World Wide Web research investigated at annual conference in South Africa

Citation

van Brakel, P. (2007), "World Wide Web research investigated at annual conference in South Africa", The Electronic Library, Vol. 25 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/el.2007.26325eaa.001

World Wide Web research investigated at annual conference in South Africa

World Wide Web research investigated at annual conference in South Africa (www.zaw3.co.za)

The success of the international World Wide Web conferences prompted the invention of a similar and local series for South African researchers and web developers. Professor Pieter van Brakel consequently organised and chaired the 1st Annual Conference on World Wide Web Applications, held in 1999 in Johannesburg.

The first international WWW conference was held in 1994 at the web’s birthplace at CERN, Geneva and organised by Robert Cailliau, the person who wrote the first source code for a hypertext system for physicists, of what would eventually become today’s World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee, who is generally being seen as the father of the web and then also worked for CERN, was also speaking at the 1994 event. Later, the International WWW Conference Committee was established, with its primary aim to arrange regular international WWW conferences. Today this Committee is better known by its acronym IW3C2 (www.iw3c2.org/). Robert played a prominent part in IW3C2’s earlier work, especially to lay down standards and guidelines for future international conferences in this field. A large contingent of international speakers was invited to the first South African event, for example Robert Cailliau of CERN and David Raitt (Editor of The Electronic Library), to name but few.

From the first event in 1999 (www.zaw3.co.za) the overall aim of the South African conferences was to provide academics, researchers and web developers with an opportunity to describe and discuss novel internet, web and intranet applications and developments, and to exchange ideas on applying the web for teaching and research purposes. The outstanding success of this first conference necessitates the arrangement of a second, a third and further events in the years to come. For the first time in South Africa, academics and those from industry were brought together from the wide spectrum of human knowledge – with web applications as the common denominator. The uniqueness of this common theme of conferencing is that researchers from different disciplines – for example pure sciences and social sciences – more than often would share the same podium or present their research results within the same track.

Soon after its existence the conference organisers received an enquiry to host the Conference in another centre than Johannesburg. This heralded the start of a bidding system to provide other areas in the country the opportunity to host a web applications conference.

Another major development in the nine years of its existence is that it was endorsed as a Regional Conference by the above-mentioned international conference committee (IW3C2). The high standard of the peer-reviewed papers submitted annually was the driving force behind this decision. A regional conference is defined as a conference whose goals and mission are similar to that of the international conference series but is organized for a specific geographical audience. This definition can also apply to a conference that has a more limited attendee focus (e.g. specialist conferences) than that of the international conference series. Typical tracks that appear in the annual programmes were online learning, web-enabled business, e-government, cyberlaw, new web technologies, web development, the web and society, web-based research methodologies, and more.

Since 2003 poster sessions were also introduced. More than 30 topics were covered by the posters submitted in 2003, and especially young researchers and post-graduate students used lunch and coffee breaks to test their ideas, expose research methodologies and share provisional findings with the other delegates. Awarding a price for the best poster has become an annual highlight of the Conference.

The nine years of conferencing created the opportunity for about 600 authors to present their research to an international audience. These papers are published permanently in www.zaw3.co.za. During the last couple of years the publication of the proceedings was preceded by a peer-review process, thus ensuring the high quality of the annual proceedings.

The first week of September each year is set aside for ZA-WWW, as the conference is being labelled to distinguish it from the international counterpart. The 2007 event took place from 4-7 September in Johannesburg. Bidding is still open for next year’s, the tenth.

Thus it is with pleasure that I write this short introduction to acknowledge that once again a few of the best and most interesting papers presented at the recent World Wide Web conference have been specially re-written for this mini-special issue of The Electronic Library. The papers selected not only show the scope and breadth of research being undertaken on the World Wide Web, but perhaps more importantly they also demonstrate the that South African ideas and activities play no small role in the development and use of the web. To this end, Butler discusses the growing phenomenon of phishing and how we should be protecting ourselves; in the same vein Etsebeth discusses malware and cyber risk, while Seymour and Naasden look at the developing world perspective on web abuse. Finally, for something different, Yates shows how the web can be used as a martial arts training resource. I hope you enjoy our South African contributions!

Pieter van BrakelConference Chair, Cape Town, South Africa