SIGWEB Annual Report

July 2002 - June 2003

Submitted by: Elli Mylonas, SIGWEB Chair

This has been a quiet year for SIGWeb. We continue to have several strong conferences, and have recently embarked on a new conference sponsorship (DocEng). We are very close to submitting all the necessary materials to our membership so we can come out of transition in September. We are also in the process of transitioning to a new leadership team. Our 3-year review, presented at the SIGBoard meeting in March was well received.

SIGWeb Conferences

We held no HT conference since the last annual report. We have been successful in moving the annual conference later in the summer. This was one of our goals from last year. Last year's conference was in June, the next one will be in August.

HT'03 will be held at the University of Nottingham, UK from August 26 to 31, 2003. JCDL'03 was held May 27-31 in Houston, TX. Final reports have not come in for DL , the only conference held in 2003. It seems to have been relatively well attended; we don't know yet if it made a profit.

JCDL'03 (Houston, Texas; May 27-31, 2003.). (33% SIGWeb, 33% SIGIR, 33% IEEE committee on Digital Libraries). Conference Chair was Geneva Henry, of Rice University, and Program Chair was Cathy Marshall of Microsoft Corporation. There were 7 workshops and 8 tutorials held at this conference. One of the tutorials was the annual meeting of PIs on DLI projects. As the conference was held in late May, we do not yet have concrete information on attendance and actual budget.

Tutorials

• Usability Evaluation of Digital Libraries
• Overview of Digital Libraries
• How to Build a Digital Library Using Open-Source Software (paired with Build Your Own Digital Library Collections: Hands- On Session)
• Introduction to the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (paired with Advanced Tutorial on Open Archives Initiative)
• Introduction to Georeferencing in Digital Libraries (paired with How to Build a Geospatial Digital Library)
• Thesauri and Ontologies in Digital Libraries I (paired with Thesauri and Ontologies in Digital Libraries II)
• XML (paired with XSL)
• Build Your Own Digital Library Collections: Hands-On Session (paired with How to Build a Digital Library Using Open-Source Software)
• Advanced Tutorial on Open Archives Initiative (paired with Introduction to the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting )
• Open Content Licenses and Copyright
• XSL (paired with XML)
• Audio/Video Digital Libraries: designing, searching for documents, and generating Metadata
• SRW (Search Retrieve WebService): Z39.50 Next Generation

Workshops

• Cross-Cultural Usability for Digital Libraries
• International Workshop on Information Visualization Interfaces for Retrieval and Analysis (IVIRA)
• Building a Meaningful Web: From Traditional Knowledge Organization Systems to New Semantic Tools. The 6th Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) Workshop
• OAI Metadata Harvesting Workshop

In Cooperation agreements:

• As we did last year, we arranged an in-cooperation agreement with the organizers of WWW03 for their Hypermedia track. We hope that this will continue for next year's WWW conference; WWW04, in NY. Many of our members present papers in this track at the WWW conference and act as reviewers for this track and other WWW tracks.
• We also agreed to be in-cooperation sponsors of the following conferences. None of these agreements involved financial contributions from SIGWeb. WebDB, 16th International Workshop on the Web and (June 13-14 2003, San Diego California); ICCR5, Int'l Conference on Electronic Commerce Research (Oct. 23-27, 2002, Montreal, Canada); DocEng 2002, Symposium on Document Engineering, held in cooperation with CIKM 2002 (Nov. 8-9, 2002, McLean, VA)

Conferences in 2004

• HT'04 will be held at the UC Santa Cruz onAugust 23-30, 2004. Conference chair is Jim Whitehead of UC Santa Cruz. Program chairs have not yet been selected. A preliminary call for papers will be announced at HT03 in few weeks.
• JCDL'04 (the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries) will be held in Tucson Arizona on June 7 - 11, 2004. Conference Co-Chairs are Hsinchun Chen (U of Arizona), Howard Wactlar (CMU), and Ching- chih Chen (Simmons College) The Program Chairs are Ee-Peng Lim (Nanyang Technological University) and Mike Christel (CMU). This conference will be sponsored 33% each by SIGWeb, SIGIR and IEEE's DL subgroup.
• DocEng'04 (ACM Symposium for Document Engineering) will be held in Grenoble, France from Nov. 20-22. This is a new venue for SIGWeb, which will be providing 100% sponsorship for the first time.

Awards

The 8 th Engelbart Award will be awarded at HT'03 in August, so we have no information on it yet.

