Journal of Web Semantics

Journal of Web Semantics, volume 11, 2012

2012-01-30T16:06:00.001-05:00

Preprints from the Journal of Web Semantics, volume 11 (2012)

Induction of Robust Classifiers for Web Ontologies through Kernel Machines, Nicola Fanizzi, Claudia d'Amato and Floriana Esposito
A Novel XML Document Structure Comparison Framework based-on Subtree Commonalities and Label Semantics, Joe M. Tekli and Richard Chbeir
Automatic Metadata Mining from Multilingual Enterprise Content, Sah Melike and Vincent Wade
Challenges for the Multilingual Web of Data, Jorge Garcia, Elena Montiel-Ponsoda, Philipp Cimiano, Asunción Gómez-Pérez, Paul Buitelaar and John McCrae
A General Framework for Representing, Reasoning and Querying with Annotated Semantic Web Data, Antoine Zimmermann, Axel Polleres, Nuno Lopes and Umberto Straccia
Where to Publish and Find Ontologies? A Survey of Ontology Libraries, Natasha F. Noy and Mathieu d'Aquin

JWS special issue on scalability

2012-01-28T11:03:00.002-05:00

Volume 10 of the Journal of Web Semantics is a Special Issue on Scalability edited by Jeff Heflin and Heiner Stuckenschmidt. Preprints from the issue, which includes a short introduction and four research papers, are available on the Journal of Web Semantics preprint server:

Editorial: Web-Scale Semantic Information Processing, Jeff Heflin and Heiner Stuckenschmidt
Scalable Distributed Indexing and Query Processing over Linked Data, Marcel Karnstedt, Kai-Uwe Sattler and Manfred Hauswirth
Searching Web Data: an Entity Retrieval and High-Performance Indexing Model, Renaud Delbru, Stephane Campinas and Giovanni Tummarello
WebPIE: A Web-scale parallel inference engine using MapReduce, Jacopo Urbani, Spyros Kotoulas, Jason Massen, Frank van Harmelen and Henri Bal
Scalable and Distributed Methods for Entity Matching, Consolidation and Disambiguation over Linked Data Corpora, Aidan Hogan, Antoine Zimmermann, Juergen Umbrich, Axel Polleres and Stefan Decker

JWS special issue on semantic sensing, 12/20 deadline

2011-12-04T11:19:00.003-05:00

December 20 is the deadline for Journal of Web Semantics special issue on semantic sensing, edited by Harith Alani, Oscar Corcho and Manfred Hauswirth.

Top Web technology conferences based on citation data

2011-11-27T17:29:00.003-05:00

Last week HCI researcher Antti Oulasvirta has an interesting post on ranking HCI conferences using the average citations per paper based on data from Microsoft Academic Search (MAS). Some of the results surprised him, including that the venerable CHI was not the top conference in this group.

WWW, ISWC and WebDB are the top Web conferences based on Microsoft Academic Search citation data

His ranking metric for conference significance is essentially the impact factor (IF) used for journals, a measure of the average number of citations a paper in a given journal receives in a time period. The IF metric has become widely used in the scholarly journal publication industry since it was defined by Eugene Garfield and first implemented by the company he founded, the Institute for Scientific Information.

Oulasvirta used data from Microsoft Academic Search (MAS), which provides citation and publication numbers for conferences in sixteen different subjects domains and a number of sub-domains for each. For computer science, there are 24 sub-domains including one for "World Wide Web" conferences.

Following Oulasvirta, we ranked Web technology conferences using the average number of citations received in the last ten years. Starting with 68 Web technology conferences (not a complete list, btw), we narrowed the set to those that had at least 100 papers in the past ten years and some papers in the past five. This resulted in 26 conferences, eliminating many series that only ran a few times or have stopped. Here are the results.

The results should only be taken as a rough estimate of conference impact. One reason is that IF is only a measure and does not take into account all aspects of scientific importance. For example, as computed here, all citations count equally, including those from high- and low-ranking sources. Another is that while Thompson-Reuters (nee ISI) journal citation data is carefully collected and curated, the Microsoft Academic Search data is the result of a largely automated process that starts with data from Bing. When I tried using the citation information from the past five years, for example, I noted that it reported 23 papers in the past five years for Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems. This is because the conference merged with User Modeling in 2009 to become User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization. Yet another shortcoming is that the MAS list of Web conferences in not complete, for example, omitting the popular ESWC, which has been running since 2004.

The original excel spreadsheet (with full conference names hidden in column B) and a PDF version are available from the UMBC Ebiquity site.

