EVENT REPORT

Report on the Tenth International Workshop on
Location and the Web (LocWeb 2020)
Workshop held at The Web Conference, WWW2020
Dirk Ahlers
NTNU - Norwegian University of Science and Technology,
Trondheim, Norway
dirk.ahlers@ntnu.no
Erik Wilde
Axway
ewilde@axway.com

Rossano Schifanella
University of Turin, Italy
schifane@di.unito.it

Jalal S. Alowibdi
University of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
jalowibdi@uj.edu.sa
Abstract
LocWeb 2020 was the tenth workshop in the LocWeb workshop series at the intersectionof location-based analytics and Web architecture and was held at The Web Conference,
WWW 2020, on 21st April 2020. The focus was on Web-scale services and systems facilitating
location-aware information access as well as on Spatial Social Computing on the Web. The
LocWeb 2019 workshop had contributions ranging from urban location data analysis overgeospatial open data access to worldwide media consumption patterns.
The workshop and conference was intended to be held in Taipei, Taiwan, but was instead
held as a virtual workshop since also The Web Conference itself moved to be an online-only
event, due to the current pandemic. That also gave rise to a number of discussions aroundspatial models, online work modes, and current mitigation efforts.
This report presents an overview of these discussions, after an introduction to the workshop
theme and the individual contributions.

1

Introduction

Location and geospatial analytics are important aspects in a wide range of Web research andsystems. LocWeb 2020 continues a successful workshop series at the intersection of location-based
analytics and Web architecture. It focuses on Web-scale services and systems facilitating locationaware information access as well as spatial social behavior analytics as part of social computing.
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The location topic is seen as a cross-cutting issue equally concerning information access, semantics
and standards, social analysis and mining, and Web-scale systems and services. It explores theconnection of the Web to the real physical and spatial world.
New application areas for Web architecture, such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Webof Things (WoT), will lead to increasingly rich and large sets of applications for which location ishighly relevant as the connection to the physical world. Location has high importance in Webbased designs, and it continues to provide challenging research questions.
It plays important roles in large systems of social and societal importance, and we aim to
explore this connection further under the topics of data science for social good and through ways
to improve people’s lives.
Following the LocWeb workshops held in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019,
LocWeb 2020 continued the workshop series, addressing issues at the intersection of location-based
services and Web architecture.
LocWeb 2020 was the tenth event in the workshop series and took place on April 21st, 2020
co-located with The Web Conference WWW20201 . It was intended to be held in Taipei, Taiwan.
Due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, the workshop and the whole conference was instead held
as an online event. This caused LocWeb for the first time to not have a physical location. We
discuss implications and experiences in more detail later.
Workshop details, including most presentations, can be found on the workshop homepage2 andon the workshop series homepage3 .
The previous LocWeb report for 2019 has been published in SIGIR Forum as Ahlers et al.
[2019] as well as those for previous years.

2

Workshop Theme and Topics

LocWeb continues the main theme of Web-scale Location-Aware Information Access and spatialsocial computing. Subtopics include (i) geospatial semantics, systems, and standards; (ii) largescale geospatial and geo-social ecosystems; (iii) mobility; (iv) location in the Web of Things; and(v) mining and searching geospatial data on the Web. The workshop encourages work describing
Web-mediated or Web-scale approaches that build on reliable foundations, and that thoroughly
understand and embrace the geospatial dimension through interdisciplinary perspectives.
The workshop’s topics of interest were: Location-Aware Information Access Spatial Social Behavior Location-Aware Web-Scale Systems and Services Location in the Internet/Web of Things
Geospatial Data Science for Social Good Open Geospatial Web Data Geospatial aspects of Smart
Cities Urban Planning and Citizen Engagement Location prediction in social media and the
Web Influence modeling and processing in static and dynamic spatio-social graphs Evaluationof frameworks, metrics and algorithms Large-scale Geospatial Ecosystems Standards for Locationand Mobility Data Modeling Location and Location Interaction Location-Based Social Networks
Geospatial Web Search and Mining Mobile Search and Location-Based Recommendation1

www2020.thewebconf.org/
https://dhere.de/locweb/locweb2020/3
https://dhere.de/locweb/
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Workshop Contributions

