Web^SQRT

We are truly sorry to inform you that we were forced to cancel the workshop. Despite our best efforts to secure a number of submissions that would allow to proceed with a regular peer-reviewing procedure, the number of submissions that were sent was not sufficient. Of course, we could have pretended to go with peer-reviewing and accept almost all submissions, but that would do science more harm than good. The authors who put their effort and hard work into preparing a paper deserve more than that, they deserve a decent reviewing process and true scientific scrutiny of their work. We would like to thank all contributing authors and the members of the PC who have agreed to share their knowledge, time and expertise. And the workshop is only canceled, not dead, so maybe we'll hear from each other in the future.

Introduction

Recent years have witnessed the transition of the Web from an information repository service to a social and business platform. New, unprecedented services are available on the Web that capitalize on the social aspects of user communities. Crowd-sourcing, user-generated content, folksonomies, social computing, are all examples of services that were made possible by the recent shift in application design paradigms. Such services offer to many people a framework for organizing their private and professional lives. Unfortunately, low publishing barriers impact the quality of the content on the Web. Pseudo-anonymity of Web users combined with strong financial incentives encourage many users to perform malicious activities. These activities range from relatively harmless (e.g. trolling), through irritating (e.g. spamming), up to criminal (e.g. online auction fraud). In order to protect the community of users from malevolent wrong-doers, new tools and techniques need to be developed. To guarantee the trustworthiness of content, mechanisms for managing its quality, assessing the associated risk, and judge about trust must be designed and implemented to enable the emergence of fairness in Web environments.

Topics of Interest

The objective of the workshop is to create a common space for researchers and practitioners of trust, risk and reputation management to collaborate, exchange and discuss ideas, case studies, and solutions. The management of trust, risk and reputation, as well as recommendation engines, are ubiquitous in Web environments. They apply to webpages, blogs, social networks, Internet forums, P2P networks, online auction markets, and business to business markets, to name a few. Hence, workshop topic list is very broad and includes (not exclusively):

• anomaly and spam detection in social networks
• link and webpage spamming
• P2P ranking and spamming
• fairness in P2P networks
• information quality, trust and reputation management in the blogosphere
• social role discovery in Internet forums
• reputation of Internet forum community members
• trust and reputation in online auctions
• risk analysis and risk propensity
• trust in recommender systems
• Web information retrieval for improving access to qualitative information