Elsevier press release on 2011 Semantic Web Challenge winners

2011-11-18T08:25:00.000-05:00

Elsevier published a press release on the awards for the winners of the 2011 Semantic Web Challenge.

"Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced the winners of the Semantic Web Challenge. Participants in the Challenge applied semantic web techniques in building online end-user applications that integrate, combine and deduce information needed to assist users in performing tasks. The Challenge took place at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2011) in Bonn, Germany, from October 23-27, 2011."

ISWC 2010 Meet the editors panel

2011-10-22T22:29:00.002-04:00

The Journal of Web Semantics is participating in a 'Meet the Editors' panel at ISWC 2011. The panel will be held 11:00-12:30 on the opening day of ISWC, Tuesday October 25 and chaired by Rudi Studer of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute AIFB.

There are now more than half a dozen journals that publish semantic-web related research, and it is often difficult for authors to navigate this landscape. In this panel discussion, the editors from these journals will help the authors understand the different focus of each journal, the rewards and perils of journal publishing, and the steps in preparing their research for journal publications. The editors will then answer the authors' questions. The editors of the following journals will participate in the discussion.

Artificial Intelligence Journal: Frank van Harmelen, Associate Editor
Journal of Web Semantics: Tim Finin, Editor In Chief
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies: Enrico Motta, Editor In Chief
Applied Ontology: Michael Gruninger, Associate Editor
Semantic Web Journal : Krzysztof Janowicz, Editor In Chief
International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems : Amit Sheth, Editor In Chief
IEEE Intelligent Systems: Jim Hendler, Editor In Cheif Emeritus
Journal on Data Semantics: Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Co-editor

Preprints from JWS v9n3

2011-10-22T22:09:00.000-04:00

Preprints from Journal of Web Semantics v9 n3 are now available on the preprint server. These include papers on Semantic Web Dynamics and papers from the 2010 Semantic Web Challenge.

Special Issue on Evaluation of Semantic Technologies

2011-09-02T14:14:00.005-04:00

Call For Papers

Special Issue on Evaluation of Semantic Technologies

Journal of Web Semantics

Semantic technologies have become a well-established field of computer science. However, the field is continuously evolving: the number of semantic technologies is constantly increasing, standards evolve and new ones are defined; and, in this scenario, the problem of how to compare and evaluate the various approaches becomes crucial. The consistent evaluation of semantic technologies is critical not only for future scientific progress, by identifying research goals and allowing a rigorous examination of research results, but also for their industrial adoption, by allowing objective measurement and comparison of these technologies and enabling their certification.

Semantic technology evaluation must, on the one hand, be supported by strong methodological approaches and relevant test data and, on the other hand, satisfy the differing needs of developers, researchers and adopters by addressing those quality characteristics that are relevant to each target group. Nevertheless, numerous issues must be faced when evaluating semantic technologies.

On the one hand, because of the fast evolution of the semantic field, previous evaluation methods and techniques need to be adapted and extended and new ones have to be developed. On the other hand, the cost of defining new evaluations methods or reusing existing ones can be prohibitive, so facilitating the understanding of such methods or their automated processing becomes highly significant.

The goal of this special issue is to present current advances and trends in semantic technology evaluation (theories and models, methods and techniques, evaluation campaigns, technology comparison, etc.). Therefore we solicit papers that improve evaluation paradigms of semantic technologies. At the same time papers that evaluate a particular method, technology or system without investigating the evaluation regime itself will be considered out of scope and will be returned to the authors with no review.

Topics of interest

Relevant topics for the special issue include, but are not limited to, the following.

Semantic technology evaluation methods
Test data for semantic technology evaluation
Automation of semantic technology evaluation
Evaluation of semantic technologies in real world scenarios
Evaluation of linked data technologies
Quality requirements for semantic technologies
Semantic technology certification
Maturity models for semantic technologies
Semantic technology selection
Semantic technology quality estimation
Interoperability and conformance of semantic technologies
Semantic technology efficiency and scalability
Usability of semantic technologies

Important dates

We will aim at an efficient publication cycle in order to guarantee prompt availability of the published results. To this end, we encourage submissions well before the submission deadline.

Submission deadline. 29 February 2012
Author notification. 31 May 2012
Final version. 31 July 2012
Publication. Fall 2012

Instructions for submission

Please see the author guidelines for detailed instructions before you submit. Submissions should be conducted through Elsevier’s Electronic Submission System. More details on the Journal of Web Semantics can be found on its homepage.

