By its very nature, the Web has a rich relation to time. Emerging and disappearing unpredictably from any part of the planet, re ecting the world, sometimes nearly in real time, full of assertions about the past as well as the future, made at any time of a complex mix of old and new content items linked together, the Web represents a challenging object for temporal-centric research. The di culty to get appropriate material for this research (time series corpora, large scale archives etc.), adds to the di culty of exploring the Web's temporal dimension.
Yet, the bene ts for research are huge. Trend analysis, emergence of concepts or ideas, representation of the past and the future, network dynamic, shaping and decay of communities, and in general, any Web research topic where a dynamic understanding is superior to a static view, requires integration of the time dimension. For this, establishing solid methods and approaches for temporal Web analytics is a necessity.
Meanwhile, marking the World Wide Web's 20th and the Internet Archive's 15th anniversary in 2011, we now see emerging large collections of digitally-born content to support this research. These archives not only capture the history of digitally-born content but also re ect the zeitgeist of di erent time periods over more than a decade. These data are a potential goldmine for temporal Web analytics at Web scale.
This, we think, is the perfect timing to establish a dedicated workshop series, the Temporal Web Analytic Workshop (TWAW), which took place for the rst time this year, in conjunction with the World Wide Web conference (www2011) in Hyderabad (India).
The objective of this workshop was to provide a venue for researchers of all Web-related domains (IE/IR, Web mining etc.) where the temporal dimension opens up an entirely new range of challenges and possibilities. The workshop's ambition was to help shaping and establishing a community of interest on the research challenges and possibilities resulting from the introduction of the time dimension in Web analysis. Being the rst workshop of this kind, it marked the kick-o of an annual workshop series about this novel and emerging topic.
TWAW 2011 was jointly organized by Yahoo! Research (Barcelona, Spain), Internet Memory Foundation (Paris, France), the Max-Planck-Institut fur Informatik (Saarbrucken, Germany), and supported by the 7th Framework IST programme of the European Union through the focused research project (STREP) on Longitudinal Analytics of Web Archive data (LAWA) under contract no. 258105.