The workshop had an interdisciplinary combination of contributions, with one short and two full
papers. Our PC members provided over 4 reviews per paper on average. With 4 papers submitted,
we had a 75% acceptance rate. We had international author groups from Europe, South and North
America, with some cross-country and cross-continent authorships of papers.
The proceedings [Ahlers et al., 2020] are available in the ACM Digital Library4 under a CCBY4.0 license as part of the WWW 2020 Companion. Slides are available from the workshop
homepage.
The first paper was on Open Geodata Reuse: Towards Natural Language Interfaces to Web
API [Degbelo and Sherpa, 2020] by Auriol Degbelo and Ang Sherpa. Its aim is to improve service
development on open datasets (Open Government Data and Open GeoData) by improving theuse and learnability of APIs. The idea is to expose standard functionality in a more interoperable
manner and through a more natural language oriented interface, while the adaptation to thespecific API dialect runs in the background. While learnability benchmarks are yet scarce, theyevaluate the interface use to contribute to this topic. So far, the supported queries follow athematic-spatial-time schema, which can be used to extract datasets from open data portals that
fulfill the criteria.
In Leveraging Behavioral Heterogeneity Across Markets for Cross-Market Training of Recommender Systems [Roitero et al., 2020], Kevin Rotiero, Ben Carterette, Rishabh Mehrotra, andMounia Lalmas aim to understand the difference in user behavior over different geographical regions for a music recommender system at Spotify. The question is whether they need different
recommender models per market or can use a single global model. It turns out that global models
are not specific enough, but that it is not necessarily efficient from an operational perspective tomaintain full models per country. They test different training approaches within these extremes
on data of 100M users in 21 different markets. Apart from a market, user language affinity also
is valuable and markets can be approximated by language apart from user registration country.
Finding the right target training market appears to be a hard problem.
Finally, Toward Characterizing Cities with Social Media Images using Activity Recognition,
Topic Modeling and Visualization [Opitz et al., 2020] by Daniela Opitz, Eduardo Graells-Garrido,
and Ignacio Pérez-Messina investigate new models of extracting information about cities fromsocial media photographs, namely Flickr images for Santiago, Chile. This allows to partition acity by image analysis at different spatial granularities. The approach performs activity recognition
in a spatial distribution leading to an activities-districts-matrix used for topic modeling to extract
relevant activities, and visualization to understand the distribution.

4

Discussion Session

Usually the discussion session is started by talking about some specific or unusual local characteristics of the conference venue and location use in the city or country of the workshop. This servesto check our assumptions of how location “works” and how we could we understand the city.
However, with the Web Conference moving online, rather this mode and the larger impact
4

