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Web of Things 2010 (WoT 2010): Call for Papers

First International Workshop on the Web of Things (WoT 2010)

In conjunction with the 8th IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom 2010), Mannheim, Germany

Web site: http://www.webofthings.com/wot/2010

Paper submission deadline: October 18, 2009 November 15, 2009 (Extended)
Notification of acceptance: December 21, 2009
Camera-ready papers due: January 29, 2010
Workshop Date: March 29 or April 2, 2010

The world of embedded devices has experienced radical changes over the past few years as real-world objects can now easily connect to the Internet. This convergence of physical computing devices (wireless sensor networks, mobile phones, embedded computers, etc.) and the Internet provides new design opportunities and challenges. The Internet of Things has mainly focused on establishing connectivity in a variety of challenging and constrained networking environments, and the next logical step in the evolution in pervasive computing builds on top of network connectivity by focusing on the application layer: how to develop ubiquitous computing applications on top of heterogeneous devices? The Web of Things is the vision that brings embedded devices into the Web by using Web standards as application protocol to interact with things. This workshop aims at bringing together the pervasive computing and Web communities to explore the possibilities for using the core principles and technologies of modern Web architecture (e.g., HTTP, REST, Atom, JSON) for seamless integration of things into the Web and developing applications on top of web-enabled devices (physical mashups). Research contributions are solicited in the following areas:

• Web-based interaction patters for embedded devices (streaming, eventing, etc.)
  
• Applications, deployments, and evaluation of Web of things systems
  
• Human-things interaction models and paradigms (mobile interfaces, etc.)
  
• User-oriented, context-aware discovery and dynamic search for the real world
  
• Web composition and macro-programming models (e.g. mashups)
  
• Semantic technologies for description of devices and services
  
• Optimization methods for embedded Web servers and applications
  
• Security, access control, and physical sharing of physical things on the Web

Since this workshop is the first in this area, the goal is to develop a community in this area and provide an interactive forum for researchers to learn and discuss about existing efforts to enable cross-fertilization. Hence, we expect all attendees to read all workshop papers in advance and to prepare questions for each. Presentations shall specifically highlight and address similarities and differences with other accepted papers. This will help to provide a forum to foster future collaboration, beyond the mere presentation of research results. In order to ensure a high-quality technical session, submissions must cover one of the topics above and should not exceed six (6) IEEE conference format pages. Research papers must be original prior unpublished work and not under review elsewhere as they will be published on the IEEE Digital Library. All submissions will be peer-reviewed and selected based on their originality, merit, and relevance to the workshop. Submission requires at least one author to fully register for PerCom 2010 and to present the paper on-site.

Organizers:

• Dominique Guinard, ETH Zurich and SAP Research Zurich
• Erik Wilde, School of Information, UC Berkeley
• Vlad Trifa, ETH Zurich and SAP Research Zurich

Program Committee:

• Gregor Broll, DOCOMO Communications, Germany
• Adam Dunkels, SICS, Sweden
• Martin Gaedke, University of Chemnitz, Germany
• Stamatis Karnouskos, SAP Research, Germany
• Gerd Kortuem, University of Lancaster, UK
• Marc Langheinrich, University of Lugano, Switzerland
• Thomas Luckenbach, Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS, Germany
• Friedemann Mattern, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
• Alexandros Marinos, University of Surrey, UK
• Rene Mayrhofer, University of Vienna, Austria
• Tatsuo Nakajima, Waseda University, Japan
• Benedikt Ostermaier, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
• Cesare Pautasso, University of Lugano, Switzerland
• Dave Raggett, W3C, USA
• Michael Smith, W3C, Japan
• Vlad Stirbu, NOKIA, Finland
• Inaki Vazquez, University of Deusto, Spain
• Agnes Voisard, Fraunhofer ISST, Germany

(( Update 10/8: Extended paper submission deadline from 10/18 to 11/15. ))

WEWST 2009: Call for Papers

4th Workshop on Emerging Web Services Technology (WEWST 2009)

In conjunction with the 2009 European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS 2009)

November 9, 2009, Eindhoven (The Netherlands)

The Workshop on Emerging Web Service Technology (WEWST) is the premier workshop for academic and industrial communities to discuss innovative ideas and research contributions advancing the state-of-the-art in Web service technologies. Although the advantages of Web services to allow businesses to interact with each other while maintaining a loose coupling are well known, there are still many challenges to be solved in this important field of research. The wide variety of tools, techniques, and technological solutions presented in WEWST share one common feature: they suggest new directions for Web service research by introducing new and sometime controversial ideas into the field. The workshop allows participants to gain new insights and to start collaborations by discussing how their own work can be used in related but different areas.

