Journal of Web Semantics

Preprint: Hidden Social Dynamics Behind Collaborative Ontology Engineering

2013-04-16T07:43:00.001-04:00

A preprint of a new paper:

Markus Strohmaier, Simon Walk, Jan Pöschko, Daniel Lamprecht, Tania Tudorache, Csongor Nyulas, Mark A. Musen and Natalya F. Noy, How Ontologies Are Made: Studying The Hidden Social Dynamics Behind Collaborative Ontology Engineering Projects, Journal of Web Semantics, volume 20, in press, 2013.

is now available on the JWS prepreint server.

Abstract: Traditionally, evaluation methods in the field of semantic technologies have focused on the end result of ontology engineering efforts, mainly, on evaluating ontologies and their corresponding qualities and characteristics. This focus has led to the development of a whole arsenal of ontology-evaluation techniques that investigate the quality of ontologies as a product. In this paper, we aim to shed light on the process of ontology engineering construction by introducing and applying a set of measures to analyze hidden social dynamics.

We argue that especially for ontologies which are constructed collaboratively, understanding the social processes that have led to its construction is critical not only in understanding but consequently also in evaluating the ontology. With the work presented in this paper, we aim to expose the texture of collaborative ontology engineering processes that is otherwise left invisible. Using historical change-log data, we unveil qualitative differences and commonalities between different collaborative ontology engineering projects.

Explaining and understanding these differences will help us to better comprehend the role and importance of social factors in collaborative ontology engineering projects. We hope that our analysis will spur a new line of evaluation techniques that view ontologies not as the static result of deliberations among domain experts, but as a dynamic, collaborative and iterative process that needs to be understood, evaluated and managed in itself. We believe that advances in this direction would help our community to expand the existing arsenal of ontology evaluation techniques towards more holistic approaches.

cfp: Special Issue on Ontology-Based Data Access

2013-04-09T08:12:00.001-04:00

Special Issue of the Journal of Web Semantics on Ontology-Based Data Access

The competitiveness of many enterprises today relies on exploiting the wealth of information that is available in various distributed data sources or services. Thus, the problem of integrating data coming from many distributed and heterogeneous data sources has been a hot research topic for many years, and has received the attention of researchers in Databases, Knowledge Representation, and the Semantic Web. Furthermore, the recent utilization of “big data” in the private sector, government, and science has not only reinforced the importance of this topic but added the challenge of scaling to huge datasets.

The ontology-based data access (OBDA) paradigm was formulated a few years ago to tackle the problem of data integration, and more generally that of accessing data sources with a complex structure. The OBDA approach is based on three components: the data layer, the conceptual model of the application that is used for expressing user requests, and the mapping between the two. The data layer might consist of a single, possibly federated, database, or by a collection of possibly distributed and heterogeneous data sources (this case is also known as ontology-based data integration). The conceptual model is represented by an ontology, typically formalised in an appropriate description logic, and user requests are expressed as queries over the ontology. The mapping between the conceptual model and the data sources is formalized by mapping assertions, which are based on an appropriate logical language, but which may also incorporate extra-logical features for data manipulation.

The aim of an OBDA system is to answer user queries by transforming them into appropriate queries to the data layer, using the ontology and the mapping.
Traditionally, in OBDA, it has been assumed that data source(s) are relational, and that they are queried through SQL. However, the OBDA approach to data integration can also be used in the context of non-relational data sources e.g., XML, RDF etc. Given the recent proliferation of linked data sources and the importance of the linked paradigm for making data public, we expect to see a stronger convergence of work in these two areas.

Data exchange is another interesting paradigm closely related to OBDA. In data exchange, data that are organized according to one schema (called the source schema) need to be translated into an instance of a different schema (called the target schema), possibly equipped with constraints. The translation must respect certain dependencies that are again formalized as mappings among the two given schemas. While in OBDA the focus is on answering user queries over the conceptual model, in data exchange the aim is to understand how to materialize data in the target schema, respecting the mappings and the constraints, so as to answer queries directly using the materialized data.

This special issue will cover recent advances of the OBDA approach and its relation to other promising paradigms such as data exchange and linked data integration. Although we are interested in all aspects of the OBDA approach, including foundational work, we are also keen to attract papers that present and evaluate analytically and/or experimentally implemented OBDA systems, as well as papers that demonstrate the applicability of the OBDA paradigm to real-world situations.

Submission guidelines

The Journal of Web Semantics solicits original scientific contributions of high quality. Submission of your manuscript is welcome provided that it, or any translation of it, has not been copyrighted or published and is not being submitted for publication elsewhere. Upon acceptance of an article, the author(s) will be asked to transfer copyright of the article to the publisher. This transfer will ensure the widest possible dissemination of information. Manuscripts should be prepared for publication in accordance with instructions given in the JWS Guide for Authors. The submission and review process will be carried out using Elsevier's Web-based EES system. Final decisions of accepted papers will be approved by an editor in chief.

Final copies of accepted publications will appear in print and at the archival online server. Author preprints of the articles will be made freely accessible on the preprint server of the journal.

Editors

Diego Calvanese (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano)
Manolis Koubarakis (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)
David Toman (University of Waterloo)

Important dates

Paper submission deadline: July 31, 2013
Initial notification of acceptance (approximate): end of November 2013
Publication in middle 2014

Andreas Hotho is new area editor for search and datamining

2013-03-17T20:59:00.000-04:00

Andreas Hotho is now the area editor for search and datamining for the the Journal of Web Semantics, replacing Dr. Alon Halevy of Google, who has edited this topic for the past several years.

