Close, but a Cigar Nevertheless

I just came back from this year’s Web Science Confernce in Raleigh, NC. The idea of the conference – as of Web Science in general – is to give a holistic, multi-disciplinary view on the Web, and while I’m still not sure if and exactly how this will work like in the end (there was a heated discussion between social and computer scientists in the closing panel), I found the event very interesting and a lot of fun. Of course, the best surprise came right at the end, when our paper on Linked Data Usage (I had reported on early stages of this quite a while ago on this blog) was shortlisted as one of three papers for the best paper award! In the end we didn’t win (the prize went to the paper by Metaxas and Mustafaraj: From Obscurity to Prominence in Minutes: Political Speech and Real-Time Search), but just to get the nomination was pretty awesome. I really didn’t expect this, considering that this paper had been in the pipeline for more that a year now, but never quite made it for any submission deadline, and was therefore delayed time and time again. This is great encouragement for continuing our work in this area!