Upcoming SIGWEB supported conferences

The Special Interest Group on Hypertext and the Web, SIGWEB was created in 1989 to support the community participating in the annual ACM Hypertext Conference. In its fourth decade, SIGWEB continues its efforts to support a wide range of communities and conferences. Recently, the Web Conference's legal and financial sponsorship was transferred to SIGWEB and thus joins the family of seven annual conferences in 2022. SIGWEB supports several specialized conferences, short courses, and workshops of different sizes, as well as the annual Hypertext Conference. SIGWEB sponsored conferences focus on timely topics in applied and computational hypertext and Web disciplines and provide a place for members and the entire applied Hypermedia and Web community to exchange ideas and to meet with and expand their network of colleagues. In this article, we provide a brief overview of SIGWEB sponsored conferences, in addition to events that are in cooperation with SIGWEB. Due to the current Corona crisis, many event organizers opted for an online conference format or allow remote participation. These conferences are marked accordingly.

COVID and social media

The Coronavirus pandemic is one of the most devastating encounters in modern times. Over 175 million cases have been recorded globally with over 3.5 million deaths. Disseminating information to billions of people during the pandemic has been challenging, and social media has been one of the key resources for the public during these excruciating circumstances. Social media and other online sources have made it easier to access information on a variety of topics. This article presents an exploration of social media trends pertinent to information on the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of several technological advances, as well as methods for evaluating their effectiveness in combating COVID-19. We examine global case studies on the use of data from various sources to tackle COVID-19, address the issue of trust between the government and the public, and shed light on the manner in which it influences the public perception of information. We delve into the role of advances in web technology and data science in curbing COVID-19 while also touching upon the impacts in the field of smart living and healthcare. We examine studies from regions around the world, explore how the pandemic has affected people from different walks of life, and peek into the utilization of advances for disseminating information as well as curbing the spread of the virus. Additionally, we briefly discuss how the works investigated here can open pathways of research to help in further enhancing the situation as we all head towards the light at the end of the tunnel, and strive to restore global normalcy.

Hybrid manuscripts

Manuscripts are usually seen as collections of material artefacts that are the by-products of authoring. Manuscripts are central in studies on authors and are used to disambiguate and reconstruct significant literary works. Digital scholarly editions are, for instance, hypertext systems that enable the collaborative, distributed study of digitised material manuscripts. However, digital and web authoring challenge the classical notion of manuscript as they generate traces that are different in form and nature (e.g. logs) while enabling a variety of collaborative practices. We address the epistemic differences between material and digital artefacts, highlighting what aspects of authoring they reflect and providing a digital-aware reframing of the manuscript.

ACM Web Science Conference 2021

The 13 th ACM Web Science Conference was hosted online by the University of Southampton from 21--25 June, 2021. The annual event is inherently interdisciplinary, integrating computer and information sciences with a multitude of disciplines including sociology, economics, political science, law, management, language and communication, geography and psychology. It is unique in the way it brings these disciplines together in creative and critical dialogue. It focuses on the full scope of socio-technical relationships that are engaged in the World Wide Web, based on the notion that understanding the Web involves not only an analysis of its architecture and applications, but also insight into the people, organisations, policies, and economics that are affected by and subsumed within it. Since it was first held in Athens in 2009, the conference has been hosted in six countries around the world.