Dr. Hotho is a professor at the University of Würzburg. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Karlsruhe, where he worked from 1999 to 2004 at the Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods in the areas of text, data, and web mining, semantic web and information retrieval.

He has published over 90 articles in journals and at conferences, co-edited several special issues and books, and co-chaired several workshops, including the Workshop on Recommender Systems and the Social Web in 2011 and 2012 held in conjunction with ACM RecSys and the ECML PKDD Discovery Challenge in 2008 and 2009. His research focuses on the combination of data mining, information retrieval and the semantic web.

CFP: Special issue on Life Science and e-Science

2013-03-12T11:41:00.000-04:00

Call for Papers

Special issue of the Journal of Web Semantics
on Life Science and e-Science

Semantic technologies promoted by the W3C play an increasingly prominent role in how life sciences are performed. From ontologies that provide a common controlled vocabulary for describing data, to publication of data as Linked Open Data and its subsequent analysis. RDF and OWL are becoming the norm for interoperability of metadata and to some extent, data, between systems that can operate on the web. Increasingly large data sets are beginning to be tackled and made the subject of large data integration experiments. New models have been proposed that aim to capture trust and quality of data and experiments.

In the life sciences, semantic web tools and paradigms have found their way into many aspects of bio- and health informatics, with exciting applications appearing in areas ranging from plant genetics to drug discovery. Semantic technologies are becoming ever more capable of enhancing research practices in the life sciences, and thus a cornerstone for e-Science in this domain. It is also in here that many of the issues that result from putting theory to practice are encountered, making life sciences a prime driver for testing out, applying, and developing semantic technologies and e-Science.

To address the role that semantic technologies have come to play in enhancing the life sciences, and in turn acknowledging the role that this plays in maturing these technologies, we wish to publish a special issue of JWS containing novel research articles in this area. We welcome papers that demonstrate how semantic technologies enhance research, for instance by enabling intelligent search for new biological insights, or by enhancing digital research practices.
Topics of particular interest include the following.

Web tools based on semantic technologies that change how life scientists work (Semantic Web, Agents, Databases, High Performance reasoning, Web standards, etc.)
Advancements in Life Science enabled by Web Semantics
New ways of publishing data and methods (scholarly communication), including mechanisms of dissemination, organization, understanding and use of workflows, web services, data, and knowledge.
Life science information management and interoperability
Knowledge discovery
Paradigm shifts in the life sciences that result from the adoption of new standards and practices.

Important dates

Paper submission deadline: July 31, 2013
Initial notification of acceptance (approximate): November 2013
Preprints online: December 2013
Publication in early 2014

Guest editors

Tim Clark, Massachusets General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, University of Manchester (twclark at partners.org)
Marco Roos, Leiden University Medical Center, University of Amsterdam, NBIC (M.Roos1 at uva.nl)

Preprint: natural language interfaces for querying ontologies

2013-03-09T18:00:00.001-05:00

A new paper is available on the Journal of Web Semantics preprint server.

Improving habitability of natural language interfaces for querying ontologies with feedback and clarifcation dialogues, Danica Damljanovic, Milan Agatonovic, Hamish Cunningham and Kalina Bontcheva, to appear, 2013.

Natural Language Interfaces (NLIs) are a viable, human-readable alternative to complex, formal query languages like SPARQL, which are typically used for accessing semantically structured data (e.g.. RDF and OWL repositories). However, in order to cope with natural language ambiguities, NLIs typically support a more restricted language. A major challenge when designing such restricted languages is habitability–how easily, naturally and effectively users can use the language to express themselves within the constraints imposed by the system. In this paper, we investigate two methods fo improving the habitability of a Natural Language Interface: feedback and clarifcation dialogues. We model feedback by showing the user how the system interprets the query,thus suggesting repair through query reformulation. Next, we investigate how clarifcation dialogues can be used to control the query interpretations generated by the system. To reduce the cognitive overhead, clarifcation dialogues are coupled with a learning mechanism. Both methods are shown to have a positive effect on the overall performance and habitability.

JWS volume 17 preprints available

2013-02-10T12:36:00.001-05:00

Preprints from volume 17 of the Journal of Web Semantics are available at and include two research papers and two ontology papers.

Understanding Why Users Tag: A Survey of Tagging Motivation Literature and Results from an Empirical Study by Markus Strohmaier, Christian Körner and Roman Kern
Improving Semantic Web Services Discovery Using SPARQL-Based Repository Filtering by José María García, David Ruiz and Antonio Ruiz-Cortés
The SSN Ontology of the W3C Semantic Sensor Network Incubator Group by Michael Compton et al.
FaBiO and CiTO: ontologies for describing bibliographic resources and citations by Silvio Peroni and David Shotton

New JWS area editors and editorial board members

2013-01-21T13:54:00.001-05:00

The Journal of Web Semantics is pleased to announce new area editors and editorial board members. Area editors oversee important subtopics in the journal's scope -- soliciting and encouraging submissions, managing the reviewing process and recommending decisions. Editorial board members provide advice on directions and policies for the Journal and serve as expert reviewers for submitted papers.

Joining the Journal as area editors are:

Harith Alani (The Open University, UK) who will cover the Social Semantic Web
Christian Bizer (Universität Mannheim) who will handle system papers
Sebastian Rudolph (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) who will cover papers on reasoning
Ansgar Scherp (Universität Mannheim) who will handle human-computer interaction (HCI) papers
Robert Stevens (University of Manchester) who will manage eScience and life science papers

Stepping down as area editors are Peter Mika (Yahoo! Research), mc schraefel (University of Southampton) and M. Schroeder (Technische Universität Dresden). We thank them for their years of service to the Journal and semantic web research community as area editors.