Editors

Raúl García-Castro (rgarcia@fi.upm.es), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Heiner Stuckenschmidt, University of Mannheim
Stuart Wrigley, University of Sheffield
Jeff Heflin, Lehigh University

Semantic Sensing JWS Special Issue

2011-07-27T09:03:00.008-04:00

Special Issue on Semantic Sensing Journal of Web Semantics

Editors:

Harith Alani (Open University)
Oscar Corcho (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)
Manfred Hauswirth (DERI)

The Journal of Web Semantics announces a call for papers for a special issue on semantic sensing edited by Harith Alani, Oscar Corcho and Manfred Hauswirth. We will review papers on a rolling basis and explicitly encourage submissions well before the final deadline of 20 December 2011.

Motivation

The areas of social media, mobile communication networks, pervasive environments, and Internet of Things are currently converging towards novel integrated communication environments to deliver information in a context-dependent form whenever and wherever the user needs it. In future communication systems, sensors will become a central information provider about the user's physical environment, which needs to be integrated with the user's preferences, the user's online communication channels and social connections along with any relevant information from Web-based information systems. We use the term sensor here to refer to any device that supplies time-dependent information about the real world, including human-generated information.

Semantic technologies are becoming increasingly popular for providing descriptive and structured integration layers for the heterogenous sensor networks and other information sources mentioned above. Semantics are used to describe, map, and reason over the data from these sources by turning the data into machine processable and sharable structured knowledge.

On the scientific side this vision requires research into information-driven integration of sensing technologies, self-organization, large-scale stream information management - all with semantics as a core building block to support optimal use of these information sources but also to enable simple and flexible cross-layer integration on a technical level. This knowledge layer on top of the Internet of Things is a critical enabler for the Sensor Web.

However, until now the virtual world of information sources and activities in the real world are still largely disconnected: Knowledge accessible on the Web (the virtual world) may influence activities in the real world and vice versa. However, these influences are usually indirect and not immediate, usually only by means of custom-built, closed applications. Several challenges arise at different layers.

On the networking side, this requires IP-based access to smart objects and sensors (Internet-connected Objects) as a unifying network layer which is already being addressed by significant efforts, e.g., CoAP, 6LoWPAN, and ROLL.

On the distributed systems/middleware layer, self-organization mechanisms along with flexible service abstractions to cut the cost and complexity of application development are necessary.

At the database and Web layers, data access is essential with support for semantics and stream processing, as future communication systems depend on the efficient, machine-supported access to time-dependent information. Specifically, this requires flexible platforms to connect information coming from Internet-connected Objects and mobile devices into the Web, for example, by means of the linked data paradigm, to serve as the basis for semantic knowledge management approaches which equally take into account the virtual and physical side, specifically addressing the strong time-dependency of information and the resource constraints of the information producers and consumers. A particular challenge here is that the semantic layers need to take into account the resource constraints of the underlying sensing layers.

At the user interface layers, dynamic data coming from information sources, and their connections to other information sources, have to be visualised effectively in order to support decision making.

Topics of Interest

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

Approaches for efficiently producing and processing stream data
Linked stream data
Stream reasoning
RESTful and linked data approaches for semantic data streams
Opportunistic sensing with semantics
RDF/Linked Data storage and processing on sensors and mobile devices
Pub-/sub-systems and middleware for semantic sensing application
Semantic cloud sensing
Semantic integration of sensor data with online data
Semantic sensing user interfaces

Important Dates

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

Submission deadline: 20 December 2011
Notification: 31 March 2012
Final version submitted: 31 May 2012
Publication: Fall 2012

See the JWS Guide for Authors for details on the submission process.

JWS special issue on the Semantic and Social Web

2011-07-26T11:52:00.003-04:00

Call for Papers: JWS Special Issue The Semantic and Social Web

Guest Editors

John Breslin, NUI Galway, Ireland
Meena Nagarajan, IBM Research, Almaden, CA, USA

The Social Web has grown considerably in the past six or seven years, with the emergence of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and WordPress.com. Most sites on the Social Web offer similar functionality: users share content (be it photos, blog posts, videos, bookmarks, etc.); users connect with other users, either directly or via common interests often reflected by shared content; users add free-text tags or keywords to content; users comment on content items; and so on. There is a huge amount of inherently-meaningful metadata being made available on the Social Web through content creation, the formation of social networks, and other tasks being performed on these sites. However, much of the Social Web exists as data silos, with connections and content items (and their associated metadata) locked into various services, either by design or a because of a lack of standardization across these sites.

