The 16th International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS 2022) took place from the 17th to the 20th of May 2022. The conference was held as a live, in-person event in Barcelona, Spain. RCIS aims to bring together scientists, researchers, engineers, and practitioners from a wide range of information science fields and to provide opportunities for knowledge sharing and dissemination. The special theme of RCIS 2022 was "Ethics and Trustworthiness in Information Science", since it is crucial for information systems to consider ethical issues when critical decision making is needed and trust as people have become more and more dependent on the information delivered for such systems.
The workshops were held on May 17th and the Research Projects Track took place on the 19th. Regarding the workshops, in this edition of the RCIS conference, for the first time we received proposals for workshops to be held in conjunction with the main conference. After a selection period, three workshops were accepted based on their quality, and potential to attract participants. The aim of the workshops was to promote the exchange, cross-fertilization, and dissemination of new ideas among the members of the RCIS community, both researchers and practitioners. Also, the workshops kept in mind the special theme of the conference. The workshops of RCIS 2022 were the following:
• QUAMES: 3rd International Workshop on Quality and Measurement of Software Model-Driven Development (organized by Beatriz Marin, Giovanni Giachetti and Estefania Serral).
In a Model-Driven Development (MDD) context, quality of conceptual models is of paramount importance since it directly influences the quality of the final software systems. Therefore, techniques are necessary to evaluate the conceptual models and predict relevant characteristics of the software products that will be generated. Furthermore, the management of MDD projects has to be adapted to take into account that programming effort is being replaced by a modelling effort at an earlier stage. Thus, measurement of models is necessary to properly support the estimation of costs and management of MDD projects. The main goal of QUAMES was to present methods, procedures, techniques, and tools that enable the measurement and the evaluation of the quality of conceptual models that can be used in MDD environments.
• CPSS4Sus: 1st International Workshop on Cyber-Physical Social Systems for Sustainability: Challenges and Opportunities (organized by Isabel Sofia Brito, Nelly Condori-Fernandez and Letícia Duboc). The world is confronting numerous challenges that should be dealt with in the near future, such as tackling climate change and environmental degradation, producing affordable and clean energy, eliminating poverty, and ensuring education, health and social protection to all. Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) can play a relevant role to address social, environmental, economic and governance sustainability. Regarding social sustainability, it is imperative to identify early development approaches for CPS systems that promote strong and fair communities, such as social and health equity, community development, human rights and social justice. These human and social characteristics and interaction that are brought into CPS shift it to Cyber-Physical Social Systems (CPSS), being the target of this workshop.
• ESEA4RCIS: 1st Workshop on Ethical, Social and Environmental Accounting of Conferences: the case of RCIS 2022 (organized by Sergio España, Vijanti Ramautar and Quang Tan Le). ESEA4RCIS was a community-based, participatory workshop, where instead of asking for papers submissions, the idea was to do collaborative research and co-author a paper.
In the workshop, Information Science researchers and practitioners (typically, but not exclusively members of the RCIS community) jointly assessed the performance of RCIS 2022 on ethical, social and environmental topics. Such practice is referred to as ethical, social and environmental accounting (ESEA), and the result is often a sustainability report. During the workshop, all participants jointly (i) reflected on the ethical, social and environmental topics that are relevant for our community, (ii) discussed preliminary results, (iii) collected additional data, (iv) processed the data to compute indicators, (v) reflected on the outcomes, and (vi) started writing a paper to report on the experience and results. The most important achievement was the process of obtaining results and the community-building effort of jointly tackling the subsequent improvement actions. The final aim was to contribute to a more ethical, more socially inclusive, and environmentally friendly scientific community.
In addition, the Research Projects Track was devoted to presenting future or ongoing research projects (e.g., H2020 or ERC projects, national grants) in the context of Information Science. The aim of this track was to provide an opportunity for presenters to get feedback before submitting a research project or to disseminate the intermediate results of their projects, and for participants to get an updated view of innovative ongoing research while getting in touch with potential research partners.
We would like to thank all the Chairs of the Workshops and the Research Projects Track, as well as their Program Committees, for their attentiveness in selecting the papers and ensuring their high scientific quality. RCIS 2022 General Chair, Organizing Chair, Program Chairs, and Publicity Chairs also contributed to organizing the Workshops and the Research Projects Track.