Recent controversies over access and processing of personal data have highlighted the significance of the sovereignty of individuals over their personal data and are leading to new paradigms for application development based on personal online datastores (pods). Emerging frameworks and ecosystems, such as SOLID and the one by Dataswyft, support the development of such decentralized applications which, when granted access by the individuals concerned, can access the data stored in pods to provide services to users in areas such as health and well-being, social networking, and collaborative authoring. However, this decentralization presents significant performance challenges, which is critical to fulfilling the potential of such applications. This workshop will serve as a platform to encourage the exploration of architecture, infrastructure, and policy necessary for implementing such systems.
The primary aim of this workshop is to foster innovative research in the field of decentralized web services, specifically focused on three key topics. First, we want to highlight the importance of exploring the societal implications of decentralization of personal data storage and the ways to improve data privacy, sovereignty, and regulation.
Second, we want to encourage researchers to take on algorithmic and performance challenges associated with decentralization, and to explore what could be gained by decentralizing applications and at what cost. Last, the workshop welcomes innovations in the infrastructure necessary for decentralization — overlay networks, peer-to-peer systems, and new ways of routing and information retrieval. This includes the development of new evaluation metrics and standards to measure the efficiency of such systems.
The workshop will serve as a platform for researchers to contribute the latest breakthroughs in this very important field. We invite original submissions on decentralized systems, including but not limited to the following topics:
- Algorithmic challenges in developing decentralized applications for search, information retrieval, recommendation, query processing, data federation, and machine learning.
- Decentralized architectures for LLM-based applications.
- Trustworthy personal data store infrastructures.
- Security, privacy, and sovereignty for sensitive personal data, e.g., medical data.
- Regulation required for supporting personal data storage ecosystems.
- Performance evaluation for decentralized systems and benchmarking frameworks.
- Routing, metadata, and query propagation in peer-to-peer systems
Submission Information
Submitted papers must follow the Web Conference guidelines for submissions (see https://www2024.thewebconf.org/calls/short-papers/).
Paper submissions must conform to the “double-blind” review policy. All papers will be peer-reviewed by experts in the field. Acceptance will be based on relevance to the workshop, scientific novelty, and technical quality.
Submission site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=thewebconf2024_workshops
Important dates
- Paper submission deadline: February 26, 2024
- Notification to authors: March 4, 2024
- Camera-ready deadline: March 11, 2024
- Workshop date: May 13, 2024