In parallel with the development of the Social Web, the Semantic Web has put in standards and mechanisms for exchanging data between services, for creating agreed-upon vocabularies of terms in particular domains, and for enabling information integration across distributed data providers. It has traditionally suffered from a 'chicken-and-egg' problem, where there was a lack of interesting applications due to a lack of data adhering to Semantic Web standards, but with the emergence of the Social Web, a large amount of data is being created on a daily basis by millions of users, and this provides a very rich data source for semantically-enabled applications to work with. The Semantic Web can also assist with the data silo issue referred to previously, by providing a set of common vocabularies for data exchange between sites on the Social Web (e.g. FOAF, SIOC, MOAT, Facebook OGP, etc.).

In this special issue, we solicit papers that tackle challenges or issues relating to the Social Web using semantic technologies, and to using social techniques to solve problems in the Semantic Web space. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following.

Enriching the Social Web with semantic metadata: RDF, microformats, or other frameworks
Mining and analysis of data from the Social Web
Semantic microblogging
Semantic wikis and creating semantic knowledge bases using Social Web systems
Semantic blogging or other tools to assist with writing posts
Data portability and social network portability
The Social Web and linked data
Developing vocabularies for the Social Web, or working with existing vocabularies
Semantic reasoning for Social Web applications
Social bookmarking enhanced with semantics, semantic tagging and annotation
Unifying domain vocabularies by mining over collective behavior (tagging, sharing, etc.)
Using semantic technologies to integrate data from the Social Web
Security and trust in the Social Web based on semantics
Producing and querying semantic data from sites on the Social Web
Other emerging semantic applications for the Social Web

Important Dates

We aim at an efficient publication cycle in order to guarantee up-to-dateness of the published results. We will review papers on a rolling basis as they are submitted and explicitly encourage submissions well before the final deadline.

Submission deadline: 21 January 2012
Reviews due: 18 March 2012
Notification: 30 March 2012
Final version submitted: 27 April 2012
Publication: July 2012

Call to Host the 2013 International Semantic Web Conference

2011-06-14T17:58:00.002-04:00

The Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) is seeking statements of interest from organizations or consortia interested in hosting the 12th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2013. The conference series usually moves regularly between the Americas, Europe, and the Asia/Pacific region. For the 2013 edition, we will accept bids from all locations, but we will give preference to the bids from the Asia/Pacific region. We expect the conference to take place in late October or early November 2013.

Organizations wishing to host ISWC 2013 should contact SWSA Secretary Dr. Natasha Noy who will work with the SWSA members who are co-ordinating the bidding process for ISWC 2013.

The process comprises two stages. During the first stage, SWSA solicits the statements of interest through an open call. They should be submitted using the statement of interest form. Once the first phase is complete, SWSA will shortlist a number of applications, who will be invited to submit a full proposal, using a standard form and budget template. More information about the ISWC Conference Series and the bidding process for hosting a conference in the series can be found in the ISWC Conference Guide.

The important dates for applying to host a Conference in 2013 are:

August 1, 2011: Deadline for receiving statements of interest
September 15, 2011: Notifications to shortlisted bids are sent out
October 20, 2011: Formal applications received from shortlisted bids
October 24 or 25, 2011: Presentation of the bid at the SWSA meeting in Bonn, Germany
October 25, 2011: SWSA decides the location of the 2013 conference

New Journal of Web Semantics preprint server

2011-04-12T14:52:00.003-04:00

The new Journal of Web Semantics preprint server is now online. Final drafts of accepted papers will be added to the preprint server as papers are accepted for publication, making a preprint available as soon as possible.

We are currently loading papers from back issues into the preprint server as time permits. The preprint server is based on the Open Journal Systems software and hosted by Gesis, the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.

After drafts are on the preprint server, they enter Elsevier's production pipeline in which they are professionally copy edited, formatted for the journal, and proofed by the authors. The result is assigned a DOI and put online as a JWS article in press available to to individual and institutional subscribers. When the article is assigned to an issue and printed, the final copy will be available online to subscribers in Elsevier's Science Direct system.

We would like to thank the people who helped stand up the new preprint server, including Ute Koch of Gesis, Kaixuan Wang of the University of Manchester, and Silke Werger of the University of Koblenz and Landau.

New JWS preprint server

2011-04-12T14:52:00.001-04:00

JWS special issue on the Semantic Web in a Mobile World

2011-03-06T12:54:00.006-05:00

Call for Papers

Special Issue of the Journal of Web Semantics on
Semantic Web in a Mobile World

Mobile users’ information needs are becoming more important than ever. It is estimated that access to the Internet by mobile phones will exceed desktop computers by 2013. This will make Internet-enabled mobile devices the key access point to the information and service infrastructure of the Internet. When accessing the web with a mobile device, one is not only overwhelmed with the information provided but also hampered by the limitations mobile devices have such as limited interaction possibilities and smaller display size.

