Thoughts From WWW8Brian Kelly recently attended the WWW 8 conference. In this article he gives a summary for the ROADS Newsletter.
This was the fifth International World Wide Web Conference I have attended. This conference seemed to have returned to its research roots, with fewer participants from the business and marketing communities and, this time, no accompanying exhibition.
The conference consisted of a day of workshops and tutorials, two days for the conference and a Developer's Day. In addition the W3C Advisory Committee held a two day meeting before the conference. The Web Accessibility Initiative also held a two day meeting after the conference. I attended both of these additional meetings.
Although I was not a member of the Programme Committee or chair a session this year, I did present a poster on Subject Based Information Gateways in the UK, which was based on a short paper written by Roddy McLeod (EEVL) and myself. The paper and the accompanying posters are available online.
The posters were on display during the conference. During the conference there was a two-hour slot for confernce delagetes to view the posters and talk to the poster presenters. Nicky Ferguson and Dan Brickley (ILRT) kindly agreed to help in this slot. As Nicky has reported in his informal conference report, the posters generated much interest. A number of leaflets for the subject gateways were distributed to interested parties.
A full conference report is given in the Web Focus article in Ariadne, issue 20. This report will not be repeated here. Mention should be made, however, of a number of issues of relevance to the ROADS community.
Many of the papers and discussions related to resource discovery mentioned citation analysis. This technique (making use of links to pages as an indication of quality, and links from authorititive pages) became popular following a paper on the Google search engine given at WWW7, and mentioned in conference reports by Brian Kelly and Charlotte Jenkins.
At a panel session consisting of representatives from several search engine vendors it was interesting to hear that the search engine vendors (Excite in particular) have no interest in embedded metadata. Although this appears worrying for those involved in the Dublin Core work, following informal discussions it appears that the search engine vendors would be interested in making use of trusted metadata.
This interest in citation analysis and trusted metadata sounds very interesting for the subject gateways - since the subject gateways provide both quality link information and trusted metadata.
To conclude - a very useful and informative conference, which appeared to confirm the importance of the approaches taken by the subject gateways in a mixed economy based on collaboration with the automated search engine companies.