IWP 2014 - Workshop on Inclusive Web Programming ? Programming on the Web with Open Data for Societal Applications

The workshop, Inclusive Web Programming ? Programming on the Web with Open Data for Societal Applications, IWP 2014 for short, connects three themes ? open data, web programming and the need to provide better analytics over the web with open data to citizens to promote better quality of life.
Open Government Data is a recent and rapidly growing phenomenon. Governments are increasingly taking initiatives to make their data available online in open formats and under licenses that allow use, reuse & redistribution of government data. More than two hundred open data catalogs exist for cities, state and federal governments that have made their data publicly available. Prominent among them are London (UK), Chicago (USA), Washington DC (USA), Dublin (Ireland), USA (data.gov), India (data.gov.in) and Kenya (opendata.go.ke?). Some of these agencies have also opened up their data as a platform encouraging development of applications for public good. There is a World Wide Web Consortium’s working group on Government Linked Data (W3C GLD WG) specifically to promote usage of open data programmatically with web standards.
The second theme is web programming. Services Oriented Architecture technologies like Web Services have simplified application integration across organizations and over the web in the past (2003-2008). However, their adoption in practice was somewhat limited due to plethora of middleware technologies to assemble such services (SOAP, JMS, UDDI, .Net). Recently, this has seen a shift with mass-scale adoption of web standards (HTTP, JSON, REST) for integration leading to reduction of the entry barrier. Consequently, web application development has become democratized with more situational applications being developed by non-programmers at higher levels of abstractions. Specifically, applications are being developed (composed) from available services with the aim to quickly prototype a capability following standard patterns of data (resource) access. If the application is found useful, a new application is built with more robust constituent services by the same or more trained developer later. Sites like programmableweb.com are promoting such simplified web-programming model.
The third theme is sustainability as a domain to build useful and analytical applications that improve citizens’ quality of life. As human population increases and resources become scarce, there is an increasing challenge faced by governments about how to promote better usage of what we have. The scientific community has responded to these challenges by promoting the computational sustainability vision where resources consumed by a city, such as water, energy, land, food and air, can be monitored to know the accurate present picture and then optimized for resource efficiency without degrading quality of services it provides -traffic movement, water availability, sanitation, public safety, etc. Industry has joined the vision with a “smart” or “intelligent” prefix for cyber-physical systems, which involve sensing the data through physical instruments, interconnecting and integrating them from multiple sources and analyzing them for intelligent patterns.
The trends are converging. In this context, the aims of the workshop are to:
Draw the attention of the Software engineering community to the research challenges and opportunities in building web applications using open data for citizens
Draw the attention on the multi-disciplinary dimension and its impact on government e.g., transportation, energy, water management, building, infrastructure
Identify unique issues of this domain and what new (hybrid) techniques may be needed. As example, since governments and citizens are involved, data security and privacy are first-class concerns.
Explore the software life cycle for the web applications including building, hosting and maintenance, commercialization, upgrades and retirement
Cloud hosting issues
Elaborate a benchmark for testing web applications techniques for city applications
Provide a platform for sharing best-practices and discussion
Understand how governments can help in better usage of their data and building of high-quality, usable applications, and provide feedback to improve
We encourage submissions that deal with topics involved in building web or mobile programs (applications and APIs) leveraging open data. Special preference will be given to contributions that go beyond open to other data sources (e.g., enterprise) and drive citizen centric decisions.
Topics of interest include, but not restricted to, are:
Experience in building and deploying Applications (apps) using public data
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) for working with Public Data
API programming model
API composition
API patterns
Web-program testing
Web programming life cycle
Semantic APIs
Platforms to manage government data: provenance, access control and privacy-preserving issues in open data
Semantic models and APIs
Linked open data tools
Semantic event detection and classification
Applications in cities e.g., transportation, public safety, healthcare, water / energy / building management
Web-based spatio-temporal reasoning, analysis and visualization
User interfaces and interaction
Issues in scaling out; Case studies, successes, lessons learnt
Organizers
Dr. Biplav Srivastava, IBM Research - India, New Delhi
Ms Neeta Verma, National Informatics Centre, DeitY, Govt of India
Program Committee
? Dr. Srinivas Padmanabhuni, Infosys Labs
? Dr. Ullas Nambiar, EMC, India
? Arjun Natarajan, IBM Research, USA
? Florian Pinel, IBM Research, USA
? Dr. Sugata Ghosal, IBM Research ? India
? Pankaj Dhoolia, IBM Research ? India
? Bob Schloss, IBM Research, USA
? Dr. Maja Vukovic, IBM Research, USA
? Dr. Tope Omitola, University of Southampton, UK
? Prof. Mark Fox, University of Toronto, Canada
? Prof. Aditya Ghose, University of Wollongong, Australia
? Pramod Anantharam, Wright State University, USA
? D P Misra, NIC, India
? Prof. Deepak Khemani, IIT Madras, India
? Dr. John Breslin, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland