The LocWeb 2014 workshop continues a successful workshop series at the intersection of geospatial search, information management, and Web architecture with a focus towards location-aware information access. The workshop reflects a multitude of fields that demand and utilize location features, featuring presentations that look at the topic of location on the Web from an interdisciplinary perspective, including new approaches dealing with or utilizing geospatial information.

Service descriptions allow designers to document, understand, and use services, creating new useful and complex services with aggregated business value. Unlike RPC-based services, REST characteristics require a different approach to service description. We present the Resource Linking Language (ReLL) that introduces the concepts of media types, resource types, and link types as first class citizens for a service description. A proof of concept, a crawler called RESTler that crawls RESTful services based on ReLL descriptions, is also presented.

Relational databases hold a vast quantity of information and making them accessible to the web is an big challenge. There is a need to make these databases accessible with as little difficulty as possible, opening them up to the power and serendipity of the Web. Our work presents a series of patterns that bridge the relational database model with the architecture of the Web along with an implementation of some of them. The aim is for relational databases to be made accessible with no intermediate steps and no extra metadata required. This approach can vastly increase the data available on the web, therefore making the Web itself all the more powerful, while enabling its users to seamlessly perform tasks that previously required bridging multiple domains and paradigms or were not possible.

Recent technology trends in Web services indicate that a solution eliminating the perceived complexity of the WS-* standard technology stack may be in sight: advocates of Representational State Transfer (REST) have come to believe that their ideas explaining why the World Wide Web works are just as applicable to solve enterprise application integration problems and to radically simplify the plumbing required to implement a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). In this tutorial we give an introduction to the REST architectural style as the foundation for RESTful Web services. The tutorial starts from the basic design principles of REST and how they are applied to service oriented computing. Service-orientation concentrates on identifying self-contained units of functionality, which should then be exposed as easily reusable and repurposable services. This tutorial focuses not on the identification of those units, but on how to design the services representing them. We explain how decisions on the SOA level already shape the architectural style that will be used for the eventual IT architecture, and how the SOA process itself has to be controlled to yield services which can then be implemented RESTfully. We do not claim that REST is the only architectural style that can be used for SOA design, but we do argue that it does have distinct advantages for loosely coupled services and massive scale, and that any SOA approach already has to be specifically RESTful on the business level to yield meaningful input for IT architecture design.

Loose coupling is often quoted as a desirable property of systems architectures. One of the main goals of building systems using Web technologies is to achieve loose coupling. However, given the lack of a widely accepted definition of this term, it becomes hard to use coupling as a criterion to evaluate alternative Web technology choices, as all options may exhibit, and claim to provide, some kind of "loose" coupling effects. This paper presents a systematic study of the degree of coupling found in service-oriented systems based on a multi-faceted approach. Thanks to the metric introduced in this paper, coupling is no longer a one-dimensional concept with loose coupling found somewhere in between tight coupling and no coupling. The paper shows how the metric can be applied to real-world examples in order to support and improve the design process of service-oriented systems.

Location-awareness, in the form of location information about clients and location-based services provided by servers, is becoming increasingly important for networked communications in general, and wireless and mobile devices in particular. The current fragmented landscape of location concepts and location-awareness, however, is not suitable for handling location information on a Web scale. Providing users with mechanisms which allow them to control how they want to expose their location information, and thus allow control over how to share location information with others and services, is a crucial step for better location management for mobile devices. This paper presents a concept for representing location vocabularies, matching and mapping them, how these vocabularies can be used to support better privacy for users of location-based services, and better location sharing between users and services. The concept is based on a language for describing place name vocabularies, which we call ldquoplace markup language (PlaceML)rdquo, and on various ways how these vocabularies can be used in a location-aware infrastructure of networked devices.

The World Wide Web has become the world's largest networked information resource, but references to geographical locations remain unstructured and typically implicit in nature. This lack of explicit spatial knowledge within the Web makes it difficult to service user needs for location-specific information. At present, spatial knowledge is hidden in many small information fragments such as addresses on Web pages, annotated photos with GPS co-ordinates, geographic mapping applications, and geotags in user-generated content. Several emerging formats that primarily or secondarily include location metadata, like GeoRSS, KML, and microformats, aim to improve this state of affairs. However, the question remains how to extract, index, mine, find, view, mashup, and exploit Web content using its location semantics. This work-shop brings together researchers from academia and industry labs to discuss and present the latest results and trends in all facets of the relationships between location concepts and Web information.

The management and publishing of complex presentations is poorly supported by available presentation software. This makes it hard to publish usable and accessible presentation material, and to reuse that material for continuously evolving events. XSLidy provides a XSLT-based approach to generate presentations out of a mix of HTML and structural elements. Using XSLidy, the management and reuse of complex presentations becomes easier, and the results are more user-friendly in terms of usability and accessibility.

XML Schema documents are defined using an XML syntax, which means that the idea of generating schema documentation through standard XML technologies is intriguing. We present X2Doc, a framework for generating schema-documentation solely through XSLT. The framework uses SCX, an XML syntax for XML Schema components, as intermediate format and produces XML-based output formats. Using a modular set of XSLT stylesheets, X2Doc is highly configurable and carefully crafted towards extensibility. This proves especially useful for composite schemas, where additional schema information like Schematron rules are embedded into XML Schemas.

XML is increasingly being used as a typed data format, and therefore it becomes more important to gain access to the type system; very often this is an XML Schema. The XML Schema Path Language (SPath) presented in this paper provides access to XML Schema components by extending the well-known XPath language to also include the domain of XML Schemas. Using SPath, XML developers gain access to XML Schemas and thus can more easily develop software which is type- or schema-aware, and thus more robust.

XML Schema's abstract data model consists of components, which are the structures that eventually define a schema as a whole. XML Schema's XML syntax, on the other hand, is not a direct representation of the schema components, and it proves to be surprisingly hard to derive a schema's components from the XML syntax. The Schema Component XML Syntax (SCX) is a representation which attempts to map schema components as faithfully as possible to XML structures. SCX serves as the starting point for applications which need access to schema components and want to do so using standardized and widely available XML technologies.

Locating files based on file system structure, file properties, and maybe even file contents is a core task of the user interface of operating systems. By adapting XPath's power to the environment of a Unix shell, it is possible to greatly increase the expressive power of the command line language. We present a concept for integrating an XPath view of the file system into a shell, the emphXPath Shell (XPsh), which can be used to find files based on file attributes and contents in a very flexible way. The syntax of the command line language is backwards compatible with traditional shells, and the new XPath-based expressions can be easily mastered with a little bit of XPath knowledge.

Namespaces are a central building block of XML technologies today, they provide the identification mechanism for many XML-related vocabularies. Despite their ubiquity, there is no established mechanism for describing namespaces, and in particular for describing the dependencies of namespaces. We propose a simple model for describing namespaces and their dependencies. Using these descriptions, it is possible to compile directories of namespaces providing searchable and browsable namespace descriptions.

There are principal differences between the relational model and XML's tree model. This causes problems in all cases where information from these two worlds has to be brought together. Using a few rules for mapping the incompatible aspects of the two models, it becomes easier to process data in systems which need to work with relational and tree data. The most important requirement for a good mapping is that the conceptual model is available and can thus be used for making mapping decisions.

XML is the predominant format for representing structured information inside documents, but it stops at the level of files. This makes it hard to use XML-oriented tools to process information which is scattered over multiple documents within a file system. File System XML (FSX) and its content integration provides a unified view of file system structure and content. FSX's adaptors map file contents to XML, which means that any file format can be integrated with an XML view in the integrated view of the file system.