication in the companion volume of the Web Conference proceedings.

We also strongly encourage authors to submit and publish their contributions according to the Linked Research principles and the Linked Open Research Cloud initiative. For this authors can use dokieli – a decentralised authoring and annotation tooling. Authors may submit either an URL to their paper (in HTML+RDFa, CSS, JavaScript etc.) with supporting files, or an archived zip file including all the material. However, note that in case of acceptance, the paper will need to be formatted in .pdf according to ACM rules described above if the authors wish to see it published in the proceedings.

Submission link:

Submit your paper via EasyChair