Joining the editorial board are Lalana Kagal (MIT) and Bijan Parsia (University of Manchester). Guss Schreiber, who was one of the original members of the editorial board, is stepping down after ten years of service.

CFP: JWS special issue on Semantic Search

2012-12-13T23:59:00.003-05:00

The Journal of Web Semantics seeks submissions for a special issue on Semantic Search to be edited by Roberto Navigli and Fabian M. Suchanek. Submissions are due by 1 July 2013.

Semantic technologies, such as expressive ontology and resource description languages, scalable repositories, reasoning engines and information extraction techniques, are now in a mature state so that they can give a higher level of semantics to Information Retrieval (IR) systems. This application of semantic technologies to IR tasks is typically referred to as Semantic Search. Challenges on this way include (i) identifying tasks and paradigms for semantic search systems, (ii) devising expressive disambiguation and annotation frameworks as well as scalable algorithms and infrastructures, (iii) investigating innovative query paradigms for semantic search systems, and (iv) applying machine learning, natural language processing and information extraction techniques in the context of semantic search.

This special issue will cover interdisciplinary topics between the Semantic Web and IR. These include, but are not limited to the following topics.

Information retrieval tasks on the Semantic Web
Incentives and interaction paradigms for resource annotation
Interaction paradigms for semantic search
Statistical and knowledge-rich techniques for semantic search
Semantic technologies for query interpretation, refinement and routing
Modeling expressive resource descriptions
Natural language processing and information extraction for the acquisition of resource descriptions
Lexical and knowledge resources for semantic search
Scalable repositories and infrastructures for semantic search
Crawling, storing and indexing of expressive resource descriptions
Fusion of semantic search results on the Semantic Web
Algorithms for matching expressive queries and resource descriptions
Algorithms and procedures to deal with vagueness, incompleteness and inconsistencies in semantic search
Evaluation methodologies for semantic search
Standard datasets and benchmarks for semantic search
Semantic Information Retrieval and semantic search engines
Semantic search in or via linked data

We solicit contributions that address these challenges, as well as reports on novel applications with the potential to push semantic search forward

Submission guidelines

The Journal of Web Semantics solicits original scientific contributions of high quality. Following the overall mission of the journal, we emphasize the publication of papers that combine theories, methods and experiments from different subject areas in order to deliver innovative semantic methods and applications. The publication of large-scale experiments and their analysis is also encouraged to clearly illustrate scenarios and methods that introduce semantics into existing Web interfaces, contents and services.

Submission of your manuscript is welcome provided that it, or any translation of it, has not been copyrighted or published and is not being submitted for publication elsewhere. Upon acceptance of an article, the author(s) will be asked to transfer copyright of the article to the publisher. This transfer will ensure the widest possible dissemination of information. Manuscripts should be prepared for publication in accordance with instructions given in the JWS guide for authors. The submission and review process will be carried out using Elsevier's Web-based EES system. Final decisions of accepted papers will be approved by an editor in chief.

Final layouted copies of accepted publications will appear in print and at the archival online server. Author preprints of the articles will be made freely accessible on the JWS preprint server.

Posted Schedule

Call for papers: Dec 2012
Submission deadline: 1st of July 2013
Author notification: 1st of October 2013
Submission deadline for revisions: 1st of January 2014
Author notification: 1st of March 2014
Submission deadline for camera-ready versions: 1st of April 2014

Contact Information

For any further questions regarding the special issue (appropriateness of your contribution, editorial issues, etc.), please feel free to contact the guest editors Roberto Navigli (LASTNAME@di.uniroma1.it) and Fabian M. Suchanek (LASTNAME@mpii.de).

JWS volume 16 preprints available

2012-10-29T09:34:00.000-04:00

Preprints from the Journal of Web Semantics, volume 16 (2012) are now on the preprint server. These include two research papers and three papers based on finalists from the 2011 Semantic Web Challenge 2011.

Georeferencing Flickr photos using language models at different levels of granularity: an evidence based approach, Olivier Van Laere, Steven Schockaert and Barth Dhoedt
ONTOCOM: A Reliable Cost Estimation Method for Ontology Development Projects, Elena Simperl, Tobias Bürger, Simon Hangl, Stephan Wörgl and Igor Popov
Editorial: Special Issue on The 2011 Semantic Web Challenge, Diana Maynard and Chris Bizer
BOTTARI: an Augmented Reality Mobile Application to deliver Personalized and Location-based Recommendations by Continuous Analysis of Social Media Streams, Marco Balduini, Irene Celino, Daniele Dell´Aglio, Emanuele Della Valle, Yi Huang, Tony Lee, Seon-Ho Kim and Volker Tresp
SchemEX – Efficient Construction of a Data Catalogue by Stream-based Indexing of Linked Data, Mathias Konrath, Thomas Gottron, Steffen Staab and Ansgar Scherp
A Middleware Framework for Scalable Management of Linked Streams, Danh Le-Phuoc, Hoan Quoc Nguyen-Mau, Josiane Xavier Parreira and Manfred Hauswirth

Christian Bizer is new area editor for system papers

2012-10-23T11:17:00.002-04:00

Christian Bizer is now the area editor for system papers for the Journal of Web Semantics. Dr. Bizer recently accepted an appointment as the W3-Professor for Information Systems at the University of Mannheim, where he leads the Research Group Data and Web Science in the School of Business Informatics and Mathematics. The research group conducts research on methods for managing, integrating and mining large-amounts of heterogeneous information within enterprise and open Web contexts. Before moving to Mannheim, he was a professor at Freie Universität Berlin. Dr. Bizer is well known for his contributions to DBpedia, linked open data and publishing relational databases on the Web.

Preprints from JWS v15 n3

2012-10-16T09:06:00.000-04:00

Preprints from the Journal of Web Semantics, volume 15 number 3, are available online.

Research papers

Matthias Klusch and Patrick Kapahnke, The iSeM Matchmaker: A Flexible Approach For Adaptive Hybrid Semantic Service Selection
Bo Fu, Rob Brennan and Declan O’Sullivan, A Configurable Translation-Based Cross-Lingual Ontology Mapping System to adjust Mapping Outcome Research
Dimitris Kontokostas, Charalampos Bratsas, Sören Auer, Sebastian Hellmann, Ioannis Antoniou and Giorgos Metakides, A Lexico-Semantic Pattern Language for Learning Ontology Instances from Text
Wouter IJntema, Jordy Sangers, Frederik Hogenboom and Flavius Frasincar, Internationalization of Linked Data: The case of the Greek DBpedia edition

Ontology papers

Michael Compton, Payam Barnaghi, Luis Bermudez, Raul Garcıa-Castro, Oscar Corcho, Simon Cox, John Graybeal, Manfred Hauswirth, Cory Henson, Arthur Herzog, Vincent Huang, Krzysztof Janowicz, W. David Kelsey, Danh Le Phuoc, Laurent Lefort, Myriam Leggieri, Holger Neuhaus, Andriy Nikolov, Kevin Page, Alexandre Passant, Amit Sheth and Kerry Taylor, The SSN Ontology of the W3C Semantic Sensor Network Incubator Group
Christian Meilicke, Raúl García-Castro, Fred Freitas, Willem Robert van Hage, Elena Montiel-Ponsoda, Ryan Ribeiro de Azevedo, Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Ondrej Svab-Zamazal, Vojtech Svatek, Andrei Tamilin, Cassia Trojahn and Shenghui Wang, MultiFarm: A Benchmark for Multilingual Ontology Matching

Letters

Tim Finin, Ian Horrocks and Steffen Staab, Letters to the Journal
Peter Patel-Schneider, Comments on WebPIE
Jacopo Urbani, Spyros Kotoulas, Jason Maassen, Frank van Harmelen and Henri Bal, Response to comments on WebPIE
Jacopo Urbani, Spyros Kotoulas, Jason Maassen, Frank van Harmelen and Henri Bal, Corrigendum to WebPIE: A Web-scale Parallel Inference Engine using MapReduce

JWS preprint: FaBiO and CiTO: ontologies for describing bibliographic resources and citations

2012-08-11T08:38:00.001-04:00

A new ontology paper preprint is available on the Journal of Web Semantics preprint server.

Silvio Peroni and David Shotton, FaBiO and CiTO: ontologies for describing bibliographic resources and citations, Journal of Web Semantics, in press.

Semantic publishing is the use of Web and Semantic Web technologies to enhance the meaning of a published journal article, to facilitate its automated discovery, to enable its linking to semantically related articles, to provide access to data within the article in actionable form, and to facilitate integration of data between articles. Recently, semantic publishing has opened the possibility of a major step forward in the digital publishing world. For this to succeed, new semantic models and visualization tools are required to fully meet the specific needs of authors and publishers. In this article, we introduce the principles and architectures of two new ontologies central to the task of semantic publishing: FaBiO, the FRBR-aligned Bibliographic Ontology, an ontology for recording and publishing bibliographic records of scholarly endeavours on the Semantic Web, and CiTO, the Citation Typing Ontology, an ontology for the characterization of bibliographic citations both factually and rhetorically. We present those two models step by step, in order to emphasise their features and to stress their advantages relative to other pre-existing information models. Finally, we review the uptake of FaBiO and CiTO within the academic and publishing communities.

New letters on the preprint server

2012-08-09T10:59:00.000-04:00

The first letters to the Journal of Web Semantics are on the IN PRINT section of the JWS preprint server. These include comments by Peter Patel-Schneider on the article WebPIE: A Web-scale Parallel Inference Engine using MapReduce by Jacopo Urbani et al. and a response and corrigendum from the authors.

JWS preprint: Folksonomized Ontology and the 3E Steps Technique to Support Ontology Evolvement

2012-08-08T16:24:00.000-04:00

A new preprint is available on the preprint server as part of a special issue on the Semantic and Social Web.

Hugo Alves and Andre Santanche, Folksonomized Ontology and the 3E Steps Technique to Support Ontology Evolvement, Journal of Web Semantics, to appear, 2012.

Folksonomies are increasingly adopted in web systems. These “social taxonomies”, which emerge from collaborative tagging, contrast with the formalism and the systematic creation process applied to ontologies. However, they can play complementary roles, as the knowledge systematically formalized in ontologies by a restricted group can be enriched by the implicit knowledge collaboratively produced by a much wider group. Existing initiatives that involve folksonomies and ontologies are often unidirectional, i.e., ontologies improve tag operations or tags are used to automatically create ontologies. We propose a new fusion approach in which the semantics travels in both directions – from folksonomies to ontologies and vice versa. The result of this fusion is our Folksonomized Ontology (FO). In this paper, we present our 3E Steps technique – Extraction, Enrichment, and Evolution –, which explores the latent semantics of a given folksonomy – expressed in a FO – to support ontology review and enhancement. It was implemented and tested in a visual review/enhancement tool.

JWS adds section for letters to the Journal

2012-08-08T12:13:00.000-04:00

The Journal of Web Semantics is introducing a new letters section as a place to publish comments on recent Journal of Web Semantics articles that have appeared either in print or online. Such letters might present corrections or errata, identify problems or errors, provide complimentary evidence for claims, and/or raise interesting points for discussion. Where appropriate, the Editors in Chief will invite the authors of the original article to compose a reply to a letter and publish both together.

