Tuesday, October 20, 2009

CfP Socio-Technical Aspects of Mashups - IEEE 1st Int. Workshop

In Conjunction with IEEE AINA 2010 (Advanced Information Networking and Applications)

Call for Papers

In recent years, mashup has emerged as a rapid and light-weight development approach for creating distributed Web applications. The advent of easy-to-use, dynamic programming and scripting techniques (e.g. PHP, AJAX, etc.), increasingly open APIs, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), dedicated frameworks and environments (eg. Facebook API Platform, Yahoo Pipes) and the wide availability of free, syndicated content (eg RSS) has provided myriad opportunities for people to create mashup-based Web applications in ways unprecedented to traditional software development methods. Mashups can bring data and functionality together in different ways and for different purposes. Many would argue that their greatest potential is for addressing transient problems for specific groups of users in dynamically changing business, social or political contexts. Mashups can be created by people, who may or may not be skilled in programming, to test out ‘self-service’ whenever needed through integrating heterogeneous information across the boundaries of different organizations over the Web.

The implication of such an end-user development approach is far-reaching and hence deserves extensive scientific investigation. However, beyond all the hype, studies of the actual development and use of mashups for delivering business, social or political value are extraordinarily rare. While previous studies have focused on the technical side of constructing the Mashups infrastructure, little has been reported to demonstrate the real value or identify the problems, practicalities and pitfalls of their construction. Essentially, we need to understand how mashups emerge and change, succeed or fail, in settings where people, policies, systems, and data are intertwined with each other, forming a complex yet dynamic system. Among many research challenges, a list of questions that are yet to be addressed by researchers are:

  • Who makes mashups?
  • Why do mashups succeed or fail?
  • Are useful mashups really quick to develop?
  • Is it better to develop a lot of low fidelity mashups or a few well engineered ones?
  • How do communities of users emerge?
  • How is the design of mashups participatory?
  • What is the life cycle of a mashup?
  • What business or social environments are condusive to mashup creation?
  • What happens when bugs emerge in mashups?
  • What happens when there are competing mashups to do the same job?

To answer these questions, a dual-focused approach that investigates both social and technical aspects of mashups is crucial. The aim of this workshop is thus to bring together academic researchers, industry practitioners and open source community participants for reporting research findings, sharing practical experiences, and highlighting research challenges and future directions in both the social and technical aspects of mashups. Intended topics may include but are not limited to:

Paper Submission

Both academic papers and industry reports will be accepted. Original full papers should be formatted in a two-column IEEE Computer Society format, and should not exceed 6 (six) pages including figures and references. Submission of a paper should be regarded as a commitment that, if the paper is accepted, at least one of the authors will register and present at the workshop. All submitted papers will be judged based on their quality through peer reviewing, where TPC members are invited to assess the scientific contributions of papers. Accepted papers will be published by the IEEE Computer Society Press and archived in the IEEE Digital Library.

Please click here for online submission

Important Dates

Submission deadline15 November 2009
Author Notification:1 December 2009
Final Manuscripts Due:15 January 2010
Registration Due:15 January 2010
Workshop Date:20 April 2010