On the other hand, mobile devices provide various sensors, for instance GPS/aGPS, accelerometer, compass, microphone, and cameras. These sensors can enable capturing the users’ context and using the context to addressing the mobile users’ needs. The Semantic Web is of high benefit for mobile computing. Not only does it provide a common interlingua for devices to reason and negotiate about context, it also provides a lot of “facts” that can be used in inferring context, such as knowledge about individuals, places, organizations, and events. The availability of such information has blossomed since the advent of the Linked Data movement in 2007. However, such a Mobile Semantic Computing is still in its early beginnings.

In this special issue, we invite original work in the area of Mobile Semantic Computing that show innovative solutions and demonstrate the benefits of semantic technologies for mobile devices and mobile applications. Besides a solid research contribution, we expect systems and applications that have been evaluated with respect to its usefulness. In addition, we like to see contributions that share their data set or make services they use publicly available.

Topics of Interest

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

RDF/Linked Data storage and processing on mobile devices
Data and information management on mobile devices
Reasoning on mobile devices
Mobile indexing and retrieving of multimedia data such as audio, video, images, and text
Pub-/sub-systems and middleware for mobile semantic applications
Scalability and performance of semantic mobile technologies
Mobile semantic user profiling and context modeling
Mobile semantic cloud computing
Interoperability of mobile semantic applications
Browsing semantic data on mobile devices
Mobile semantic annotation and peer tagging
Mobile semantic mash-ups
Mobile semantic multimedia
Mobile applications for the social semantic web
Mobile semantic e-learning and collaboration
Location-aware mobile semantic applications
Mobile semantic eGovernment applications and services
Innovative and novel user interfaces for mobile semantic applications
Development methods and tools for mobile semantic applications
Privacy and security for mobile semantic devices and applications
Data sets for the mobile semantic web

Important Dates

Submission of papers October 1, 2011
Acceptance/revision notification: December 20, 2011
Revised manuscript due: February 29, 2012
Final acceptance notification: May 1, 2012
Final manuscript due: June 15, 2012
Tentative publication: August/September 2012

Submissions

Submissions should be conducted through Elsevier’s Electronic Submission System . More details on the Journal of Web Semantics can be found on its homepage. Please see the author guidelines for detailed instructions before you submit.

Guest Editors

Ansgar Scherp, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
Anupam Joshi, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA

JWS special issue: reasoning with context in the Semantic Web

2011-03-04T09:50:00.009-05:00

Call for Papers

Special Issue of the Journal of Web Semantics on

Reasoning with context in the Semantic Web

New submission deadline: 26 June 2011

Mechanisms for reasoning with context have become increasingly important factors in the Semantic Web. There is a growing need for general and robust reasoning techniques that make it possible to integrate heterogeneous knowledge or to use homogeneous knowledge across different domains.

Research on this topic has so far, and not surprisingly, concentrated on formal ontologies, i.e., on the logical structures that encode the semantics of a software's domain of application. Work on the Semantic Web as well as on information integration, distributed knowledge management, multi-agent and distributed reasoning has focussed on the relationship between an ontology and its context. This has aimed at clarifying how to relate knowledge that is distributed over many resources. Recent Semantic Web specific developments suggest that aspects of this relation can be captured by means of named graphs (to express meta-information), the use of provenance (to track the context where data/axioms came from) and querying (to facilitate reasoning).

Other neighbouring research areas, though, have also investigated topics that shed light on how to reason with context in the Semantic Web. Ontology Engineering and Maintenance, for instance, has tackled the problems faced by ontology engineers when developing and maintaining an ontology. The yielded automation of the process of ontology development and of its phases (e.g. knowledge elicitation, revision cycles, alignment with pre-existing ontologies etc.) has improved efficiency, reduced the introduction of unintended meanings into ontologies and in general made explicit the relationship between an ontology and its development context.

Finally, research on Problem Solving and Agent Communication has explored how an agent's ontology needs to change at run-time because of interactions with its context - for instance with other agents whose ontologies are not known or with new non-classifiable world situations. This type of research has delivered a deeper understanding of the evolution of an ontology and is often based on non-monotonic reasoning, belief revision or changes of signature, i.e., of the grammar of the ontology's language, with a minimal disruption to the original theory.