Letters and associated responses should be submitted using the Journal of Web Semantics' submission site by selecting the 'letter' article type. Both letters and their responses will normally not exceed four JWS-formatted pages. Where a longer length is required by the subject, it may be allowed at the discretion of the Editors in Chief. Both will be reviewed for content and appropriateness by the letters area editor and/or the Editors in Chief. In some cases, we may also ask for one or more peer reviews.

Due to limited space, the Journal of Web Semantics cannot publish all submitted letters and responses in the printed journal. Some may be selected for online publication only on the Journal's preprint Web site.

The content of both the letter and any response is the responsibility of their authors and subsequent publication in the Journal of Web Semantics does not imply the Journal's agreement or endorsement.

Three new papers from the 2011 Semantic Web Challenge

2012-08-06T08:01:00.001-04:00

Three new papers are available on the Journal of Web Semantics preprint server. These will appear in volume 15 as part of a special section edited by Diana Maynard and Chris Bizer featuring revised and extended papers from the 2011 ISWC Semantic Web Challenge.

Marco Balduini, Irene Celino, Daniele Dell´Aglio, Emanuele Della Valle, Yi Huang, Tony Lee, Seon-Ho Kim, Volker Tresp, BOTTARI: An Augmented Reality Mobile Application to Deliver Personalized and Location-Based Recommendations by Continuous Analysis of Social Media Streams, Journal of Web Semantics, volume 15, to appear.

In 2011, an average of three million tweets per day was posted in Seoul. Hundreds of thousands of tweets carry the live opinion of some tens of thousands of users about restaurants, bars, coffees and many other semi-public points of interest (POIs) in the city. Trusting this collective opinion to be a solid base for novel commercial and social services, we conceived BOTTARI: an augmented reality application that offers personalized and localized recommendation of POIs based on the temporally-weighted opinions of the social media community. In this paper, we present the design of BOTTARI, the potentialities of semantic technologies like inductive and deductive stream reasoning and the lesson learnt in experimentally deploying BOTTARI in Insadong – a popular tourist area in Seoul – for which we have been collecting tweets for three years to rate the few hundreds of restaurants in the district. The results of our study show to demonstrate the feasibility of BOTTARI and encourage its commercial spreading.

Matthias Konrath, Thomas Gottron, Steffen Staab, Ansgar Scherp, SchemEX – Efficient Construction of a Data Catalogue by Stream-Based Indexing of Linked Data, Journal of Web Semantics, volume 15, to appear.

We present SchemEX, an approach and tool for a stream-based indexing and schema extraction of Linked Open Data (LOD) at web-scale. The schema index provided by SchemEX can be used to locate distributed data sources in the LOD cloud. It serves typical LOD information needs such as finding sources that contain instances of one specific data type, of a given set of data types (so-called type clusters), or of instances in type clusters that are connected by one or more common properties (so-called equivalence classes). The entire process of extracting the schema from triples and constructing an index is designed to have linear runtime complexity. Thus, the schema index can be computed on-the-fly while the triples are crawled and provided as a stream by a linked data spider. To demonstrate the web-scalability of our approach, we have computed a SchemEX index over the Billion Triples Challenge (BTC) dataset 2011 consisting of 2,170 million triples. In addition, we have computed the SchemEX index on a dataset with 11 million triples. We use this smaller dataset for conducting a detailed qualitative analysis. We are capable to locate relevant data sources with recall between 71% and 98% and a precision between 74% and 100% at a window size of 100K triples observed in the stream and depending on the complexity of the query, i.e. if one wants to find specific data types, type clusters or equivalence classes.

Danh Le-Phuoc, Hoan Quoc Nguyen-Mau, Josiane Xavier Parreira, Manfred Hauswirth, A Middleware Framework for Scalable Management of Linked Streams, Journal of Web Semantics, volume 15, to appear.

The Web has long exceeded its original purpose of a distributed hypertext system and has become a global, data sharing and processing platform. This development is confirmed by remarkable milestones such as the Semantic Web, Web services, social networks and mashups. In parallel with these developments on the Web, the Internet of Things (IoT), i.e., sensors and actuators, has matured and has become a major scientific and economic driver. Its potential impact cannot be overestimated – for example, in logistics, cities, electricity grids and in our daily life, in the form of sensor-laden mobile phones – and rival that of the Web itself. While the Web provides ease of use of distributed resources and a sophisticated development and deployment infrastructure, the IoT excels in bringing real-time information from the physical world into the picture. Thus a combination of these players seems to be the natural next step in the development of even more sophisticated systems of systems. While only starting, there is already a significant amount of sensor-generated, or more generally dynamic information, available on theWeb. However, this information is not easy to access and process, depends on specialised gateways and requires significant knowledge on the concrete deployments, for example, resource constraints and access protocols. To remedy these problems and draw on the advantages of both sides, we try to make dynamic, online sensor data of any form as easily accessible as resources and data on theWeb, by applying well-established Web principles, access and processing methods, thus shielding users and developers from the underlying complexities. In this paper we describe our Linked StreamMiddleware (LSM, http://lsm.deri.ie/),which makes it easy to integrate time-dependent data with other Linked Data sources, by enriching both sensor sources and sensor data streams with semantic descriptions, and enabling complex SPARQL-like queries across both dataset types through a novel query processing engine, along with means to mashup the data and process results. Most prominently, LSM provides (1) extensible means for real-time data collection and publishing using a cloud-based infrastructure, (2) a Web interface for data annotation and visualisation, and (3) a SPARQL endpoint for querying unified Linked Stream Data and Linked Data. We describe the system architecture behind LSM, provide details how Linked Stream Data is generated, and demonstrate the benefits and efficiency of the platform by showcasing some experimental evaluations and the system’s interface.

