Building upon the series of International "Web Observatories Workshops" (2013-2014) and the "Workshop on the Theory and Practice of Social Machines" (2013-2016), This workshop brings together participants associated with Web Observatory topics including: data sharing, re-use of data and applications; study of social machines; decentralisation of Web infrastructure and services; and emerging research challenges when these are combined with the Internet of Things (IoT).

This full-day workshop explores the challenges of interoperability and distributed analytics across the growing number of Web services, Web Observatories, and most recently, IoT devices. We will also discuss the pressing issues around the decentralisation of Web infrastructure and social machines, with a specific focus on the decentralisation of scholarly communications.

The goal of the workshop is to further advance the major research themes andpertaining to the development of Web Observatories, and explore the ongoing research challenges, which include architectures for distributed storage, protocols for (meta)data discovery, distributed querying, and analytics on large-scale Web data. For WOW17, this year's workshop includes two additional areas of research. Firstly, we will focus on the opportunities and challenges due to the emergence of IoT devices and datasets available via the Web, and how this will be integrated into the Web Observatory.

Secondly, we will focus on decentralisation, in particular for the development of architecture and interactions of digital scholarly communications as a social machine. It is critical that scholarly communication and knowledge dissemination are not controlled by overpowered or centralised actors. The academic publishing ecosystem should be considered an ongoing conversation between experts, policy makers, implementers, and the general public. The Web is increasingly being used to enable fair access to scholarly work, but bringing this to its full potential requires understanding of, and change in, a number of interrelated areas. Platforms for authoring and publishing research are only one part of a bigger picture, which also includes feedback and commentary, reputation and impact, searching and linking across projects and domains, and long-term archival of work. This part of the workshop intends to bring together practitioners and researchers from a variety of different backgrounds in order to articulate requirements and discuss interoperability of smaller, more domain-specific solutions.

The timing of this workshop coincides with a surge of interest around platforms, architecture and methods for data sharing and knowledge creation in emerging Internet of Things (IoT) on the Web. The data generated by these networks is well structured in contrast to the Web data (documents, tweets etc.). The emergence of the Internet of Things adds new challenges in this space, these include technical issues like volume and velocity of real-time streams of sensors, ethical concerns about privacy, access control and support for large-scale analytical queries and applications.

Web Observatories can support communities to interact, observe and share analysis over the Web and inspire more comprehensive solutions for these challenges. For example, for chronic disease management, trusted information retrieval of online medical resources, online interventions and building trusted online communities are critical challenges. Web Observatories enabled with data provenance, access control, risk assessment methods can facilitate multidisciplinary analysis across geographic boundaries.

Core to these challenges is understanding the requirements for observatories across different user groups, and orchestrating communication and interaction between business and scientific communities engaging in Web Observatory research. Questions need to be asked as to how we shall discover, acquire, construct and curate varied datasets in a way that is suitable for cross-platform use. Similarly, the discovery, construction and use of analytic and visualisation tools across platforms and disciplines presents significant challenges.

The workshop in the past has provided a platform for discussions which led to development of meta-data standards and search tools for the Web Observatories. These tools support researchers who engage with the global network of Web Observatories. Similarly, we aim for discussions to position Web Observatories as a global infrastructure to facilitate research studies related to the Web.

We also draw inspiration from the ongoing debate about the production of scholarly articles. We wish to explore how academic researchers can leverage the Web as a technical platform for academic publishing, using existing Web technologies and standards, as well as take advantage of contemporary cultural norms around interacting, sharing and linking through social media. Despite the potential of the Web for greater control over publishing formats and reach to wider (non-academic) audiences, paper-based constraints, and dependencies on centralised third-parties for demonstrating academic impact remain.