Important Dates

• Paper submission: September 1, 2009
• Acceptance notification: October 4, 2009
• Camera-ready papers: October 18, 2009
• Workshop: November 9, 2009

Topics

The WEWST 2009 program committee seeks original, high quality papers related to emerging aspects of Web services, including but not limited to the following topics.

• Self-organizing SOA
• Dynamic service discovery
• Automated service composition
• Dynamic service binding
• Service evolution
• Coordination and business transactions
• Embedded devices and sensors as services
• Streaming services
• Event-driven architectures
• Middleware for SOA
• SLA enforcement
• Reputation mechanisms
• Technologies for social collaborations and service markets

Format and Proceedings

The workshop features regular papers of max. 8 pages and short papers of max. 4 pages. The workshop proceedings will be published as an ICPS volume by the ACM, available in the ACM digital library. Papers must be prepared according to ACM's ICPS format; the LaTeX and Word template including the ICPS volume details are provided on the WEWST web page.

Submission

Please use the online submission system: http://www.easychair.org/conferences?conf=wewst2009.

Program Chairs

• Walter Binder, University of Lugano, Switzerland
• Erik Wilde, UC Berkeley, USA

Program Committee (to be completed)

• Luciano Baresi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
• Ciarán Bryce, INRIA Rennes, France
• Christoph Bussler, Merced Systems, USA
• Emanuele Della Valle, CEFRIEL, Italy
• Elisabetta Di Nitto, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
• Peter Dolog, Aalborg University, Denmark
• Schahram Dustdar, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
• Rik Eshuis, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
• Boi Faltings, EPFL, Switzerland
• Luis Ferreira Pires, University of Twente, The Netherlands
• Martin Gaedke, Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany
• Daniela Grigori, University of Versailles, France
• Paul Groth, University of Southern California, USA
• Thomas Gschwind, IBM Zurich Research Lab, Switzerland
• Yanbo Han, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
• Jörg Hoffmann, SAP Research, Germany
• Radu Jurca, Google Inc., Switzerland
• Bernd Krämer, FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany
• Philipp Leitner, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
• David Lowe, University of Technology, Sydney
• Claus Pahl, Dublin City University, Ireland
• Cesare Pautasso, University of Lugano, Switzerland
• Heiko Schuldt, University of Basel, Switzerland
• Niranjan Suri, Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, USA
• Stefan Tai, University of Karlsruhe, Germany
• Alex Villazón, University of Lugano, Switzerland
• Wolfram Wöß, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
• Wolf Zimmermann, University of Halle, Germany

Contact

For more information and inquiries about the workshop, please contact Walter Binder (walter.binder@unisi.ch).

OneSpace 2009: Call for Papers

2nd International Workshop on Blending Physical and Digital Spaces on the Internet (OneSpace2009)

In conjunction with the Future Internet Symposium 2009 (FIS2009)

September 1, 2009, Berlin (Germany)

++ Deadline for submission: Aug 07, 2009 ++
++ Full papers and position papers invited ++

The Second International Workshop on Blending Physical and Digital Spaces on the Internet (OneSpace2009) will be held in conjunction with the Future Internet Symposium 2009 (FIS2009) in Berlin on 1 September 2009.

We welcome technical papers and shorter position papers addressing the identification and study of the complex relationship of the Internet with space, place, geography and distance, whether physical or virtual. Technologies as well as novel ideas, experiments, and insights originating from multi-disciplinary viewpoints, including internet, computer and GI sciences, humanities, digital media, and social sciences are welcome.

Important dates

• Submission deadline: Aug 07, 2009
• Acceptance Notification: Aug 17, 2009
• Camera-ready paper: Aug 24, 2009
• Workshop date: Sep 01, 2009

Description

OneSpace proposes to contribute to the cross-domain exploration of how Internet technologies and spatial notions co-exist and evolve.

