Trip Report WWW2006 - May 22-26 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland (UK) |
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- pre-conference activities (19..21-may 2006)
- conference at a glance
- first day: (workshops) (monday, 22-may-2006)
- workshop on web accessibility
- second day: "business success" (tuesday, 23-may-2006)
- opening ceremony
- key note "the new economy - an engineer's perspective"
- workshop on logging traces of web activities
- third day: "next wave" (wednesday, 24-may-2006)
- plenary panel "the next wave of the Web"
- fighting search spam
- the next wave (W3C)
- Web accessibility guidelines (WAG) 2.0
- social event at edinburgh castle
- fourth day: "security" (thursday, 25-may-2006)
- plenary keynotes "solving global problems with global resources"
- tutorial on Internet crime
- Web mining with search engines
- new search paradigms
- fifth day: "society" (friday, 26-may-2006)
- plenary keynotes "the impact of the Web on health and society"
- impact of the Web on society
- impact of the Web on intellectual property
- impact of the Web on society
- closing ceremony and handover to WWW2007
- documentation
- other trip report
- previous conferences
zürich - london - edinburgh by plane (may 19, 2006)
an Airbus A321 of british airways brought us - my fellow worker philipp rütsche, his wife and his lovely daughter plus myself - from zürich to london (with about one hour delay due to heavy winds in london) and an Airbus A320 took us from london to edinburgh. scotland's capital greeted us with sunny and dry weather.
we stayed at the rather stylish and fancy point hotel, a guest house that won many awards for its very special interior, as you can tell from their website and the pictures below.
see my picture book for more impressions from edinburgh
the most popular topics were quite similar to those last year with the addition of the first in the list below:
on monday, i attended the "international cross-disciplinary workshop on web accessibility 2006", a full day event taking place in a very small room crowded with many attendees. there were 16 talks on various topics, but all aimed to answer the following question:
"Is engineering, designing, and building for the mobile Web just a rehash of the same old Web accessibility problems?"
two years ago, the W3C tried to "sell" the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) with arguments such as: the mobile community will benefit from the same efforts as people with disability, because the small mobile devices have very similar characteristics as devices for people with disabilities, such as speech or braille browsers. today, these arguments have been somewhat changed. most people still think there are at least some similarities, but there are also some significant differences.
sarah horton gave a very interesting introduction to the topic. she introduced the term "universal design" for a solution, that would serve anybody equally well, regardless of their capabilities. she argued for more markup tags that would give the author more control over the content and how it should be presented on different devices. i certainly agree that the content for all devices should come from the same source. however, instead of dynamically adopting the presentation to various target devices, i would rather prefer a system - such as a content management system - that should produce different documents from the same source optimized for various targets. in my opinion, it is not a good idea to produce the same set of documents dynamically over and over again. i rather have a system, that produces a new set of documents only when the source was modified.
benfeng chen presented a very interesting approach to fix invalid HTML-documents with a software called PURE (webPage cleanUp through Reverse Engineering). this software renders a give webpage and then tries to generate valid HTML and CSS code automatically which would render the same page as the original document.
there were a number of suggestions on how to improve documents for mobile devices with limited capabilities. an interesting approach are roles, which will be introduced with CSS3. roles describe part of the document in terms of their function, such as "navigation", "main content", "search" etc. the browser on the mobile device can then for example skip some of the content based on these roles.
yuki arase presented a different approach to solve the problem of limited capabilities of mobile user agents: she suggested what she called "a Web browsing system based on adaptive presentation of Web content for cellular phones". this system acts as a proxy server between the web server and the mobile phone. this system reduces and optimizes the content for small devices. one problem with such proxy server is security and privacy, because proxies tend to break security features such as encrypted data transfer and restricted access to resources.
at the ETHZ, we might consider a project to bring the phone book to mobile devices. today's rich pages are badly suited for mobile devices with small screens and limited capabilities. speedy access to the phone book from mobile devices might be very useful for members of the ETHZ as well as for visitors, who for example need to visit somebody at our institute, but don't know the location or need the phone number of the person they are going to see.
the proceedings of the workshop on Web accessibility are available from our Web server.