https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/3366424#heading15

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of the pandemic and mitigation efforts were discussed instead of specific locations of interest for
Taipei, Taiwan.
The discussion started around questions of: Where are we? Is it Taipei, online, worldwide, or
anything in between? How do we get together? What do we learn from this situation? How does
COVID-19 and the caused lockdowns and limitations challenge our assumptions and perceptionof location?
One initial point was how to represent such a move:
Taipei (25◦ 02’07”N 121◦ 33’46”E) → Online/Worldwide (null?)Many formats exist for location annotations, but such a move would be difficult to represent.
Just “null” is too general, “online” may not be specific or cannot be handled by systems expecting
a location. This may also mean that event systems need to better deal with online events. Anotherquestion then becomes, what is a “virtual” event? Is it completely online and non-spatial, or is itin some way spatially grounded or has a spatial footprint?
In our case, the conference was still run from Taipei as a location of the organizing and support
team, wile participants came from all over the world. For our workshop, we had participants fromthe UK, Chile, Norway, Germany, France, Taiwan; and a few other countries that we did notcatch. We had around 12 people at a time, but a much higher session hopping, and we estimate
around 20–25 participants overall.
Another observation was that, as a result of lockdowns and travel restrictions, usage modes
shift massively. For example, wayfinding for new areas becomes practically obsolete for mostpeople. For the conference itself, it means no need for understanding the conference locations,and a different way of switching sessions.
It is not easy to gather accurate data on the reduction in use of mapping and location services.
On the other hand, there is more evidence for a general shift in behavior of overall mobility andsome hints to changes location search behavior.
We see online search services putting warnings on the extracted opening hours of locations forthe possibly reduced accuracy. Business listings are encouraging their owners to update information. This links back to an older issue that is harder to estimate whether places are still open than
it is to discover newly opened ones; so this seems to be still a hard problem in search. Delivery
options are becoming a more important feature for business listings.
The massive reduction in mobility has already led to a high number of reports, systems, andarticles. Work on analysis of mobility reduction per country, city, or neighborhood is alreadytoo numerous to just point to here. The terms “covid-19 mobility” in an academic search engine
produce a large number of results, often of work basing results on cell tower or direct phone
tracking. As a large-scale example, Google is now publishing coronavirus mobility reports, showing
mobility changes and destination changes.5
General search patterns also appear to be shifting. Some anecdotal evidence exists, with theusual caveat that trend patterns are not very reliable. A shift for example between terms of “yoganear me” shrinking while “online yoga” is growing,6 similar for “restaurant” and “delivery” andother cases. It will be interesting to see actual thorough analysis to understand the impact on
search.
The discussion then moved to the larger implications of COVID-19 and different mitigation
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https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/
https://twitter.com/SearchItSocial/status/1243339761080619008

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efforts, mainly around case mapping and proposed contact tracing (or exposure tracing) apps.
One interesting aspect was how to build privacy-aware contact trackers. A more thorough discussion including risk analysis, societal implications, privacy-by-design, decentralisation, and otherconsiderations has been published just before the workshop by a large international group of
researchers.7
Assuming a decentral model which does not share location data with a central server, but rather
keeps a contact list on a phone through for example Bluetooth beacon use,8 the location model canchange away from a detailed model of location, but rather to one of (personal) proximity. Sucha location model would have location privacy inherently built in, and could also help in building
trust and building a sufficiently large user base.
These topics are part of an ongoing challenge, of how to get access to actual large-scale mobility
traces for research, without affiliation to a large tech or telecoms company. As discussed above,
actual location-based contact tracing apps need to be extremely careful about their data use andpurpose limitation of collection; also any current location traces would – for the moment – not be
representative of usual mobility patterns.
This brought us to the topic of resilience, which we talked about as a combination of information, preparedness, emergency response, (natural) disaster response, health, and community.
We thought about a stronger focus on resilience than on specific emergencies. From here it was aquick detour towards public society, open data, data sharing, and putting data in hands of users,
towards larger integration of location systems that can help with societal issues. We ended with
an open question on how we could change the current situation into actions towards sustainable
solutions and a more sustainable and liveable future.

5

Reflections on the online workshop mode

The worldwide lockdowns and travel restrictions had a direct impact on the conference and workshop in forms of location, timing, and work mode.
Overall, we can draw a positive conclusion, under the circumstances. We managed to holda good online workshop as the main concern to aim to keep the live workshop experience, withengaging live presentations by the authors, enough time for Q&A after each presentation, an
informal coffee break, and a discussion session, and no organisational or technical issues. Here, wewant to share some observations about the running of the workshop itself apart from the discussion
during the workshop; and from the overall conference participation.
Offering to stay online during the breaks turned out to be a great idea in our case, so that people
could stay and do something mimicking going up to the speakers after the sessions. The discussion
had much less participants, but we could have it much more in detail than usual; however thispart went rather informal. Overall, online mediated participation seems less energetic than a live
workshop, and we have to make more effort to keep engagement up. This may also reflect backto improve future live workshops.
7

Joint Statement on Contact Tracing: Date 19th April 2020
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OQg2dxPu-x-RZzETlpV3lFa259Nrpk1J/view
8
There is a different discussion on how well the radio functionality can actually measure actual contact throughderived distance as a proxy.