One of the most important effects of the Internet and of the Web has been to relax spatial and temporal constraints on human activities – the so called "space-time collapse" – allowing fast global access to information as well as to physical resources and services. Recently this movement accelerated, due to the success of mobile devices such as the iPhone allowing almost ubiquitous mobile access to the Internet, to the generalisation of digital social interaction through platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, to the virtual environments provided on gaming platforms enabled by the Internet, instant communication supported by popular VOIP providers such as Skype, and an emerging web of things. Many now spend as much time involved in digital spaces over the Internet than in "real" ones, and continuously update the digital with elements of their physical life in "lifestreaming" process. Moreover reality itself is augmented by information collected from the Internet, through the increasing availability of GPS devices that ease location based search, or through "magic-lense" based applications that add information to recognized physical elements, or reconstruct them in digital space from various media collected on the Web.

While allowing users to experience a profound modification of their interaction space, the Internet has familiarised us with new topologies – alongside the prominent hyperlinked topology exhibited by the Web, Deleuze and Guattaris's "rhizome", which has become the model of many new forms of organization – leading to the creation of new virtual spaces and communities. Indeed, P2P networks of devices create semi-private sharing environments; (micro-) blogging and lifestreaming induces new notions of spatiotemporal as well as social proximity, while sensor and controller networks enable ubiquitous access, sensing and interaction with the real world. Furthermore, Virtual globes and GIS technologies continue to improve and to blur the boundaries between spatial representation and perception by providing mashup opportunities, photorealistic visual navigation, and three-dimensional representations.

Many agree with what came to be known as Waldo Tobler’s first law of Geography: "Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." The Internet, by establishing new connections between geographically distant entities cannot but provide us with a radically new image of Space and Time that this workshop is aiming to explore in an interdisciplinary way. OneSpace proposes to take the measure of the aforementioned developments and their repercussion as well as to identify trends and directions for a new future blended Internet.

Topics of Interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Representation of physical/virtual spaces and topologies
• Spatiotemporal knowledge representation (ontologies and reasoning)
• The 3D and 4D Web
• Location-based services
• The Web of sensors
• New-generation Web mapping frameworks and applications
• Mobility and ubiquity
• Application of Linked Data for physical and digital spaces
• Digital Sense of Place and Presence
• Visibility and privacy in the Internet of people and things

Submissions

The following types of contributions are welcome:

• Position papers, max. 4 pages
• Technical papers, 4-10 pages

Workshop Organizers

• Vlad Tanasescu - The University of Edinburgh, UK (contact)
• Pierre Grenon – The Open University, UK
• Arno Scharl - MODUL University Vienna, Austria
• Erik Wilde - UC Berkeley, California, USA

Program Committee

(provisional, please check the website for updates)

• Susanne Boll - University of Oldenburg, Germany
• Catherine Dolbear - Sharp Laboratories of Europe, UK
• Stefan Dietze - The Open University, UK
• Hans W. Guesgen - Massey University, New Zealand
• Puneet Kishor - University of Wisconsin, USA
• Vinny Reynolds - National University of Ireland
• Dumitru Roman - STI Innsbruck, Austria
• Mike Worboys - University of Maine, USA

Further information

Updated information about the workshop can be found on the workshop website: http://onespace.ace.ed.ac.uk/2009/. For further information, please send email to
onespace2009@easychair.org.

LocWeb 2010?

after two successful and interesting Location and the Web (LocWeb) workshops (LocWeb 2008 at WWW2008 and LocWeb 2009 at CHI 2009), the obvious question to ask is: should there be a LocWeb 2010? i am of course in favor of it, because the ongoing development in the sector of mobile web access will make location increasingly important on the web, and applications will increasingly need to not only support location, but also to share location, so that location has to emerge from the silos of individual applications.

another exciting development is that we're in the process of establishing a W3C incubator group around the theme of location and the web (nothing is official yet, though), and the workshop could be a good place to summarize the findings, and to solicit opinions about how to proceed. but before jumping to any conclusions about why a 2010 workshop would be a good idea, i am wondering how others think about this... would you be in favor of such a workshop, submitting to it and attending? or maybe you would even be willing to serve on the PC or as an organizer? and what would be a good place to hold such a workshop? probably again co-located with a conference, but which one? returning to WWW or possibly this time targeting a more geo-focused conference? i am really interested in opinions from everybody interested in the general topic of how to make the web location-aware, so please submit your comments about LocWeb 2010!