Topics of interest

This special issue aims at bringing together work on reasoning with context in the Semantic Web from the integration, development and evolutionary perspectives described above. Submitted articles, which may describe either theoretical results or applications, must clearly pertain to the Semantic Web and/or to semantic technologies. They should present either Semantic Web specific approaches to reasoning with context, or approaches that have characteristics that are interesting for the Semantic Web (e.g., scalability, bounded reasoning), or approaches that are of value to a larger community containing a non-trivial Semantic Web sub-community (e.g., revision/update techniques and error pin-pointing).

Submissions are welcome on topics relevant to reasoning with context in the Semantic Web and that include but are not limited to the following.

Named graphs
Provenance
Knowledge representation languages for semantic technologies
Planning and reasoning about action and change in the Semantic Web
Ontology fault diagnosis and repair
Pinpointing of logical errors in contexts and ontologies
Explanation and justifications in DL ontologies
Ontology and context evolution, debugging, update and merging
Inconsistency handling in contexts and ontologies
Uncertainty handling, defeasible reasoning and argumentation in ontologies
Non-classical belief revision
Context revision and theory change in DL ontologies
Ontology and context versioning
Semantic difference in ontologies and in contexts
Information and knowledge integration
The role of context and ontology in distributed reasoning and knowledge management
Heuristic and approximate reasoning
Bounded reasoning and bounded rationality in the Semantic Web
Adaptive systems and reconfiguration
Ontology-based data access
Querying
Multi-Agent systems in the Semantic Web
Temporal and spatial reasoning
Normative reasoning in the Semantic Web
General problem solving for semantic technologies
Machine learning for the Semantic Web
Philosophical foundations of reasoning about context and ontology evolution
Comparison of uses of contexts and ontologies

How to submit

Maximal length of submissions is 25 pages. Authors should upload submissions on Elsevier's Electronic Submission System choosing "Reasoning with context in SW" as the article type. See the Author Guide for more detailed instructions.

Important dates

Submission deadline: 15 26 June 2011
First-round reviews: 5 September 2011
Revised papers submitted: 30 September 2011
Final acceptance decisions: 31 October 2011
Tentative publication date: April 2012

Guest editors

Alan Bundy (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom)
Jos Lehmann (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom)
Ivan Varzinczak (CSIR Meraka Institute, South Africa)

Send enquiries and communications to organization[at]arcoe[dot]org

SWSA seeks bids for ISWC 2012, 11th Int. Semantic Web Conf.

2010-09-06T18:43:00.006-04:00

The Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) is seeking statements of interest from organizations or consortia interested in hosting the 11th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2012. The conference series moves regularly between the Americas, Europe, and the Asia/Pacific region and we expect that the 2012 edition will be held in the US Americas in late October or early November 2012.

Organizations wishing to host ISWC 2012 should contact SWSA President Professor James Hendler (swsa-president@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de) who will work with the SWSA members who are co-ordinating the bidding process for ISWC 2012.

The process comprises two stages. During the first stage, statements of interest are solicited through an open call that request responses using a simple form. Once the first phase is complete, SWSA will shortlist a number of applications, who will be invited to submit a full proposal, using a standard form and budget template. More information about the ISWC Conference Series and the bidding process for hosting a conference in the series can be found in the ISWC Conference Guide.

The important dates for applying to host a Conference in 2012 are:

September 30, 2010: Deadline for receiving statements of interest
November 15, 2010: Notifications to shortlisted bids are sent out
January 15, 2011: Formal applications received from shortlisted bids
March 1, 2011: SWSA decides on location for the 2012 Conference

JWS 2009 impact factor is highest yet: 3.412

2010-06-18T13:49:00.003-04:00

Thomson Reuters has released their 2009 Journal Citation Report and we are happy to report that the Journal of Web Semantics impact factor has risen to 3.412, the fifth highest among the 116 journals in its category, "Computer Science, Information systems." This is the highest impact factor score for the JWS to date.

Thomson Reuter's journal impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. The 2009 impact factor is computed as the citations received in 2009 from journals indexed by Thompson to all JWS articles published in 2007 and 2008, divided by the number of JWS "source items" published in 2007 and 2008. If your institution has access to the ISI Web of Knowledge, you may be able to access their Journal Citation Report online.

Journal impact factors are not perfect measure of a journal's quality, but are generally regarded as meaningful and, perhaps, the best objective measure we have. Our high ranking is a very good sign and a testament to the hard work of many people -- area editors, editorial board, advisory board, reviewers, authors and especially Silke Werger, who runs the JWS editorial office. We thank everyone for all of the work -- it's made a difference.