The 5 th Nelson Award will be awarded at HT'03 in August, so we have no information on it yet.

The 6 th Bush Award was awarded at DL'03to Barbara M. Wildemuth, Gary Marchionini, Meng, Yang, Gary Geisler, Todd Wilkens, Anthony Hughes, and Richard Gruss for 'How fast is too fast? Evaluating fast forward surrogates for digital video'.

The Engelbart and Bush awards have, in the past, been sponsored by Knowledge Systems Inc in the amount of $1000 for each winner. Last year, the SIG provided the funds for the awards, and this year they have been built into the conference budget. The Nelson Award will be partially sponsored by the Journal of Digital Information (JoDI).

International initiatives

SIGWEB remains a solidly international organization. The Hypertext conference alternates years between North America and Europe. Papers from all parts of the world are submitted to the HT conference. JCDL also receives a large number of international papers from Europe, Australia and Asia. We have also co- sponsored several conferences that take place in countries other than the US. Finally, the new team that has volunteered to take over the leadership of the SIG is composed of Europeans and Americans, from both academia and industry. (The transition has not been finalized yet, in the SIG or with ACM.)

Significant Activities

Change in Status: As stated in the previous annual report, at the SIG Chairs meeting in February 2002, the status of SIGWeb was changed to a conference only SIG, because we were more than 3 issues behind in our newsletter. We were also placed in transition for the same reason. We hope to be voted out of transition at the September (2003) Chairs meeting. The volunteers who are proposing to assume the SIG leadership also would like to slowly move back to being a full service SIG. For progress on the newsletter, see below.

There are now 3 subcommittees in place which are working on our areas of focus. We have also formed a steering committee with the former officers, former conference and program chairs and representatives from the subcommittees. This steering committee plays an advisory role, and provides continuity.

Newsletter: We are in the final stages of repairing the newsletter backlog. We published one double issue to fill out Issues 9.2-3 (spring 2003), and are in the final stages of preparing a CD ROM of SIGWeb proceedings to be sent to members in lieu of volume 10. Volume 11 was a copy of the HT'02 proceedings (sent summer 2002). There will be no Volume 12. The CD ROM is being compiled by Jim Whitehead of UC Santa Cruz. It is substantially complete, he is now finalizing copyright prose and production details with ACM. We anticipate that it will be sent out for production during August or early September.

Among other areas, we are discussing forms of publication other than a paper newsletter. Our membership feels that we should be publishing in a form that reflects their expertise and interests; that is to say, digital and hypertextual.

SIGWeb Course Directory: The online Hypermedia Course listings is ongoing on our web site, thanks to Simon Buckingham-Shum and Gene Golovchinsky. This is a database of courses relevant to hypertext and hypermedia. Its listings are growing.

Subcommittees

The Marketing subcommittee has helped a great deal with the publicity for HT'03, and is working with Helen Ashman on making publicity a much more prominent part of the conference organization. One of the publicity co-chairs is M. C. Schraefel, who is also co-chair of the Hypermedia track at WWW'03. They are also trying to get notices about SIGWeb and the HT'03 conference into new venues, for example high profile trade publications.

As part of the marketing of HT'03, Helen Ashman took over the role of Information Office for the SIG and updated our website.

The Awards subcommittee and Membership subcommittee have not been very active.

Areas of concentration for 2004

1. Conferences ' HT'04, JCDL'04 and DocEng'04, as well as promoting in- cooperation agreements with other relevant conferences. We are especially pleased that we are now DocEng, which covers topics that dovetail with those of interest to SIGWeb.
2. New leadership. We have received a strong proposal for a new leadership team from several European and American SIG members, which will be discussed at the SIG business meeting at HT'03. As a conference only SIG we don't have to hold elections, but we can put a proposal to the membership for comment, and, if we get positive feedback, propose the group to the SIGBoard.
3. Become the ACM WWW SIG. This is not a statement that reflects on SIGWeb's status within the ACM, as the perceptions in the WWW community of the relevance of the ACM and SIGWeb to their work.
4. Subcommittees: make sure these subcommittees make progress on their tasks, and that they report on the process to the steering committee.
5. Steering committee: Develop it, make sure everyone who should be is on it, and make a listserv for it.
6. Membership  continuing to make ourselves attractive to the membership through the website and newsletter
7. Volunteers  nurture the new volunteers we already have. Make sure they don't feel left out, and that they don't lose their sense of purpose.
8. Keep updating the website.