Web of Things 2010 Workshop

we were just informed that our Web of Things 2010 proposal at the Eighth Annual IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications has been accepted, which means that there will be a WoT2010 workshop at PerCom 2010 in march 2010. this is great news for us, and i am looking forward to organizing this workshop with dominique guinard and vlad trifa from ETH zurich's distributed systems group.

from my point of view, this workshop nicely complements the Location and the Web (LocWeb) workshops organized in 2008 and 2009. however, i guess we will face the exact same challenges: my vision for the LocWeb workshops was to not focus on location-enabled application that happen to have a web interface, but to really focus on the larger, systemic issues of location on the web; to look at what it takes to location-enable the web, and thus to look beyond single applications. this did not work as well as i hoped, we still had a lot of submissions about location-enabled applications on the web, but that was also good, because it provided a nice forum for presenting various approaches of how to use and expose location on the web.

for WoT, the challenge will be the same: the goal is to mainly attract submissions that look beyond the single application, and that look at systemic issues of making the web a better place for things. my guess is that we again will get the majority of submissions about projects that deal with real-world things, and somehow expose these on the web. and again, it will not be a problem, because that will allow us to provide a nice overview of the current landscape of these applications.

since i am currently at ICWE 2009, i couldn't help but notice the similarity to what's going on here: even though it's called Web Engineering, the majority of the conference is actually about Web Application Engineering, or more specifically Model-Driven Web Application Engineering. but even though this is more about engineering for the web (or even software engineering for the web) and not as much about engineering the web as i would lke it to be, it still is a great forum to see the ongoing developments in how apps for the web can be created. and regardless of personal preferences, the thing that matters most is that there are forums where people can meet and discuss the future of the web, and not only that of web apps.

Information Engineering

i often refer to myself half-jokingly as a web plumber, because that is what describes many of the things i am thinking about pretty accurately. on the other hand, it does not sound like a respectable thing to do as an academic, and it also has lost a bit of appeal since joe the plumber has tarnished the plumbing profession.

more generally, i am often asking myself what i am interested in in comparison to well-established academic fields with large departments associated with their names, most importantly computer science. it occurred to me that there seem to be two axes to this, one being computer and information, and the other being science and engineering. and since one of my main interests is what i usually refer to as web architecture, let's throw in some web and some architecture for good measure. so what do we end up with?

	Computer	Information	Web
Science	Computer Science	Information Science	Web Science
Engineering	Computer Engineering	Information Engineering	Web Engineering
Architecture	Computer Architecture	Information Architecture	Web Architecture

out of these combinations, computer science (the general field), information science (often associated with the library context), computer engineering (building computer systems), web engineering (building web-facing applications), computer architecture (design considerations for building computer systems), and maybe web architecture (how the web is designed as a system) may have some reasonably well-defined boundaries and are more or less well-established fields. this leaves web science, information engineering, and information architecture as not-so-well-defined fields.

• web science: the recently started Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) has captured this term, but given it an extremely broad scope (our students half-jokingly nominated the graphical depiction of web science as the worst venn diagram ever). from most discussions i have heard so far, it seems that almost everything is included in the scope of web science, which makes its existence as a well-defined field problematic.
• information engineering: there is little to find about this term. it seems it was used as a name for some very specific method in software engineering, and for little else. i am intrigued by this term, because it is not exclusively focusing on the web, but still focuses on engineering as a term describing constraint-based design.
• information architecture: to me, it appears that this field has many different competing definitions. in many cases, my issues with these definitions is that they primarily focus on the surface of how to define and design information structures and interfaces, and that there is little focus on how this information can be most easily shared, transmitted, or transformed.

from this little survey, it appears that the term information engineering is up for grabs. and i really like it, because it shifts the focus away from the web (which should just be one well-established system for providing and consuming loosely coupled services), and focuses on the central issue of the services we look at: supporting cooperation in information-centric scenarios. i also really like the term engineering, because it is less theoretical than science, and less vague than architecture. for me, the most important facet of engineering is that it always describes design based on constraints, and not in some idealized vacuum.

so from now on i'll try to promote the term information engineering for a number of the things i am doing. it has a reasonably safe distance to anything with computer in it and thus allows to simply view computers as tools for getting information from producers to consumers. the engineering part makes clear that this is done in a way which clearly focuses on constraint-based design considerations and decisions. as a grand plan, i would hope to see information engineering to emerge as a discipline separate from computer science, one which looks at computers and computer networks as tools, focuses on information-centric scenarios, and is mainly concerned with the question of how to design and implement information-centric systems that work well in constrained environments.

