Important Dates

Submissions due: Jan. 13, 2026 (23:59 Anywhere on Earth (AoE) time zone)
Notification of Acceptance: Jan. 20, 2026
Camera-ready version due: Feb. 2, 2026
Workshop authors’ early registration: Feb. 13, 2026
Workshop day: April 13, 2026

Workshop Objective

This is the 12th edition of the workshop series with the label “Web Applications and Smart Cities” (previous name: AW4City), which started in Florence in 2015 and kept on taking place every year in conjunction with the WWW conference series. Last year the workshop was held in Sydney, in conjunction with “The Web Conference 2025”. The workshop series aim to investigate the role of the Web and of Web applications in smart city growth.

This year, the workshop focuses on data-driven smart cities (DDSC), which can be considered urban environments that utilize data as a foundational asset to enhance decision-making, optimize services, and improve the community’s well-being.  DDSC utilizes IoT and social media for data collection; smart city platforms with domain-specific data lakes (i.e., transportation, energy, health etc.) for data storage, and AI for data processing and visualization; AI and machine learning for data predictive analysis; people-centric and personalized service delivery; open data release for transparent governance and engagement; data-driven decision making; and governance that ensures privacy, ethics, and data sovereignty. Data needs to be collected and processed in a fair and responsible manner. This workshop aims to explore the above characteristics and the role of the Web in the development of data-driven smart cities.

WebAndTheCity aims at gathering researchers from the fields of SC that are related to this year’s conference topics, to think about the obstacles that hurdle the leveraging of understanding and capturing of SC trends with regard to the WWW role (web-based, Apps, platforms and web intelligence).

Theoretical concepts, empirical evidence and selected case studies from leading scholars and practitioners in the field showing the “big picture” of smart cities and urban areas will be examined in this workshop.

WebAndTheCity is timely since SC’s are being transformed into digital ecosystems, where data flows, digital twinning and metaverse create local dataspaces and virtual worlds that generate new types of value, digital experiences, and transactions. Communities can utilize this new form of SC for its prosperity (i.e., new types of business, new digital products and services, AI-based service automation etc.), economic growth and living.

We target researchers from industry, academia, and government to join forces in this exciting area. We intend to discuss the recent and significant developments in the general areas of SC and the WWW dynamics and to promote cross-fertilization of techniques. To address the above-mentioned aspects, we solicit the following topics (but not limited to):

• Highlight data-driven and responsible intelligence viewpoints in cities and communities;
• Meet the intelligence and metaverse expectations for cities (human centricity and protection, new value creation, immersive experiences for users etc.)
• Explore city digital twinning;
• Enhance community living with the web (services, Apps and intelligence);
• Apps and services that support community engagement in governance, circularity, climate change adaptation, mobility, sharing, crowd-sourcing etc.;
• Smart City platforms (e.g. consultation; openness; parking; traffic management; environment etc.);
• Smart and Self evolving services (e.g. self-threat analysis; self-responsive government services etc.);
• Practices of Web applications, Apps and AI in smart cities;
• Theoretical foundations on Smart City applications and standards;
• Creative partnerships, creative industries and industry 4.0 in Smart City with a focus on application development and AI (Internet Economics and Monetization);
• Pervasive Web for Smart City emerging topics (i.e., user behavior analytics, energy, water, waste, transportation etc.);
• The role of city stakeholders for smart city applications development and standardization (i.e., promotion push, start-ups, open data);
• Web Infrastructure and AI service standardization;
• The role of standards on smart city data mining;
• Smart city information quality and evolution in social content;
• Ensuring security and privacy in Smart Environment: the role of web applications and Apps.

Submission

We welcome full research papers, research in progress, and discussion papers. Full papers should be up to 12 pages long (maximum 8 pages for the main paper content + maximum 2 pages for appendixes + maximum 2 pages for references).
Discussion papers may be short (up to 6 pages), but should clearly and distinctly address one or more issues pertinent to Smart City research including research methods and quality as well as focus of studies. Papers should be designed to support in-depth discussions of one of these issues during the workshop. Although it is a half-day event, the workshop papers will be clustered and each session will discuss a small set of papers focusing on similar or related issues.
Accepted refereed papers, must be presented at the conference by an author who is registered to attend. Please be aware that The Web Conference’s organizers will require at least one registration per paper published in either the main Proceedings or in the Companion volume. At the time of submission of the final camera-ready copy, authors will have to indicate the already registered person for that publication. We strongly encourage at least one author of every paper to register by the early-bird deadline so that session chairs can make plans for its presentation.

Please submit your papers via the Easychair: https://easychair.org/my2/conference?conf=webandthecity2026

Details of the programme will be made available online.
Although it is a half-day event, the workshop papers will be clustered and each session will discuss a small set of papers focusing on similar or related issues.

Submission Guidelines

The accepted papers will be included in the companion volume of WWW’s proceedings, which will be published by ACM and included in the ACM Digital Library.

All submitted papers must be:

• written in English;
• contain author names, affiliations, and email addresses;
• be formatted according to the ACM SIG Proceedings template (https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template) with a font size no smaller than 9pt;
• be in PDF (make sure that the PDF can be viewed on any platform), and formatted for US Letter size. Files in Postscript (ps) or any other format will not be accepted. Authors should submit a .doc/.docx too to the workshop’s chairs.
• Occupy no more than 12 pages (maximum 8 pages for the main paper content + maximum 2 pages for appendixes + maximum 2 pages for references)

It is the authors responsibility to ensure that their submissions adhere strictly to the required format.

Submissions that do not comply with the above guidelines may be rejected without review.

All submissions must be entered into the reviewing system and they will follow a blind peer-review process by the workshop co-chairs and at least one external reviewer. More details regarding The Web Conference 2026 (WWW2026) conference can be found on https://www2026.thewebconf.org/

Extended version of accepted articles are possible to be selected and included in a special issue with relevant theme of the International Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR) or ACM DGov.

Accepted refereed papers, must be presented at the conference by an author who is registered to attend. Please be aware that The Web Conference’s organizers will require at least one registration per paper published in either the main Proceedings or in the Companion volume. At the time of submission of the final camera-ready copy, authors will have to indicate the already registered person for that publication. We strongly encourage at least one author of every paper to register by the early-bird deadline so that session chairs can make plans for its presentation.

Please submit your papers via Easychair: https://easychair.org/my2/conference?conf=webandthecity2026

Details of the programme will be made available online.

For any questions, please contact the Workshop chairs:

Leonidas ANTHOPOULOS, Professor, University of Thessaly, Greece, lanthopo@uth.gr

Marijn JANSSEN, Professor, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, M.F.W.H.A.Janssen@tudelft.nl

Vishanth WEERAKKODY, Professor, University of Bradford, United Kingdom, v.weerakkody@bradford.ac.uk

Program Committee Members (tentative)

• Toru Ishida, Hong Kong Baptist University
• Panos Panagiotopoulos, Associate Professor, Queen Mary University of London, UK
• Carl Erik Moe, Professor, University of Agder, Norway
• Sofia Toufic Shwayri, Independent Scholar, U.S.A.
• Nicolas Douay, MCF Paris 7 / UMR Géographie-Cités / LabEx DynamiTe
• Beth Coleman, University of Waterloo
• Markus Rittenbruch, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
• Alois Paulin, HVF Ludwigsburg, Germany
• Zohreh Pourzolfaghar, Maynooth University, Ireland