Large scale services for connecting and integrating hundreds of linked datasets

Michalis Mountantonakis is a Postdoctoral Researcher of the Information Systems Laboratory at FORTH-ICS (Greece) and a Visiting Lecturer in the Computer Science Department at University of Crete (CSD-UoC), Greece. He obtained his PhD degree from the CSD-UoC in 2020. His research interests fall in the areas of large-scale semantic data integration, linked data and semantic data management. The results of his research have been published in more than 20 research papers. For his dissertation, he awarded a) the prestigious SWSA Distinguished Dissertation Award 2020, which is given to the PhD dissertation from the previous year with the highest originality, significance, and impact in the area of semantic web, and b) the Maria Michael Manasaki Legacy's fellowship, which is awarded to the best graduate student of CSD-UoC, once a year. In his dissertation, supervised by Associate Professor Yannis Tzitzikas (Computer Science Department at University of Crete), Michalis Mountantonakis dealt with the problem of Linked Data Integration at large scale, which is a very big challenging problem. He factorized the integration process according to various dimensions, for better understanding the overall problem and for identifying the open challenges, and proposed novel indexes and algorithms for providing core services, which can be exploited for several tasks related to Data Integration, such as: for finding all the URIs and all the available information for an entity, for producing connectivity analytics, for discovering the most relevant datasets for a given task, for dataset enrichment, and many others.

Interview with Charlie Hargood

Dr Charlie Hargood is a Principal Academic in Games Technology in the Department of Creative Technology at Bournemouth University, UK. He has long been a contributor to Hypertext research and the ACM Hypertext Conference where he has twice won ACM SIGWeb's Engelbart Award. He is also Information Director for the ACM SIGWeb executive committee, and organiser for the Narrative and Hypertext Workshop (NHT) - the longest running workshop series at ACM Hypertext. Charlie's particular research expertise is in narrative systems which he has long explored as Hypertextual models of story representation, and novel Hypertextual mediums such as locative narrative.

Task-based support in search engines

Darío Garigliotti is a postdoctoral researcher at Aalborg University, Denmark, where he works in collaboration with Prof. Katja Hose and Assoc. Prof. Johannes Bjerva, in the areas of information extraction, information retrieval and natural language processing. He completed his doctoral degree in Computer Science at University of Stavanger, Norway, under the supervision of Prof. Krisztian Balog. The website at https://dariogarigliotti.github.io/ contains more information about Garigliotti's work. The research conducted by Garigliotti focused on utilizing and extending methods and techniques from semantic search within an information access paradigm that aims to support users in achieving their tasks. More specifically, to enhance search engines with functionalities for recognizing the underlying tasks in searches and providing support for task completion. The work presented in this thesis is organized in three grand themes: entity type information for entity retrieval, entity-oriented search intents, and task-based search. Alongside the theoretical and empirical contributions, a number of resource contributions were developed, including several corpora and test collections, and a knowledge base of entity-oriented search intents.

Hypercane

In the Dark and Stormy Archives (DSA) project, we focus on storytelling techniques to summarize collections of archived web pages. Since collections can have hundreds or even thousands of seeds (initial URLs) and each seed can be recrawled many times, with each version separately maintained, techniques that include information about all members of the collection can be overwhelming. The premise of storytelling is to focus on sampling exemplar pages from the collection, and present them in a social media interface familiar to users. We present Hypercane , the tool in the DSA suite responsible for selecting exemplar pages. Hypercane offers eight action statements that can be combined in various ways to customize the sample that is produced. Because of its modular design, Hypercane can also be used to analyze large web archive collections outside of the DSA suite.

Health personalisation

The current agenda in health personalisation research mainly revolves around supporting lifestyle and wellbeing. Personalised recommendations for patients and consumers have been explored for areas like physical activity, food intake, mental support, and health information consumption. Strikingly little attention has been paid to personalised medical applications supporting clinical users. In this paper, we turn the spotlight on such medical use cases and the advantages personalised decision-support can bring. We discuss the differences between patient- and clinician-centric personalisation and highlight touch points, where personalised support might improve clinicians' decision-making.

WSDM'21

The ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM) is one of the premier conferences on web-related research involving web search and data mining, with a dynamic and growing community from academia and industry. This year, WSDM was held virtually on March 8th -- 12th, 2021, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, instead of the originally-planned location in Jerusalem, Israel. WSDM'21 program reflects the breadth and diversity of research in the field and showcases the latest developments in these domains.