Trip Report WWW2007 - May 8-12 2007, Banff, Canada

table of contents:

1. pre-conference activities (2..7-may 2007)
2. conference at a glance
   1. the venue
   2. quotes
   3. most popular topics
   4. next conference
3. documentation
4. other trip report
5. history and statistics
6. previous conferences

note: click on the images for an enlargement.

1. pre-conference activities:

vancouver / whistler / blackcomb mountain (may 2..7, 2007)

my wife susanne and myself spent some time in vancouver and whistler, where we had the chance to explore some of the slopes that will host the olympic winter games in 2010.

skyline of vancouver at very low tide		totem poles at stanley park in vancouver		blackcomb ski area in whistler

pre-conference activities in more details ...

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2. conference at a glance:

2.1 the venue:

the conference took place at the conference center of the fairmont springs hotel in banff, canada.

fairmont springs hotel in banff		mount stephen hall		beautiful landscape of banff national park
conference center at fairmont springs hotel in banff

the venue in more details ...

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2.2 quotes:

some quotes i really liked:

• "please do not unplug the wireless LAN to connect your computer, some people are actually using the WLAN !" (announcement at the third day of the conference after some outages of the WLAN due to some attendees actually unplugging the hotspots in order to plug in their computers).
  
  
• "ask GYM !" (means make a query against Google, Yahoo! and MSN).
  
  
• "the added value of the Web is the fact, that people did the unexpected" (tim berners lee during his keynote speech after the opening ceremony).

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2.3 most popular topics:

tutorial "Web workloads: characterization, modeling and application":

virgilio almeida (federal university of minas gerais, brazil) and daniel menasce (george mason university, USA) presented methodologies and techniques used in workload characterization and modeling. this tutorial was held in a room that was probably the smallest room of this huge building, certainly smaller than our hotel room.
they explained why it is important that we need to know the workload of our systems. they introduced the subject using a bridge as an example: a civil engineer needs to know the various aspects of the load that will be put on the bridge, such as the type of vehicles that might cross the bridge, their weights, the traffic pattern and so on. they defined the workload of a webserver as the sets of all input. if we are about to configure a webserver or to develop an application, we need to know the types of services we are going to provide, the maximum number of concurrent transactions etc. if we understand the workload, we can create a workload model and apply that model to various systems, system configurations or application designs. the authors showed various statistical methods to analyze the workload. by changing the level of details (e.g. the time frame of the data analyzed), we may discover patterns that may allow to find the parameters required for the modelling. once these parameters are found, we can deploy the workload model.
i was particularly interested in this topic because i did some workload tests a while ago using Microsoft's WCAT (see Web Capacity Analysis Tool). this tutorial was an interesting supplement to my own experiences, especially how they varied the time range of the statistics to look for patterns.

Web history:

"we need to start to preserve the Web now !", said bill pickett, professor emeritus of history and co-founder of the Web History Center (WHC). in a few years, we may run into the paradox situation that we know more about the invention of the printed letters by gutenberg half a millennium ago, than we know about the invention of the Web. digitally stored information is very vulnerable to loss or change and requires as much careful preservation as any other historical artifacts. the Web history event confirmed my opinion, that we need to preserve digitally stored information, such as databases, emails and websites through long term archives, such as the ETHZ webarchive.

Web history in more details ...

RDF and semantic Web:

• "the two magics of the Web", keynote by tim berners lee after the opening ceremony. opening ceremony and tbl's keynote in more details ...

• tabulator, a semantic web browser, presented by tim berners lee, see www.w3.org/2005/ajar/tab for details.

• christian bizer from the freie university berlin presented his contribution to DBpedia.org, a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. DBpedia allows to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia and to link other datasets on the Web to Wikipedia data. in my opinion, this was one of the best and most interesting presentation of WWW2007. to programmatically extract and categorize information from a website like Wikipedia is an ambitious project. what they achieved is amazing and the opportunities this project provides are very promising. this is probably the first time that i see the beauty in semantic data and a very practical use of RDF. see dbpedia.org for detailed information.

search:

Web search and data mining was still the top topic. of about 750 submitted papers, 140 were related to search and 105 were related to data mining. in fact, there is such an immense interest in Web search and data mining that they announced a separate conference dedicated to this particular topic to be held in february 2008 in the san francisco bay area, see wsdm2008.org for details.
i must admit that i almost started to forget that there are other search engines available besides the well known google search. yahoo! was very active at WWW2007 and presented some quiet interesting developments and projects, for example yahoo!-pipes. like in Unix, pipes can be used to feed the output of one "thing" as input to "another thing". pipes were invented by a person who was looking for an apartment in san francisco that should be within walking distance to a day care center. instead of browsing through a list of available apartments and looking them up on a map, this person wrote a small generic application that could take input from various sources and do some comparison - this application became "pipes". for example, pipes takes the RSS feed of craigslist - a list of available apartments in the bay area, extracts the location information and compares the location with location information of other objects, such as parks, hospitals or day care center. if the two locations are within a certain range, we have a match and pipes draws a map showing the location of the apartments found. pipes has a number of given objects, such as various types of sources (e.g. RSS feeds, flickr (images), google base, yahoo! search), user input (date, location, text, number, URL), operators (counter, filter, content analysis, loops, regular expressions and many more) etc. pipes also include a graphical editor to connect the objects. a free yahoo! account is required in order to use pipes. see pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ for details.

the screenshots below give an idea what yahoo! pipes looks like (click on the images for an enlargement):

list of stored pipes (my pipes)	pipes' graphical editor	result of a simple pipe

the banquet took place at the brewster's mountview barbecue the banquet in more details ...

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2.4 next conference:

the 17th world wide web conference will be held on april 22 - 25, 2008 in beijing, china, see www2008 for details.

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3. documentation:

• the conference and poster proceedings are available from our Web server
• official WWW2007 website

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4. other trip report:

please read also the trip report by jann forrer, university of zürich. because jann wrote his report on a notebook running ubuntu, a bush drum plug-in may be required in order to read it :-)

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5. history and statistics:

the series of Web conferences started in spring 1994 with WWW1 held at CERN near geneva, switzerland. in fall 1994, there was a second conference in chicago, USA. because they stated that there will be two conferences each year, one in europe and one in the US, i did not attend WWW2. but at WWW3 in darmstadt, germany, they announced that in the future, there will be only one conference per year. i managed to convince my boss, that i should attend WWW4 in boston, even if i was already in darmstadt and from then on, i did attended every Web conference up to today. the table below lists all conferences and provides links to my trip reports as well as links to the official conference website where applicable.

no	logo (link to my trip report)	year	conference	location	country	number of attendees*
1		1994	WWW1	geneva	switzerland (CH)	380
2		1994	WWW2	chicago	USA	750
3		1995	WWW3	darmstadt	germany (D)	1075
4		1995	WWW4	boston	USA	2000
5		1996	WWW5	paris	france (F)	1452
6		1997	WWW6	santa clara	USA	2000
7		1998	WWW7	brisbane	australia (AUS)	1100
8		1999	WWW8	toronto	canada (CAN)	1200
9		2000	WWW9	amsterdam	netherlands (NL)	1400
10		2001	WWW10	hongkong	hongkong (HK)	1220
11		2002	WWW2002	honolulu	USA	900
12		2003	WWW2003	budapest	hungry (H)	850
13		2004	WWW2004	new york	USA	1000
14		2005	WWW2005	chiba	japan (J)	900
15		2006	WWW2006	edinburgh	scotland (UK)	1124
16		2007	WWW2007	banff	canada (CA)	940

*) note: it is very difficult to get an accurate value for the number of attendees. the numbers are either based on the printed list of attendees where available, on the statement made by the organizers or on my own observations. the number for WWW2 is just an estimation because i missed that conference and i didn't find any numbers on the web.

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6. trip reports from previous conferences:

• trip report from the 15th WWW conference in edinburgh, scotland (UK), may 22-26, 2006
• trip report from the 14th WWW conference in chiba, japan, 10-14 may, 2005
• trip report from the 13th WWW conference in new york city, USA, 18-22 may, 2004
• trip report from the 12th WWW conference in budapest, hungary, 20-24 may, 2003
• trip report from the 11th WWW conference in honolulu, hawaii, 7-11 may, 2002
• trip report from the 10th WWW conference in hong kong, 1-5 may 2001
• trip report from the 9th WWW conference in amsterdam, the netherlands, 15-19 may 2000
• trip report from the 8th WWW conference in toronto, canada, 11-14 may 1999
• trip report from the 7th WWW conference in brisbane, QLD, australia, 14-18 april 1998
• trip report from the 6th WWW conference in santa clara, CA, USA, 7-11 april 1997
• trip report from the 5th WWW conference in paris, france, 6-10 may 1996
• trip report from the 4th WWW conference in boston, USA, 11-14 december 1995
• trip report from the 3rd WWW conference in darmstadt, germany, 10-14 april 1995
• sorry, but i did not attend the 2nd WWW conference in chicago, USA !
• trip report from the 1st WWW conference in geneva, switzerland, 25-27 may 1994

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production note:

this trip report was written on a Dell Latitude D820 notebook with Softquad HoTMetaL. this document is supposed to be HTML V4.0 compliant.