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The impact on travel seems to have made participation easier, but on the other hand, without
the actual conference experience, less participants may actually join, or only visit specific sessions.
We had a slightly lower number of participants than usual, which was a surprise to us, as we
expected more people to make use of the online participation who would normally not travel.
We saw this pattern also in other workshops and in main conference sessions, for example thedeveloper track. We also saw more session hopping in and out right during the workshop sessions
and presentations than usual, when it happens in the breaks or is due to people joining late.
Another thing we observe is that the non-presence at the physical location makes conference
participation harder, due to the time differences. We set a slot in the afternoon, which translated
to a start at 14:00 in Taiwan (GMT+8), 8:00 in central Europe (GMT+2) and 2:00 in EDT(GMT-4). This means that a full participation will incur a kind of daily jetlag for conference
participants.
The videoconferencing worked well without any hiccups, and was well set up with the WWW
volunteers. WWW used Zoom, which works quite okay and actually manages to show quite a lotof parallel video streams and has a few participant interaction features. The ongoing discussions
about the platform itself are out of scope here, but we hope that more options will become available
soon.
However, you do not have a general conference environment. Each session or workshop is its
own mini-videoconference or webinar. There is no common space of the actual conference. To
even switch sessions, you have to close the client and start it with a different URL and reconfirm
with name and password. This adds to the feeling of disconnect.
Ideally, and hopefully for future conferences, an online system would at least have an overview
of sessions to directly jump in, or in some way a stronger integration of the programme, ones own
schedule, and the actual sessions. A shared lobby or some other way to replicate social spaces
would be very welcome. It may even be possible to replicate in some way a 2D map of a virtual
conference venue.
So an important question is, how do we replicate the personal serendipitous interactions andmeetings with other participants in an online setting?
Experiences on participant behavior are starting to be shared. In one example,9 it is notedthat a majority only watched 1-5 presentations and only 14% watching more than 11. They
hypothesize that “it appears that attendees this year focused on a small number of topics close
to their research interests” and that the lack of travel may mean that participation may not betaken full-time and also easier collides with other activities. We share these observations; andwould add that many people may also come specifically for the networking and meeting, not justfor the paper sessions, reducing engagement.
The EDBT/ICDT conference organisers have shared their experience from the organiser viewof having to move a conference online on short notice: Bonifati et al. [2020]. They give detailed
considerations and advice on decisions, considerations and experiences, covering such topics oftimezones, synchronous vs. asynchronous, lengths, interaction modes, technical issues, and also
provide results of a participant survey.
9

The ASPLOS 2020 Online Conference Experience. James Larus, Luis Ceze, Karin Strauss. BLOG@CACM,
March 31, 2020
https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/243882-the-asplos-2020-online-conference-experience/

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We also found an extensive report on the ICLR online experience from a participant,10 which
discusses impacts on the interaction mode. We want to highlight it as it talks about the ICLRTown
virtual 2D platform that allowed a sort of situated place-based virtual experience. Details andscreenshots of this are in the lessons and experiences from the ICLR2020 organising committee,
including other interesting ways to rethink interaction as well.11
For now, we would much rather meet in person and “on location”, but we are glad that we
do have the online facilities available at scale for this phase, which will certainly result in better
tools, which may lead us to more sustainable ways of traveling and interacting at conferences.
Ultimately, this will also mean that we have to rethink workshop formats and look at additional
ways to maintain interactivity, apart from mere paper presentations.
We close with a remark we made right after the workshop: “It was an interesting experience tohave our whole workshop online-only and location-less. Direct contact and discussions are really
missing; but we had some informal chats in a virtual coffee break. How do we improve that social
interaction part? #locweb #thewebconf @TheWebConf”126