REST and RDF Granularity

bob ducharme's recent post about Semantic web technology and humanities research and our recent WWW2009 tutorial talking about the route from SOA to REST (to be repeated in june at ICWE 2009) made me think about the fundamental tension between RDF-based semantic web approaches, and RESTful architectures.

it seems to me that the biggest problem of RESTful RDF is the lack of a well-defined notion of a document. one of the strengths of RDF is that you harvest triples from wherever you find them, take the graph, compute the closure of this graph under whatever schemas or ontologies you might have, and then process the resulting graph. on the semantic level this means you take whatever you can get as data, whatever you can get as reasoning mechanisms, and extend the data using inference. it is this general model of raw data and derived information that makes RDF so powerful.

the price you pay, however, is the loss of provenance and document boundaries. of course this can be overlaid using various mechanisms, but it is not a fundamental part of the RDF model, and it's easy to forget it or get it wrong.

this leads to problems when it comes to the rather document-centric model of REST, which talks about representations that need to be exchanged for enabling interactions. how do you use RDF, when the data you're working with for your application purpose is a mix of retrieved RDF and inferred information?

XML, on the other hand, has a rather static idea of a document. well, that's actually not entirely true, because XSD introduced the concept of the Post-Schema Validation Infoset (PSVI), which in a way is the same mix of source data (the original XML document) and inferred data (validation information, type annotations, and default values). type annotations can be regarded as a bonus that can make data processing much more robust and reliable. ironically, default values, however, are widely frowned upon in XSD best practices, because they tightly bind document processing to document validation, and that is largely perceived to be a Bad Idea.

and this is where it gets interesting: XML's very idea is that of enabling applications to GET XML and blindly process it by simply processing well-formed markup. RDF, on the other hand, is more rooted in the idea that the RDF you find blends into an existing set of other triples and schemas or ontologies. this latter model makes working with RDF more seamless and more convenient in an RDF-only world, because essentially, applications can ignore the fact that data had different origins, and they can work on what sometimes has been referred to as the giant global graph. it seems to me that this replicates the pattern of trying to hide distribution that underlies many of the middleware-inspired approaches to web services in a rather interesting way.

XML, on the other hand, makes it almost impossible to get this seamless view of the world, and requires applications to handle one XML document at a time, often steered by overlaid mechanisms such as XInclude at a very low level, or by following hyperlinks when it comes to RESTful data formats. what this means is that XML and this RESTful picture force you to work on the document level, and this also forces developers to explicitly deal with distribution, which means dealing with failures at the network or representation level.

so it seems as if RDF's virtues, the ability to transcend document boundaries and to seamlessly include data from all kinds of sources, become problematic when moving towards RESTful services, where coarse granularity and well-defined document concepts are an essential part of the architectural style.

this does not imply that RDF cannot be used for RESTful services and document-oriented scenarios; it simply means that XML makes it more natural (or you might say: less avoidable) for developers to deal with strict document boundaries, whereas in RDF, this requires special attention. i am really curious to find out whether somebody already came up with a set of best practices and design guidelines for building RESTful RDF applications, and this becomes particularly interesting when looking at issues such as SPARQL (and its basic model of accessing an RDF triple store through just one URI) and updates of RDF data.

it seems to me that the road towards a RESTful semantic web (if we take the RDF-centric view of that concept) is still not fully clear, and i am really curious to explore in more depth the fundamental tension between REST's things are diverse and distributed and you have to deal with it, and RDF's in the end it's all just triples world views.