UK to support open access for publicly funded scientific research

2012-07-16T00:11:00.000-04:00

The Gardian reports that the UK government will unveil controversial plans to make publicly funded scientific research immediately available for anyone to read for free by 2014. The controversy stems from the plan that ensures the financial security of journal publishers by swapping their revenue from library budgets to science budgets.

"Though many academics will welcome the announcement, some scientists contacted by the Guardian were dismayed that the cost of the transition, which could reach £50m a year, must be covered by the existing science budget and that no new money would be found to fund the process. That could lead to less research and fewer valuable papers being published.

British universities now pay around £200m a year in subscription fees to journal publishers, but under the new scheme, authors will pay "article processing charges" (APCs) to have their papers peer reviewed, edited and made freely available online. The typical APC is around £2,000 per article."

Ian Horrocks appointed an Editor in Chief of the Journal of Web Semantics

2012-07-11T15:24:00.000-04:00

Dr. Ian Horrocks has been named as an editor in chief of the Journal of Web Semantics, replacing Dr. Riichiro Mizoguchi. Dr. Horrocks is a Professor in the Oxford University Department of Computer Science, where he conducts research on knowledge representation, ontologies and ontology languages, description logics, automated reasoning, and applications in areas including e-Science and the Semantic Web. He is recognized for his contributions to description logic reasoning algorithms and techniques, and the development of the OIL, DAML+OIL and OWL ontology languages. He served as the co-chair of the W3C Working Group that developed the OWL 2 Web Ontology Language which became a W3C recommendation in 2009. Dr. Horrocks is a BCS Fellow, an ECCAI Fellow and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Dr. Horrocks has been a member of the JWS editorial board since the journal's inception in 2003 and has also served as the area editor for reasoning.

The Journal of Web Semantics thanks Dr. Riichiro Mizoguchi for his considerable service as an member of the editorial board since 2003 and as an editor in chief from 2007 to 2011. Professor Mizoguchi continues to lead an active research program at Osaka University as the director of the Department of Knowledge Systems in the Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research.

JWS preprint: A Configurable Translation-Based Cross-Lingual Ontology Mapping System to Adjust Mapping Outcome

2012-06-20T05:13:00.000-04:00

The following research paper is now on the Journal of Web Semantics preprint server.

Bo Fu, Rob Brennan and Declan O’Sullivan, A Configurable Translation-Based Cross-Lingual Ontology Mapping System to Adjust Mapping Outcome, Journal of Web Semantics, Elsevier, to appear.

Abstract: Ontologies are widely considered as the building blocks of the semantic web, and with them, comes the data interoperability issue. As ontologies are not necessarily always labelled in the same natural language, one way to achieve semantic interoperability is by means of cross-lingual ontology mapping. Translation techniques are often used as an intermediate step to translate the conceptual labels within an ontology. This approach essentially removes the natural language barrier in the mapping environment and enables the application of monolingual ontology mapping tools. This paper shows that the key to this translation-based approach to cross-lingual ontology mapping lies with selecting appropriate ontology label translations in a given mapping context. Appropriateness of the translations in the context of cross-lingual ontology mapping differs from the ontology localisation point of view, as the former aims to generate correct mappings whereas the latter aims to adapt specifications of conceptualisations to target communities. This paper further demonstrates that the mapping outcome using the translation-based cross-lingual ontology mapping approach is conditioned on the translations selected for the intermediate label translation step. In particular, this paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a novel cross-lingual ontology mapping system: SOCOM++. SOCOM++ provides configurable properties that can be manipulated by a user in the process of selecting label translations in an effort to adjust the subsequent mapping outcome. It is shown through the evaluation that for the same pair of ontologies, the mappings between them can be adjusted by tuning the translations for the ontology labels. This finding is not yet shown in previous research.

JWS preprint: Georeferencing Flickr Photos Using Language Models at Different Levels of Granularity: an Evidence Based Approach

2012-06-18T22:13:00.000-04:00

The following research paper has been added to the Journal of Web Semantics preprint server.

Olivier Van Laere, Steven Schockaert and Barth Dhoedt, Georeferencing Flickr Photos Using Language Models at Different Levels of Granularity: an Evidence Based Approach, Journal of Web Semantics, to appear.

The topic of automatically assigning geographic coordinates to Web 2.0 resources based on their tags has recently gained considerable attention. However, the coordinates that are produced by automated techniques are necessarily variable, since not all resources are described by tags that are sufficiently descriptive. Thus there is a need for adaptive techniques that assign locations to photos at the right level of granularity, or, in some cases, even refrain from making any estimations regarding location at all. To this end, we consider the idea of training language models at different levels of granularity, and combining the evidence provided by these language models using Dempster and Shafer’s theory of evidence. We provide experimental results which clearly confirm that the increased spatial awareness that is thus gained allows us to make better informed decisions, and moreover increases the overall accuracy of the individual language models.

JWS preprint: The SSN Ontology of the W3C Semantic Sensor Network Incubator Group

2012-06-18T08:17:00.001-04:00

The following ontology paper is available on the the Journal of Web Semantics preprint server.

Michael Compton, Payam Barnaghi, Luis Bermudez, Raul Garcia-Castro, Oscar Corcho, Simon Cox, John Graybeal, Manfred Hauswirth, Cory Henson, Arthur Herzog, Vincent Huang, Krzysztof Janowicz, W. David Kelsey, Danh Le Phuoc, Laurent Lefort, Myriam Leggieri, Holger Neuhaus, Andriy Nikolov, Kevin Page, Alexandre Passant, Amit Sheth, Kerry Taylor, The SSN Ontology of the W3C Semantic Sensor Network Incubator Group, Journal of Web Semantics, Elsevier, to appear.

