News

[2 June 2014] Workshop proceedings and working notes are now available on the site. The event is now closed.

Description

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 resourcesbecome 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:

1. Draw the attention of the Software engineering community to the research challenges and opportunities in building web applications using open data for citizens
2. Draw the attention on the multi-disciplinary dimension and its impact on government e.g., transportation, energy, water management, building, infrastructure
3. 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.
4. Explore the software life cycle for the web applications including building, hosting and maintenance, commercialization, upgrades and retirement
5. Cloud hosting issues
6. Elaborate a benchmark for testing web applications techniques for city applications
7. Provide a platform for sharing best-practices and discussion
8. 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:

1. Experience in building and deploying Applications (apps) using public data
2. Application Program Interfaces (APIs) for working with Public Data
3. API programming model
4. API composition
5. API patterns
6. Web-program testing
7. Web programming life cycle
8. Semantic APIs
9. Platforms to manage government data: provenance, access control and privacy-preserving issues in open data
10. Semantic models and APIs
11. Linked open data tools
12. Semantic event detection and classification
13. Applications in cities e.g., transportation, public safety, healthcare, water / energy / building management
14. Web-based spatio-temporal reasoning, analysis and visualization
15. User interfaces and interaction
16. Issues in scaling out; Case studies, successes, lessons learnt

Workshop Notes

The official workshop proceedings can be found in the ACM Digital library here. (Note: due to publication deadlines, not all papers are here but listed at this site.)

[1 June 2014]

It was a hectic day of high-quality discussion around IWP topics - open data, APIs and how to build high-quality social applications. By the end, it became clear that developer community should adopt libraries and best practices that promote security, performance and usability. The reason it was not emphasised was because most of the apps were not planned for commercial success when customers demand it.

1. Opening session was by Ms Neeta Verma who gave an overview of Open Data platform, policies and status

- Biplav gave demo of portals from India (data.gov.in), US (data.gov), and city level - Chicago [http://311api.cityofchicago.org/open311/v2/]

2. Session 2

- Paper on Enabling the development of safer mashups for open data Safe mashups talked about attacks while building client-side mashups. They

have built a JS library through which attacks can be prevented. Demo and codes are here:

* http://safemash.herokuapp.com/

* https://github.com/iiithyd-websec/safemash (Code)

- Paper on Full Community Engagement & Open Government Data: An Indian Case Study was done by Biplav

* Talked about experience with usage of open data from India and in running Hackathons around it

- Paper on Emerging Trends: Apps in Event Management talked about a use-case in running an app for technical (student) conference.

They suggested working on locating toilets using open data which was appreciated. More inputs were given on using the event platform for crowd

management to overcome stampede situations

3. Session 3

- Paper on Building Apps With Open Data in India: An Experience talked about issues with the open data platform including support for search,

lack of semantics and sufficient metadata.

- Paper on From Architectural Requirements Towards an Open Architecture for Web and Mobile Societal Applications, talked about how to

conform to open arch. while building apps. They shared experiences with previously closed IT systems.

- The panel on Hackathon with winners of India's OpenDataApps Hackathon (Announced Feb 2014). Attendees were Aby Mathew from

MarketWatch team and Neil Mathew from Gramseva team. They were asked about their motivations, challenges faced and what tooling

could have helped them. The main points that emerged were:

* Support to internationalize app, have multi-lingual support is needed,

* In testing, basic availability is checked but not performance or security. To get commercially successful apps, the issues need to

be considered. Libraries like SafeMash can help along with training.

* Selection of platform to support in apps is important

* It was felt that apps should be disability friendly by design, and this should be promoted

- Discussion around engaging community around city- and national- level visualisations and analytics.

* Biplav showed Amsterdam portal: http://citydashboard.waag.org/

* Discussion on how to support for Indian cities and national level

* Consensus to have meet up activities around the theme.

Schedule (planned)

 09:00 - 10:30 Session I

           Introductions - [15 mins]

           Invited talk - 1 [60 + 15 mins]

10:30 - 11:00 Break

11:00 - 12:30 Session 2

           Full paper #2 - [30 mins]

           Full paper #3 - [30 mins]

           Short papers #1 & #2 - [15 + 15 mins]

12:30 - 14:00 Lunch

14:30 - 16:00 Session 3

           Invited talk - 2 [60 + 15 mins]

           Full paper #1 - [30 mins]

           Short paper #3 - [15 mins]

16:00 - 16:30 Break

16:30 - 17:45 Session 4

           Panel - [60 mins]

           Concluding comments - [15 mins]

Peer-reviewed Accepted Papers (in proceedings)

Paper: Type, Title, All Authors

1. Full Building Apps With Open Data in India: An Experience Mitesh Vasa; Srikanth Tamilselvam;
2. Full Enabling the development of safer mashups for open data Krishna Chaitanya; Venkatesh Choppella;
3. Full Community Engagement & Open Government Data: An Indian Case Study Durgaprasad Misra; Alka Mishra;
4. Short SMS based Service Delivery Platform for Mobile Cloud Applications Murali Kalyan; Siba Charan Pradhan;
5. Short Emerging Trends: Apps in Event Management Vishalaksh Aggarwal; Nadeem Ansari;
6. Short From Architectural Requirements Towards an Open Architecture for Web and Mobile Societal Applications Bahtijar Vogel; Arianit Kurti; Tommi Mikkonen; Marcelo Milrad;

Panel Participants - Winners of India's OpenDataApps Hackathon (Announced Feb 2014)

Entry descriptions (unreviewed):

1. MarketWatch, by Salmon KP, Ameen Rashad, Aby Mathew(description)
2. Indian Health stats, by Saurav Gupta (description)
3. Go tourist, by Saurabh Kumar Verma (description)
4. Earth Core, by Anshu Handa, Anmol Gupta (description)
5. Gramseva - app for agricultural commodity prices, by Neil Mathew (description)

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