Abstract: The recent media focus on Smart City services, particularly ride sharing, that provide ordinary users with the ability to advertise their resources has highlighted society’s need for transparent and accountable systems. Current systems offer little transparency behind their processes that claim to provide accountability to and for their users. To address such a concern, some applications provide a static, textual description of the automated algorithms used, with a view to promote transparency. However, this is not sufficient to inform users exactly how information is derived. These descriptions can be enhanced by explaining the actual execution of the algorithm, the data it operated on, and the parameters it was configured with. Such descriptions about a system’s execution and its information flow can be expressed using PROV, a standardised provenance data model. However, given its generic and domain-agnostic nature, PROV only provides limited information about the relationship between provenance elements. Combined with semantic information, a PROV instance becomes a rich resource, which can be exploited to provide users with understandable accounts of automated processes, thereby promoting transparency and accountability. Thus, this paper contributes, a vocabulary for Smart City resource sharing applications, an architecture for accountable systems, and a set of use cases that demonstrate and quantify how the semantics enrich an account in a ride share scenario.

Citation: Heather Packer, Dimitris Diochnos, Michael Rovatsos, Ya’akov Gal, Luc Moreau, Semantics and Provenance for Accountable Smart City Applications, The Role of Semantics in Smart Cities, Semantic Web Journal special issue, 2014.

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Social computing broadly refers to computing-supported approaches that facilitate interactions among people and organizations. Social computing has emerged as an exciting multidisciplinary area of research, driven by the wealth of easily available information and the success of online social networks and social media. Social computing applications are characterized by high interactivity among users, user-generated content, and in cases such as Wikipedia, more open governance structures. Much of the recent excitement in social computing is driven by data analytics and business models. What is still lacking, however, is a deeper conceptual understanding of social computing — e.g., relating to its conceptual bases, information and abstractions, design principles, and platforms. This event invites papers that take an explicitly multiagent perspective in addressing these gaps and do so in thought-provoking ways.

The First International Workshop on Multiagent Foundations of Social Computing is Co-located with AAMAS 2014

Important Dates

• Submission: January 22, 2014
• Notification: February 19, 2014
• Camera-ready due: March 5, 2014