Workshops


The Web and Requirements Engineering (WeRE) Tuesday, June 21*

The International Workshop on the Web and Requirements Engineering (WeRE) intends to be an international forum for exchanging ideas on both using Web technologies as a platform for requirements engineering, and applying requirements engineering in the development and use of web-based applications. Papers are solicited that present on-going work focusing on new ideas and experiences with Requirements Engineering and the Web. The workshop will be a forum for discussion and exchange of ideas among researchers, designers, and users who are working or are interested in any combination of these two main topics.

Purpose: In the last decade, the number and complexity of web-based applications and the amount of information they offer has been growing exponentially. In the context of Software Engineering, design methods and methodologies have been introduced to support the development of these complex applications in a systematic way. However, most of these methodologies focus on design and neglect other tasks, notably requirement analysis and quality management. However, in the development of traditional (non-web) applications both practitioners and process experts regard requirements engineering as a phase of crucial importance in the development process. It is well-known that the most common and time-consuming errors as well as the most expensive ones to repair, are often errors caused by inadequate engineering of requirements. Moreover, web-based applications demand new requirements engineering techniques that can accommodate a large, open and changing community of, can deal with navigational requirements and broad in scope so that they can account for business processes as well as web usability. These new techniques will need to offer more participatory environments to support effective collaboration among stakeholders. In this context, the Web (especially Web 2.0 applications), provide a convenient platform to allow stakeholders and users alike more active participation in requirements engineering.

Third International Workshop on Lightweight Composition on the Web (ComposableWeb 2011) Monday, June 20, full-day from 9.00 to 17.30 (Coffee Breaks at 10.30 and 15.30 and Lunch at 12.30)

In the context of the Web, the word “mashup” is used to denote Web applications that are materialized by integrating data, services and/or presentation of other (data) sources or applications. Some applications focus on integrating RSS feeds, others on integrating RESTful services or SOAP services, others on Atom feeds, and there are those that focus on integrating user interfaces. We believe mashups – and especially mashup tools with their models, languages and instruments for mashup development – do bring innovation, in that they tackle integration at the user interface level (most mashups do integrate presentation content, not “just” data), they aim at simplicity more than completeness of features (up to the point that advanced Web users, not only programmers, can develop composite applications), and they allow fairly sophisticated development tasks in the web browser.

Over the last years, we have seen many efforts invested in research on mashups, in both the industrial and the academic context, yet we are still far from a common understanding of the problems that drive the research, of the approaches that best fit given problems, and even of the benefits of the results achieved so far.

In light of these considerations, the goal of ComposableWeb is to stimulate the discussion of key issues, approaches, open problems, innovative applications, and trends in the area of web mashups and lightweight composition on the Web, so as to accelerate progress. ComposableWeb aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners with different research interests and belonging to communities like Web Engineering, Service Engineering, Business Process Management, Databases, Semantic Web, Software Composition and Software Engineering.

First International Workshop on Search, Exploration and Navigation of Web Data Sources (ExploreWeb) Monday, June 20, full-day from 9.00 to 17.30 (Coffee Breaks at 10.30 and 15.30 and Lunch at 12.30)

The goal of this workshop is to gather researchers and practitioners in the diverse fields related to exploration and navigation of search results and web data sources.

The workshop will be mainly focused on the following disciplines:

• Exploratory search
• Navigation and visualization of (open) Web data
• Access to Web data
• Modeling of data sources on the web

The joint application of the data integration, hypertext navigation, concept exploration, and exploratory search techniques is not trivial, because the new Web datasources are characterized by some peculiar features that need to be considered, including: rank awareness of results, partial retrieval of result lists from data sources, partial or approximate match between values, and so on. This imposes new requirements both to the data integration and navigation applications, which cannot solely rely on past solutions. The workshop will represent a unique venue for discussing all the aspects related to navigation and exploration of new Web data sources.

2nd International Workshop on Quality in Web Engineering (QWE 2011) Tuesday, June 21*

The "Quality in Web Engineering" workshop (QWE) is aimed at bringing together professionals and researchers interested in discussing recent trends and perspectives in the role of quality in Web Engineering. The main purpose will be to assess the effectiveness of existing approaches for evaluating and managing the quality of Web resources (review guidelines, usability models, usability evaluation methods, usability checkers, accessibility verifiers, information quality tools, logging tools, automatic metric capture tools, statistical tools, etc.), with the final objective of allowing participants to discuss and get to know the most innovative and advanced experiences for guaranteeing the quality of Web applications in general, and Web 2.0 applications in particular. Special emphasis will be posed on Web Engineering methods, the way they improve the development process and the quality of final applications, and the way they can be further empowered by taking into account quality principles and by integrating sound quality assessment methods.

