WEBSCI

Welcome to the ACM Web Science 2014 Conference. This is the 6th conference of the series and the 3rd to be sponsored by ACM through the Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia and the Web (SIGWEB). The Conference continues to acknowledge the centrality of the Web as a socially constructed artifact, focusing on the study of information networks, social communities, organizations, applications, and policies that shape and are shaped by the Web. The conference provides a unique forum for researchers from different disciplines, including computer, social, and related sciences, with the goal of fostering and supporting a thriving interdisciplinary community of Web Science.

This year we were very pleased to receive 144 valid full and short paper submissions and 33 poster submissions. The largest number of contributions was from the US followed by the UK and Germany. Almost all submissions received 3 reviews, for a total of over 500 reviews from around 100 reviewers. Based on the reviews, on discussions among the reviewers, and on a meta-review phase by the Program Chairs, 20 submissions were accepted as full papers, 9 submissions were accepted as short papers and 35 submissions were accepted as posters in total (some accepted posters were originally submitted as full/short papers). The overall acceptance rate for full/short papers was 20.14% (29 papers accepted out of 144 submissions).

The highly selective program allowed us to maintain Web Science 2014 as a single track conference, to expose all participants to the high-quality contributions we accepted, give their authors high visibility, and help foster a cohesive Web Science community. This year we decided to also have three "lightning talk" sessions for posters on the first day of the conference, so that all the authors of accepted posters will have a chance to make their work visible in an incisive format that, we believe, will better engage conference participants with the poster contributions and the poster sessions.

The conference program is accompanied by a number of exciting keynote talks given by Dame Wendy Hall (U. of Southampton), JP Rangaswami (Salesforce.com), Laura DeNardis (American University) and Daniel Tunkelang (LinkedIn). In addition, a series of workshops are held to give the community a forum to present and discuss work-in-progress:

• Altmetrics'14 - Expanding Impacts and Metrics

• Computational Approaches to Social Modeling (ChASM)

• Massive Data Flow: Understanding the Complex Dynamics of the Web

• The Web of Scientific Knowledge: Current Trends & Future Perspectives in the Big Data Era

• Interdisciplinary Coups to Calamities

• Web Science Education: Sharing Experiences and Developing Community

• 2nd International Workshop on Building Web Observatories (B-WOW2014)

• Research Methodologies for Analyzing Cybercrime and Cyberwar

The program also includes a doctoral consortium to provide PhD students in the later stages of their research with a supportive and critical learning opportunity to discuss their work in progress and to receive feedback and guidance from senior Web and information science scholars. Conference attendees will have an opportunity to enjoy the exhibit Places & Spaces: Mapping Science, meant to inspire cross-disciplinary discussion on how to best track and communicate human activity and scientific progress on a global scale. Finally, we will award prizes for the most innovative visualizations of Web data. For this data challenge, we are providing four large datasets that will remain publicly available to web scientists.