CFP: Using Provenance in the Semantic Web

2010-03-15T11:02:00.004-04:00

Journal of Web Semantics Special Issue on

Using Provenance in the Semantic Web

Editors: Yolanda Gil, University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute and Paul Groth, Free University of Amsterdam

The Web is a decentralized system full of information provided by diverse open sources of varying quality. For any given question there will be a multitude of answers offered, raising the need for assessing their relative value and for making decisions about what sources to trust. In order to make effective use of the Web, we routinely evaluate the information we get, the sources that provided it, and the processes that produced it. A trust layer was always present in the Web architecture, and Berners-Lee envisioned an “oh-yeah?” button in the browser to check the sources of an assertion. The Semantic Web raises these questions in the context of automated applications (e.g. reasoners, aggregators, or agents), whether trying to answer questions using the Linked Data cloud, use a mashup appropriately or determine trust on a social network. Therefore, provenance is an important aspect of the Web that becomes crucial in Semantic Web research.

This special issue on Using Provenance in the Semantic Web of the Journal of Web Semantics aims to collect representative research in handling provenance while using and reasoning about information and resources on the web. Provenance has been addressed in a variety of areas in computer science targeting specific contexts, such as databases and scientific workflows. Provenance is important in a variety of contexts, including open science, open government, and intellectual property and copyright. Provenance requirements must be understood for specific kinds of Web resources, such as documents, services, ontologies, workflows, and datasets.

We seek high quality submissions that describe recent projects, articulate research challenges, or put forward synergistic perspectives on provenance. We solicit submissions that advance the Semantic Web through exploiting provenance, addressing research issues including:

representing provenance
relating provenance to the underlying data and information
managing provenance in a distributed web
reasoning about trust based on provenance
handling incomplete provenance
taking advantage of the web’s structure for provenance

Submissions may focus on uses of provenance in the Semantic Web for:

linked data
social networking
data integration
inference from diverse sources
trust and proof

Papers may also focus on application areas, highlighting the challenges and benefits of using provenance:

provenance in open science
provenance in open government
provenance in copyright and intellectual property for documents
provenance in web publishing

Important Dates

We will aim at an efficient publication cycle in order to guarantee prompt availability of the published results. We will review papers on a rolling basis as they are submitted and explicitly encourage submissions well before the submission deadline. Submit papers online at the journal's Elsevier Web site.

Submission deadline: 5 20 September 2010
Author notification: 15 December 2010
Revisions submitted: 1 February 2010
Final decisions: 15 March 2011
Publication: 1 April 2011

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 "Guide for Authors" (available from the publisher), details can be found online. 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.

About the Journal of Web Semantics

The Journal of Web Semantics is published by Elsevier since 2003. It is an interdisciplinary journal based on research and applications of various subject areas that contribute to the development of a knowledge-intensive and intelligent service Web. These areas include: knowledge technologies, ontology, agents, databases and the semantic grid, obviously disciplines like information retrieval, language technology, human-computer interaction and knowledge discovery are of major relevance as well. All aspects of the Semantic Web development are covered.

The current Editors-in-Chief are Tim Finin, Riichiro Mizoguchi and Steffen Staab. For all editors information, see our site.

The Journal of Web Semantics offers to its authors and readers:

Professional support with publishing by Elsevier staff
Indexed by Thomson-Reuters web of science
Impact factor 3.41: the third highest out of 92 titles in Thomson-Reuters' category "Computer Science, Information Systems

cfp: Web-scale Semantic Information Processing

2010-01-22T06:14:00.017-05:00

Web-scale Semantic Information Processing

Note revised dates

One of the greatest challenges for the Semantic Web is achieving web-scale. While the information retrieval community has developed successful strategies for coping with the scale of the web using statistical techniques, semantic web technologies are still struggling with scaling up to the web as such. This is in part due to the need to preserve the data’s structure and the need to perform various forms of reasoning in order to more effectively leverage the available information. The need to handle vast amounts of structured data on the web is now widely recognized and efforts like the Billion Triples Challenge have been launched to advance the state of the art with this respect.