One of the goals of this year's edition will be to discuss the impact of these issues in modern Web applications, commonly referred to as Web 2.0 applications. The current trend in the creation of such applications is to increase the user involvement in the creation of contents, annotations, and evaluations. An emerging practice, that is currently gaining popularity even among users with only little programming skills, is the development of mashups through the integration of contents and functions that are provided by third parties that open their APIs toward developers and end users.

This new generation of applications proves the initially unexpected value of integrating end users in the creation process of online applications. However, while several efforts have been so far devoted to the production of authoring environments and development tools, and to the definition of corresponding enabling technologies, there is a lack of proposals for the definition of key quality principles and evaluation methods.

7th Model-Driven Web Engineering Workshop (MDWE 2011) Tuesday, June 21*

The MDWE'2011 workshop aims at providing a discussion forum for researchers and practitioners on model-driven development of Web applications. The workshop will be the ideal venue for meeting, disseminating and exchanging ideas and problems, identifying the key issues and exploring together the possible solutions and future research directions.

Accordingly, we invite submissions from both academia and industry about topics that comprise Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) and other model-driven approaches (e.g., Software Factories, Product Line Engineering, Aspect-Oriented Development, etc.) for the development of Web systems, use of metamodels, model transformations, UML profiles, domain specific modeling languages, semantic Web and design patterns in the development of Web applications. Further topics of interest are the interoperability models for Web applications and resources (Web pages, Web services, mockups, portlets, distributed components, etc.) and the use of tools and frameworks for supporting model-driven Web development. Finally, we also welcome contributions that foster discussions on the analysis of advantages, problems and limitations of such MDSD in the Web Engineering domain, maintenance, evolution, management of model-driven generated Web systems and model-driven analysis of Web applications, such as quality, performance or reliability analysis.

2nd International Workshop on Enterprise Crowdsourcing Monday, June 20, half-day afternoon from 14:00 to 17.30 (Coffee Break at 15.30)

Crowdsourcing, a successful mechanism operating on Web 2.0 of harvesting information and expertise from the online communities, has evolved over the past few years from its humble beginnings as isolated purpose-built initiatives, such as Wikipedia and Mechanical Turk to a growth industry. This workshop has the following objectives: (1) Identify requirements arising from deploying Web architectures to source (business) tasks through the social networks (e.g. potentially resulting in Web standards for collaborative applications). (2) Identify emerging topics and challenges within the enterprise crowdsourcing paradigm and provide a forum for further exploration and advancement in the enterprise domain. (3) Bring together academic and industrial communities that are active in the crowdsourcing area.

2nd International Workshop on Web-Enabled Objects (TouchTheWeb) CANCELLED

The vision of the Internet of Things builds upon the use of embedded systems to control devices, tools and appliances. With the addition of novel communications capabilities and identification means such as RFID, systems can now gather information from other sensors, devices and computers on the network, or enable user-oriented customization and operations through short-range communication. When the information gathered by different sensors is shared by means of open Web standards, new services can be defined on top of physical elements. In addition, the new generation of mobile phones enables a true mobile Internet experience. These phones are today’s ubiquitous information access tool, and the physical token of our "Digital Me“. These meshes of things and “Digital Me” will become the basis upon which future smart living, working and production places will be created, delivering services directly where they are needed.

The fundamental questions in this workshop are:

• How do we apply the lessons learned in Web Engineering to the Internet of Things?
• What kind of Web-based interaction patterns for embedded devices (streaming, eventing, etc.) can we identify?
• Applications, deployments, prototypes and evaluations of Web of things systems.
• Human-things interaction models and paradigms (mobile interfaces, etc.)
• User-oriented, context-aware discovery and dynamic search for the real world.
• Compositions of Things and Meshes of Things.
• What kind of interfaces, business models and scenarios these smart things will create, address and modify?
• How can the services in the surroundings be composed and orchestrated?

The research areas involved are many, including Web Engineering, Ubiquitous Computing, Product Engineering, Distributed Systems, Human Computer Interaction, Economics, Artificial Intelligence, and many more. We look forward in this workshop to bring together different areas of expertise to help us shape a vision of creating living and working surrounded by meshes of web-enabled things.

*MDWE, QWE and WeRE workshops will be run as one consolidated workshop from 9.00 to 17.30 (Coffee Breaks at 10.30 and 15.30 and Lunch at 12.30).