The W3C Semantic Sensor Network Incubator group (the SSN-XG) produced an OWL 2 ontology to describe sensors and observations — the SSN ontology, available at http://purl.oclc.org/NET/ssnx/ssn. The SSN ontology can describe sensors in terms of capabilities, measurement processes, observations and deployments. This article describes the SSN ontology. It further gives an example and describes the use of the ontology in recent research projects.

JWS preprint: Community Analysis through Semantic Rules and Role Composition Derivation

2012-06-17T14:55:00.001-04:00

The following paper has been added to the Journal of Web Semantics preprint server.

Matthew Rowe, Miriam Fernandez, Sofia Angeletou, Harith Alani, Community Analysis through Semantic Rules and Role Composition Derivation, Journal of Web Semantics, Elsevier, to appear.

Online communities provide a useful environment for web users to communicate and interact with other users by sharing their thoughts, ideas and opinions, and for resolving problems and issues. Companies and organisations now host online communities in order to support their products and services. Given this investment such communities are required to remain healthy and flourish. The behaviour that users exhibit within online communities is associated with their actions and interactions with other community users while the role that a user assumes is the label associated with a given type of behaviour. The domination of one type of behaviour within an online community can impact upon its health, for example, it might be the case within a question-answering community that there is a large portion of expert users and very few users asking questions, thereby reducing the involvement of and the need for experts. Understanding how the role composition - i.e. the distribution of users assuming different roles - of a community affects its health informs community managers with the early indicators of possible reductions or increases in community activity and how the community is expected to change. In this paper we present an approach to analyse communities based on their role compositions. We present a behaviour ontology that captures user behaviour within a given context (i.e. time period and community) and a semantic-rule based methodology to infer the role that a user has within a community based on his/her exhibited behaviour. We describe a method to tune roles for a given community-platform through the use of statistical clustering and discretisation of continuous feature values. We demonstrate the utility of our approach through role composition analyses of the SAP Community Network by: a) gauging the differences between communities, b) predicting community activity increase/decrease, and c) performing regression analysis of the post count within each community. Our findings indicate that communities on the SAP Community Network differ in terms of their average role percentages and experts, while being similar to one another in terms of the dominant role in each community - being a novice user. The findings also indicate that an increase in expert users who ask questions and initiate discussions was associated with increased community activity and that for 23 of the 25 communities analysed we were able to accurately detect a decrease in community activity using the community’s role composition.

Journal of Web Semantics, v14

2012-04-30T23:09:00.000-04:00

Five new research papers from volume 14 (2012) are available on the Journal of Web Semantics preprint server. Three make up a special issue on the Messiness of the Web of Data edited by Stefan Schlobach and Craig Knoblock:

Emerging practices for mapping and linking life sciences data using RDF - a case series, by Scott Marshall, Richard Boyce, Helena Deus, Jun Zhao, Egon Willighagen, Matthias Samwald, Elgar Pichler, Janos Hajagos and Eric Prud'hommeaux
An empirical survey of Linked Data conformance, by Aidan Hogan, Jürgen Umbrich, Andreas Harth, Richard Cyganiak, Axel Polleres pand Stefan Decker
Integrating Open Government Data with Stratosphere for more Transparency, by Arvid Heise and Felix Naumann.

The remaining two papers in volume 14 are regular research submissions:

A General Datalog-Based Framework for Tractable Query Answering over Ontologies by Thomas Lukasiewicz, Andrea Cali and Georg Gottlob
A Novel Approach to Ontology Classification by Giorgos Stoilos, Birte Glimm, Ian Horrocks, Boris Motik and Rob Shearer.

CFP: Special Issue on Data Linking, Journal of Web Semantics

2012-03-25T23:36:00.002-04:00

Call for Paper

Special Issue on Data Linking

Journal of Web Semantics

This special issue of the Journal of Web Semantics focuses on the problem of finding links between datasets published as linked data.

Today the web of data has become a reality. The ever increasing number of datasets published as RDF according to the linked data principles, the support of major search engines, e-commerce sites and social networks give no doubt that the early scenarios of the semantic Web vision will soon become a reality.

The power of the web lies in its networked structure, in the connections between the resources it contains. Similarly, linked data enable the interlinking of data resources so that databases become interconnected and the information they contain become part of a huge distributed database. The transformation of the Web from a “Web of documents” into a “Web of data”, as well as the availability of large collections of sensor generated data (“Internet of Things”), is leading to a new generation of Web applications based on the integration of both data and services. At the same time, new data are published every day out of user generated contents and public Web sites.

This emergence of the Web of data raises many challenges, such as the need of comparing and matching data with the goal of resolving the multiplicity of data references to the same real-world objects and of finding useful and relevant similarities and correspondences among data. The Web needs techniques and tools for the discovery of data links, and a suitable theory for the understanding and definition of the data links meaning.

About data links, one of the most important goals is to provide means to ensure that the interconnection between data is effective. The design of algorithms, methodologies, languages and tools that provide more efficient and automated ways to link data is essential for the growth of the Web of data rather than a set of disjoint data islands.

While the problems of entity resolution have been studied in the database community for a long time, the Web of data environment presents new important challenges at different levels. Large volumes of data and the variety of repositories which have to be processed rise the need for scalable linking techniques which require minimal user involvement. On the other hand, in cases where user configuration effort is required, there is a need for tools to be usable by non-experts in the domain.

