Yahoo! at WWW2009 in Madrid

Paella, papers and the Prince were all part of the 18th International World Wide Web conference (WWW2009), held in Madrid, Spain from April 20 to April 25. The 5-day event attracted 1,000 attendees from all over the world, including researchers, faculty and students from both industry and academia. Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft were among the top sponsors.

Yahoo! repeated its stellar technical presence, earning the honor of 14 out of 105 total accepted papers – the most from any single organization, and also picking up 2 Best Paper Award nominations. Researcher Ricardo Baeza-Yates was an invited speaker for a keynote and participated in a plenary panel on Web Science, together with Tim Berners-Lee. Yahoo! also held various tutorials, workshops and panels.

Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the Web, delivered the opening keynote address to kick off the conference. During his talk, titled "Twenty Years," he touched on the future and discussed topics such as open social networking and open linked data. He sees similarities in the way social networks currently behave, but this has started to change. Currently it suffers from the ‘Social Silo Problem’. Users often have accounts in several platforms like Facebook or MySpace. The platforms, however, are separated from each other like a field of silos. The challenge of the semantic Web community is to interconnect the silos via RDF, OWL, HTTP, and SPARQL. He then discussed linked data, a term he coined himself. The goal of linked data is to enable people to share structured data on the Web as easily as they can share documents and is important in social networks. He stressed that “we need data on the Web to work better together” in government, enterprise and science. For example, the answer to question like “how do you cure cancer” should be captured by organized data on the Web. Berners-Lee also believes that search optimization has a big place, as well as advertising science and how to efficiently monetize the Web. The move to mobile is also another one to watch.

Notable themes from the conference included social networks, Web science, cloud computing, the power of data, security, mobile Web access and the semantic Web. Although not an official topic of the conference, this was the first WWW conference where no one could deny the ubiquitous presence of Twitter. The #www2009 topic was getting multiple entries per second – so much so that one could essentially “follow” the conference just by keeping up with the tweets.

Beyond Twitter, social networks and their effects are still a major topic, as evidenced by the continuous flow of papers on trying to extract semantics from tag clouds, and the Googles and Yahoo!s of the world trying to use these tags to improve their search results (like Yahoo!’s TagExplorer).

One of the more interesting papers was “Mapping the World’s Photos” by Jon Kleinberg and his group at Cornell University. The paper investigated roughly 35 million geo-tagged photos available on flickr and showed an analysis based on text tags, image data, and geo-spatial data to reveal geographic and visual information about the world.

Baeza-Yates also reported some work on data in his keynote, including analyzing search queries by looking at the paths of different searches performed by users between the time they begin some search and the time they find what they are looking for. Yahoo! developer Ted Drake presented on BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) – Yahoo!’s innovative open search Web services platform. Attendees found it interesting that people can have access to a part of Yahoo!’s accumulated indexes to build their own search engines.

The Yahoo! booth served as a central demo point and social meeting location for all attendees. Yahoo! researchers attracted large crowds for their presentations on the latest projects such as Correlator, VideoTagGame and PhotoSearch.

One of the highlights of the conference this year was the presence of Spanish royalty. As a gesture of techie goodwill, the Prince and Princess of Asturias attended the inauguration ceremony on Wednesday, attracting a blaze of paparazzi and warranting heavy police presence, metal detectors at the entrance and even the Guardia Civil (Civil Guards of Spain). In his talk, the Prince expressed interest in the Web as a medium for connecting family and community.

Attendees felt that the conference was a success and a conduit for future research collaborations. “The world is becoming smaller and WWW2009 is just one example of this phenomenon,” said one conference-goer.