Conclusion and Future Directions

LocWeb 2020 had good contributions from many domains, such as access to open geodata, countryspecific music preferences, and segmentation of cities by activity clusters. We had inspiring discussions on the papers and more general topics, as discussed in this report.
The full online mode for the workshop was a new experience, where the paper presentation
sessions worked well and even further discussions were possible. Some issues may be ironed out
in the near future, which we would hope for physical workshops again. We are looking forward to
more inspiring location research arising from the current situation, and encourage a move towards
more sustainability and resilience in the work we do.

Acknowledgements
We thank the authors of submitted papers for their efforts, and all attendees of LocWeb2020
for making this an interesting and interactive workshop. We are specially grateful to the members of the program committee for their hard work in reviewing the contributions and providing
substantial feedback on a tight deadline:
Anastasios Noulas (New York University), Bart Thomee (Google), Bruno Martins (IST and
INESC-ID – Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon), Carsten Keßler (Aalborg University
Copenhagen), Clodoveu Davis (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais), Francisco J. Lopez-Pellicer(University of Zaragoza), Leonidas Anthopoulos (University of Applied Science (TEI) Larissa),
Lisette Espı́n-Noboa (GESIS – Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences, University of KoblenzLandau), Muhammad Murtaza Khan (University of Jeddah), Muhammad Usman Ilyas (Universityof Jeddah), Rainer Simon (AIT – Austrian Institute of Technology), Ross Purves (University of10https://www.theexclusive.org/2020/05/virtual-iclr.html
https://medium.com/@iclr_conf/gone-virtual-lessons-from-iclr2020-1743ce6164a3
12https://twitter.com/dirkahlers/status/1252565222516195333
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Zurich), Salem Alelyani (King Khalid University), Torsten Suel (New York University), Yana
Volkovich (Xandr).
Finally, we would like to thank the organizers of WWW2020 for hosting the workshop andproviding the online meeting facilities.

References
Dirk Ahlers, Erik Wilde, Rossano Schifanella, and Jalal S. Alowibdi. Report on the Ninth International Workshop on Location and the Web (LocWeb 2019). SIGIR Forum, 53(2):82–87, December 2019. ISSN 0163-5840. URL http://sigir.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/december/
p082.pdf.
Dirk Ahlers, Erik Wilde, Rossano Schifanella, and Jalal S. Alowibdi, editors. LocWeb 2020: Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Location and the Web, Companion Proceedingsof the Web Conference 2020, New York, NY, USA, 2020. ACM. ISBN 9781450370240. Held at
WWW2020.
Auriol Degbelo and Ang Sherpa. Open Geodata Reuse: Towards Natural Language Interfaces to
Web APIs. In Ahlers et al. [2020], pages 703–710. ISBN 9781450370240. doi: 10.1145/3366424.
3384363. Held at WWW2020.
Kevin Roitero, Ben Carterette, Rishabh Mehrotra, and Mounia Lalmas. Leveraging Behavioral
Heterogeneity Across Markets for Cross-Market Training of Recommender Systems. In Ahlers
et al. [2020], pages 694–702. ISBN 9781450370240. doi: 10.1145/3366424.3384362. Held at
WWW2020.
Daniela Opitz, Eduardo Graells-Garrido, and Ignacio Pérez-Messina. Toward Characterizing Cities
with Social Media Images Using Activity Recognition, Topic Modeling and Visualization. In
Ahlers et al. [2020], pages 688–693. ISBN 9781450370240. doi: 10.1145/3366424.3384361. Heldat WWW2020.
Angela Bonifati, Giovanna Guerrini, Carsten Lutz, Wim Martens, Lara Mazilu, Norman Paton,
Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles, Marc H. Scholl, and Yongluan Zhou. Holding a Conference Online
and Live due to COVID-19. https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.07668, 2020. arXiv.

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