The 15th International World Wide Web Conference, to give it its full title, appears to have been a resounding success. The event, held in Edinburgh, has seen a resurgence in interest in the technology of the Web, not just from its traditional heartland of academia but also from business and developers keen to see the practical side of new Web technologies.
The conference was organised by the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science. Professor Wendy Hall from Southampton was executive director of WWW2006, and started organising the event three years ago. That's a long time on the Internet, and it helped the organisers identify kind of areas that this year's conference would need to cover. "You know the major trends. One of them was obviously the Semantic Web, mobile Web was another, and security. In the conferences three or four years ago, there were small sessions on them, and they've now become mainstream," Hall told Builder AU sister site Builder UK.
The conference committee wanted to make sure that the event wasn't just about research and experimental technologies. "We were very keen to re-engage business with the technology," said Hall. "The early Web conferences in the mid-1990s were incredibly well attended by business, because everyone wanted to find out what this Web thing was. The Web's now established and mainstream, and people were going elsewhere to find out what's new. The conference was becoming one just for the technology people. We were determined this year to get business and the developers back in."
Academia hasn't been neglected in this push, however, and researchers have been able to present their work, but in an increasingly competitive field. "The quality of the technical papers has been getting better and better every year, and this year we've got the best quality we've ever had," said Hall.
Carole Goble, technical programme co-chair of the conference, said: "There's an incredible breadth of content ranging from industrial practice, through the way the Web affects society, to groups of hackers sitting on the floor writing code there and then. The keynotes were excellent. Mary-Ann Davidson was astonishingly good."
Goble also pointed out that the conference content wasn't purely about technical standards. "This year we've seen a rise in the discussion of how people are part of the Web, as well as the technologies used to build the Web," she said.
It wasn't just the organisers who were full of praise. Kevin Hinde, head of technical development for BBC News Interactive, said that he'd enjoyed the mix of content. "The general area of the World Wide Web is where we do our stuff, and it's quite refreshing to attend an academic conference, rather than one organised by one of the vendors. I've seen some excellent things. Just about everything I've been to has been relevant in some way," said Hinde. But he said that the content was still very practical: "For an academic conference, it's very grounded and not too way out there."
One attendee, who works in the security field, echoed the comments about content applicable to business. "There's quite a wide divergence of views. It's been quite good. Most of the sessions I've been to have been primarily business-related," she said.
Even the academics attending the event found the new balance of the conference to be an improvement. Nick Gibbins, a lecturer at the University of Southampton, explained: "This is one of the main conferences where we see the interaction between industry and the academic side of the Semantic Web. I've been very gratified to see the increasing interest from some parts of industry. There are other conferences which cover the academic side more; this fits into the happy medium where you get some of both."
Gibbins' comments were echoed by another researcher, Andy Seaborne of Hewlett-Packard's Bristol Labs. "This conference is about how things link together, and where everything is going in the Web: There are other conferences for specialists. The energy in the developers track has been a big change from previous years. The conference used to be much more about refereed papers. The business aspects mean there's a much more dynamic mix of people," said Seaborne.
As well as the balance of attendees and content, there was enthusiasm for the discussions of subjects that wouldn't happen elsewhere. "I'm interested to see how user interface design is filtering into the consciousness of people who are doing research in the Semantic Web and Web 2.0. A panel on tagging, which covered manual tagging versus the Semantic Web, was fantastic," said MC Schraefel, another Semantic Web researcher.
Jim Bell from HP told Builder UK that some familiar Web ideas still need to be explored to see how pervasive they can become. "One of the things I particularly enjoyed was a talk on the principle of the long tail on the Web. If you go to Amazon, half the books they sell will be very popular, but the aggregate of all the unpopular ones adds up to as much as the popular ones. Part of the magic of the Web is that you can have all of those in stock. It turns out that this principle of the long tail applies to a lot of other things on the Web as well."
Bell also commented on the new-found balance in the people at the event. "The attendance is quite split; there are a lot of academics, but there are also more general businesspeople learning about the Web," he said.
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