Making Sense of Microposts (#MSM2012) – Big things come in small packages
In connection with World Wide Web 2012.
Important dates:
- Submission of Abstracts (mandatory): 03 Feb 2012
- Paper Submission deadline: 06 Feb 2012
- Notification of acceptance: 06 Mar 2012*
- Camera-ready deadline: 23 Mar 2012
- Workshop program issued: 08 Mar 2012
- Proceedings published (CEUR): 31 Mar 2012
- Workshop – 16 Apr 2012 (Registration open to all)
(all deadlines 23:59 Hawaii Time)
From the post:
With the appearance and expansion of Twitter, Facebook Like, Foursquare, and similar low-effort publishing services, the effort required to participate on the Web is getting lower and lower. The high-end technology user and developer and the ordinary end user of ubiquitous, personal technology, such as the smart phone, contribute diverse information to the Web as part of informal and semi-formal communication and social activity. We refer to such small user input as ‘microposts’: these range from ‘checkin’ at a location on a geo-social networking platform, through to a status update on a social networking site. Online social media platforms are now very often the portal of choice for the modern technology user accustomed to sharing public-interest information. They are, increasingly, an alternative carrier to traditional media, as seen in their role in the Arab Spring and crises such as the 2011 Japan earthquake. Online social activity has also witnessed the blurring of the lines between private lives and the semi-public online social world, opening a new window into the analysis of human behaviour, implicit knowledge, and adaptation to and adoption of technology.
The challenge of developing novel methods for processing the enormous streams of heterogeneous, disparate micropost data in intelligent ways and producing valuable outputs, that may be used on a wide variety of devices and end uses, is more important than ever before. Google+ is one of the better-known new services, whose aim is to bootstrap microposts in order to more effectively tailor search results to a user’s social graph and profile.
This workshop will examine, broadly:
- information extraction and leveraging of semantics from microposts, with a focus on novel methods for handling the particular challenges due to enforced brevity of expression;
- making use of the collective knowledge encoded in microposts’ semantics in innovative ways;
- social and enterprise studies that guide the design of appealing and usable new systems based on this type of data, by leveraging Semantic Web technologies.
This workshop is unique in its interdisciplinary nature, targeting both Computer Science and the Social Sciences, to help also to break down the barriers to optimal use of Semantic Web data and technologies. The workshop will focus on both the computational means to handle microposts and the study of microposts, in order to identify the motivational aspects that drive the creation and consumption of such data.
Is tailoring of search results to “…a user’s social graph and profile” a good or bad thing? We all exist in self-imposed mono-cultures in which “other” viewpoints are allowed in carefully measured amounts. How would you gauge what we are missing?