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WebStaff of the ETH and university of zürich in front of the EICC |
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opening ceremony and key note:
the opening ceremony began with two bagpipe players and two charming dancers. then the conference was officially opened by leslie carr in a traditional scottish kilt, followed by a brief introduction by tim berners lee. the scottish first minister jack mc connell welcomed the approximately 1100 attendees from all over the world to edinburgh. the keynote titled "the new economy - an engineer's perspective" was given by david brown, chairman of motorola ltd.
pentland plenary room at EICC welcome speech by jack mc connell (click on the image for an enlargement) (click on the image for an enlargement) workshop logging traces of web activities:
during this workshop, various technics and methodologies were presented to analyze the users behavior on the Web. on one hand, there are the well known log files produced by the web servers. these sources my provide information such as number of visits, most and least requested documents, performance etc. but they cannot provide information about the users behavior, such as what link she or he clicked on, how often the user scrolled up and down the page to find the information she or he was looking for and so on. various attempts to log such information were presented. one speaker presented a solution, where they introduced a proxy server between the user agent and the target web server. this proxy server added a small java script to the responds of the web server which logged all user activities to a separate server. the information logged included any mouse activities, the URLs the user followed, all keystrokes etc. this information helps to analyze the user's behavior and may help to increase the website's usability. however, most speakers stressed the point, that analyzing the log files is not sufficient, it is also important to talk to the users and to learn how they felt when they were using the website.
it was also discussed that logging the users activities introduces serious privacy issues. users must not only be informed about such logging, but they must also have the opportunity to disable logging and/or to review the logged information before it gets passed on for further analysis.it was also suggested to combine the advantages of a content management system with logging technics, by adding - preferable automatically - additional tags to the documents that would allow to analyze the user's behavior in more details.
since WebTrends supports additional meta tags to increase accuracy of statistical analysis, it might be an interesting idea to extend our WCMS system to introduce additional meta tags to the web pages generated in order to get more detailed and more accurate statistical information.
fighting search spam:
- Topical TrustRank: Using Topicality to Combat Web Spam
- Site Level Noise Removal for Search Engines
- Detecting Spam Web Pages through Content Analysis
i consider this a very serious topic. it is important to understand how search engines work and even more important how they fight search spam. getting into "bad neighbourhood" (that means being linked to by sites that are considered bad) can have a negative impact on the raking of our own website.the next wave (W3C track):
- DHTML Accessibility for Web Applications
- SVG Data Widgets Framework
- Adopting an open-source search engine and result comparisons to Google Appliance
- Microformats, converting XHTML to vCards and vCalendars
Web accessibility guidelines (WAG) 2.0:
- Moving to WCAG 2.0 [slides]
- Revealing the Power of ATAG 2.0 [slides]
- W3C Panel: Understanding Accessibility Issues in the Interactive Web
social event:
the social event took place at edinburgh castle, see impressions from the castle
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edinburgh castle | canon overlooking edinburgh | home of the crown jewels | ||
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tutorial on Internet crime:
- professional Internet crimes, the tactics used by the criminals, the non-linear nature of Internet crime, mitigation strategies, and initiatives to improve Internet infrastructure to defeat these new attacks.
Web mining with search engines:
- Random Sampling from a Search Engine's Index
- A Web-based Kernel Function for Measuring the Similarity of Short Text Snippets
- Generating Query Substitutions
new search paradigms:
impact of the Web on society:
- Jim Kinney (Improvement Service): The Web & The Empowered Citizen
- Mike Futcher (Sopra Newell & Budge): The Web & The Empowered Citizen
- David A Thomas (FBI): Cyber Issues: Internet Threats
impact of the Web on intellectual property:
- Jeffrey Berkowitz (Finnegan, Henderson): Impact of the Web on Intellectual Property
- Dr. Clara Neppel (European Patent Office): current practices of the patent office in the field of computer implemented inventions and methods for doing business
impact of the Web on society:
- Myles MacBean (Walt Disney Internet Group): Disney's online and interactive TV portfolio in EMEA and Latin America
closing ceremony and handover to WWW2007:
the sixteenth WWW conference will be held in banff, canada from may 8 until may 12, 2007, see WWW2007
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leslie carr closes WWW2006 officially | WWW2007 is only 11 month away | |
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Please check out this other trip report:
- trip report by roberto mazzoni (uni ZH)
this trip report was written on a Dell Latitude D820 notebook with Softquad HoTMetaL. this document is supposed to be HTML V4.0 compliant.