Given that published data links can be used by automatic reasoning tools, it is important to capture the meaning of links in a precise way. Since quality of automatically generated links can vary, their provenance and reliability have to be modelled in an explicit way. Finally, to capture and compare the reliability of different tools and techniques, there is a need for evaluation methods for automatic data linking approaches.

Challenges

Automating the process of finding links between Web datasets
Scaling data linking algorithms
Representation and interpretation of links
Providing efficient user interfaces and interaction methods
Modeling and reasoning on links trust and provenance information

Topics of Interest

The topics of interest for this special issue include but are not
limited to the following.

data linking tools and frameworks
techniques for automated data linking
data similarity measures
similarity spreading measures
schema-based similarity measures
candidate dataset selection and datasets similarity measures
statistical analysis techniques
semi-supervised, learning-based data linking methods
optimization methods for computing similarity
web data sampling techniques
identity representation and semantics
reasoning on links, link propagation
user interaction for link elicitation and validation
provenance and trust models on links
methods for link quality assessment
innovative applications using links
evaluation of data linking techniques and tools

Important Dates

We will review papers on a rolling basis as they are submitted and explicitly encourage submissions well before the final deadline.

1 15 June: submission deadline
1 September: initial decisions and notifications
1 October: major/minor revisions due
1 November: final minor revisions due
1 December: final decisions and notifications
1 January: preprints available publication in 2013

Instructions for submission

Please see the author guidelines for detailed instructions before you submit. Submissions should be conducted through Elsevier’s Electronic Submission System. See the Journal of Web Semantics Web page for general information and the the JWS Guide for Authors for details on the submission process.

Editors

Alfio Ferrara (Università degli Studi di Milano)
Andriy Nikolov (Open University)
François Scharffe (LIRMM, Université de Montpellier 2)

JWS special issue: reasoning with context in the Semantic Web, v12 (2012)

2012-02-01T09:07:00.003-05:00

Volume 12 of the Journal of Web Semantics is a special issue on special lssue on reasoning with context in the Semantic Web edited by Jos Lehmann, Ivan Jose Varzinczak and Alan Bundy. Its ten articles shed direct or indirect light on the role of context in Semantic Web theories and applications. Preprints of the papers are now available on the Journal of Web Semantics preprint sever.

Introduction - Special Issue Reasoning with Context in the Semantic Web, Jos Lehmann, Ivan Jose Varzinczak and Alan Bundy
Representing and Querying Validity Time in RDF and OWL: A Logic-Based Approach, Boris Motik
Context-Dependent Views to Axioms and Consequences of Semantic Web Ontologies, Rafael Peñaloza, Franz Baader and Martin Knechtel
Towards a context sensitive approach to searching information based on domain specific knowledge sources, Duy Dinh and Lynda Tamine
Domains and context: first steps towards managing diversity in knowledge, Vincenzo Maltese, Fausto Giunchiglia and Biswanath Dutta
Contextualized Knowledge Repositories for the Semantic Web, Martin Homola and Luciano Serafini
Interactive ontology debugging: two query strategies for efficient fault localization, Kostyantyn Shchekotykhin, Gerhard Friedrich, Philipp Fleiss and Patrick Rodler
Higher-Order Aspects and Context in SUMO, Christoph Benzmüller and Adam Pease
An Interaction-Based Approach to Semantic Alignment, Manuel Atencia and Marco Schorlemmer
Reasoning-Supported Interactive Revision of Ontologies, Nadeschda Nikitina, Sebastian Rudolph and Birte Glimm
OWL-POLAR: A Framework for Semantic Policy Representation and Reasoning, Murat Sensoy, Timothy J Norman, Wamberto W Vasconcelos and Katia Sycara

Journal of Web Semantics

Preprint: Hidden Social Dynamics Behind Collaborative Ontology Engineering

cfp: Special Issue on Ontology-Based Data Access

Special Issue of the Journal of Web Semantics on Ontology-Based Data Access

Submission guidelines

Editors

Important dates

Andreas Hotho is new area editor for search and datamining

CFP: Special issue on Life Science and e-Science

Special issue of the Journal of Web Semanticson Life Science and e-Science

Important dates

Guest editors

Preprint: natural language interfaces for querying ontologies

JWS volume 17 preprints available

New JWS area editors and editorial board members

CFP: JWS special issue on Semantic Search

Submission guidelines

Posted Schedule

Contact Information

JWS volume 16 preprints available

Christian Bizer is new area editor for system papers

Preprints from JWS v15 n3

JWS preprint: FaBiO and CiTO: ontologies for describing bibliographic resources and citations

New letters on the preprint server

JWS preprint: Folksonomized Ontology and the 3E Steps Technique to Support Ontology Evolvement

JWS adds section for letters to the Journal

Three new papers from the 2011 Semantic Web Challenge

UK to support open access for publicly funded scientific research

Ian Horrocks appointed an Editor in Chief of the Journal of Web Semantics

JWS preprint: A Configurable Translation-Based Cross-Lingual Ontology Mapping System to Adjust Mapping Outcome

JWS preprint: Georeferencing Flickr Photos Using Language Models at Different Levels of Granularity: an Evidence Based Approach

JWS preprint: The SSN Ontology of the W3C Semantic Sensor Network Incubator Group

JWS preprint: Community Analysis through Semantic Rules and Role Composition Derivation

Journal of Web Semantics, v14

CFP: Special Issue on Data Linking, Journal of Web Semantics

Challenges

Topics of Interest

Important Dates

Instructions for submission

Editors

JWS special issue: reasoning with context in the Semantic Web, v12 (2012)

Special issue of the Journal of Web Semantics
on Life Science and e-Science