Sitemap Names

in our recent investigation of web site metadata, one finding was that only 6.3% of all sites were publishing a sitemap (looking at the web's most popular 100'000 domains). strictly speaking, this is correct, but since sitemaps may exist without being advertised in a robots.txt, this is the lower boundary of the actual sitemaps available on the web.

one simple way to test this hypothesis would be to just test for sitemaps, if there are popular names for sitemap documents. as a first step, i decided to run brief statistics on our dataset. we found that out of our 100'000 domains, 44'832 were serving robots.txt files, and of those 44'832 files, 6'268 pointed to sitemap files. since one robots.txt can point to more than one sitemap file, we ended up with finding the names of 10'029 sitemaps. (read our technical report for more details about this study.)

stripping the prefixes and only looking at the path of the sitemap URIs, this dataset produced the following list of the 10 most popular sitemap URI paths:

1. 25.07%: /sitemap.xml
2. 8.38%: /feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated
3. 6.75%: /sitemap.xml.gz
4. 3.37%: /sitemap_index.xml
5. 1.91%: /s2/sitemaps/profiles-sitemap.xml
6. 1.48%: /sitemap.php
7. 1.24%: /sitemap_index.xml.gz
8. 1.05%: /vb/sitemap_index.xml.gz
9. 0.66%: /sitemapindex.xml
10. 0.45%: /sitemap.gz

so it does look as if /sitemaps.xml would be a good candidate to look for as a general strategy. it will actually be interesting to look at how many sites that do not advertise a sitemap in their robots.txt file still have one. that's something i have to try out next, going through all 100'000 domains again and ping each site for the most popular sitemap files names.

Web vs. Web Architecture

when we recently pitched principles of web architecture and more specifically feed-oriented technologies for projects around sensor data, we also got some negative feedback. surprisingly, it was not only feedback along the well-known web technologies are not appropriate to do the heavy lifting of serious enterprise-level IT stereotype (which always dazzles me as a generic answer when you haven't looked at the requirements yet), but there also was another recurring theme.

this other theme was that web technologies are dangerous because they will allow terrorists to monitor sensor data and do bad things. this one completely dumbfounded me; it assumes that less accessible technologies are more secure, following the well-known security through obscurity pattern. i don't think that some application-specific WSDL will necessarily stop any terrorist from accessing information or a service, and i certainly hope that critical sensor data resources are protected by better security measures than WSDL's interoperability problems.

while this specific argument is probably easy to counter in a discussion, it made me realize how many people still confound web architecture with the web. web architecture not only allows you to understand how the web works; it also allows you to study why it works, and what differences there are between the web and more traditional approaches to building large-scale information systems.

web architecture as an architectural approach simply informs the design of an IT architecture and is probably a good thing to take into consideration when designing IT architectures for information systems requiring massive scalability and loose coupling. this has not necessarily anything to do with making data or services openly available on the web, and might not even have anything to do with making them available on the web at all. it is all about designing and building loosely coupled systems which allow data and services to be used and recombined in creative, unforeseen, and flexible ways.

Web Site Metadata

after crawling for sitemaps for a while and then accessing and analyzing them, we just came up with a first report on our results. we started with the web's top 100'000 domains (provided by alexa), crawled these for robots.txt files, analyzed these files, and looked for references to sitemaps.

for the sitemaps, we retrieved all the sitemap files and analyzed their structure (a site can have multiple sitemap files) and the number of URIs in them. our next step (which we are currently working on) will be to start analyzing the URIs and see whether we can distill a site's navigational structure from the sitemap URIs.

as a first set of intermediary results, the analysis of the robots.txt and sitemaps crawl have been published an as ISchool Technical Report:

Erik Wilde and Anuradha Roy, Web Site Metadata, UCB ISchool Report 2009-028, School of Information, UC Berkeley, February 2009.

Abstract: The currently established formats for how a Web site can publish metadata about a site's pages, the robots.txt file and sitemaps, focus on how to provide information to crawlers about where to not go and where to go on a site. This is sufficient as input for crawlers, but does not allow Web sites to publish richer metadata about their site's structure, such as the navigational structure. This paper looks at the availability of Web site metadata on today's Web in terms of available information resources and quantitative aspects of their contents. Such an analysis of the available Web site metadata not only makes it easier to understand what data is available today; it also serves as the foundation for investigating what kind of information retrieval processes could be driven by that data, and what additional data could be provided by Web sites if they had richer data formats to publish metadata.