For this special issue, we seek papers that present algorithms and architectures that help semantic web systems achieve any form of scalability possessed by contemporary, state-of-the-art web applications, including, but not limited to:

answering queries and/or reasoning with billions of triples
operating over hundreds of ontologies or schemas simultaneously
supporting hundreds of thousands of users and/or concurrently handling semantic web requests from thousands of users

Accepted papers will have to provide detailed descriptions of their algorithms, architectures, and data structures and include systematic empirical evaluations that clearly demonstrate their claims of scalability. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

semantic web search engines,
benchmark evaluations of the state-of-the-art systems
systems that process data streams from multiple sensors
parallel and distributed reasoning,

The Journal of Web Semantics is published by Elsevier since 2003. It is an interdisciplinary journal based on research and applications of various subject areas that contribute to the development of a knowledge intensive and intelligent service Web. These areas include: knowledge technologies, ontology, agents, databases and the semantic grid, obviously disciplines like information retrieval, language technology, human computer interaction and knowledge discovery are of major relevance as well. All aspects of the Semantic Web development are covered. The Journal of Web Semantics offers to its authors and readers:

Professional support with publishing by Elsevier staff
Indexed by Thomson Reuters web of science
Impact factor 3.41: the third highest out of 92 titles in Thomson Reuters' category "Computer Science, Information Systems"

Submissions should describe original contributions and should not have been published or submitted elsewhere. Submissions based on conference papers should be extended and include a reference to the corresponding proceedings.

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 Editorial System (http://ees.elsevier.com/jws/). Final decisions of accepted papers will be approved by an editor in chief.

The schedule for the special issue is the following:

Submissions Due: ~~July 1st 2010~~ October 1, 2010
Notification: ~~December 1st 2010~~ January 15, 2011
Revised Papers: ~~February 1st 2011~~ February 15, 2011
Final Decision: April 1st 2011
Camera Ready Version: May 1st 2011

For any further questions regarding the special issue (appropriateness of your contribution, editorial issues, etc.), please feel free to contact the guest editors:

Prof. Dr. Heiner Stuckenschmidt (managing guest editor)
Computer Science Institute
University of Mannheim
B6, 26 68159 Mannheim
Germany
Phone.: +49 621 181 2530
Fax: +49 621 181 2682
Email: heiner@informatik.uni-mannheim.de

Jeff Heflin
Associate Professor
Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
Lehigh University, 19 Memorial Drive West
Bethlehem, PA 18015
Phone: +1 610 758-6533
Fax: +1 610 758-4096
E-Mail: heflin@cse.lehigh.edu

Special Issue on Semantic Web Dynamics

2010-01-22T05:55:00.003-05:00

CALL FOR PAPERS Special Issue on Semantic Web Dynamics

Description

Recent years have witnessed the arrival of more and more semantically annotated data and related ontologies in the Semantic Web. For example, the linked data initiative has been very successful in making datasets available online, with a total of about 5 billion triples all together so far. While existing semantic tools and reasoning engines are year after year getting better in dealing with time invariant domain of ontological knowledge, supporting rapidly changing information has not yet attracted sufficient attention.

There are more and more heterogeneous and/or dynamic data types being created and which integration could lead to interesting applications and models (e.g. sensor data streams, geospatial information and imagery, financial transactions, news feeds, 3D models, engineering data, information for policy intelligence etc.). Current Stream Database Management Systems provide on the fly analysis of data streams, but they suffer several limitations: they cannot handle heterogeneous data streams originating from a variety of already deployed sensors; they cannot combine data streams with slowly evolving knowledge at query time; and they cannot perform reasoning tasks. And in the area of reasoning, while the problem of classical, time invariant domain of ontological knowledge has been extensively studied, the task of reasoning with rapidly changing information has been mostly neglected and constitutes a new challenge.

Furthermore, ontologies, just like any structure holding knowledge and information, need to be updated too: changes could be initiated because of a change in the world being modelled; or by a change in the users’ needs which would require a different conceptualization; or by the acquisition of knowledge previously unknown, unclassified or otherwise unavailable; or by the noticing of a design flaw in the original conceptualization. In all these cases, the representation of knowledge in the ontology should be modified so as to form a more accurate or adequate conceptualization of the domain.

This general issue of Semantic Web Dynamics includes difficulties from both practical and theoretical points of view, raising a variety of research questions and development challenges, such as how to support the ontology and data publishers in maintaining up-to-date, adequate representations; how to detect the need for evolution and changes; how to facilitate the integration of new, dynamic sources in existing datasets and ontologies; how to validate and evaluate the impact of the changes on semantic information; how to handle changes triggered from multiple sources and collaborative updates; and how to keep track of (possibly concurrent) versions of and ensure the delivery of up-to-date and valid knowledge.

Topics of Interest

For this special issue, we seek articles describing foundational and theoretical work as well as technological solutions to these challenges. More specifically, we expect submission on (but not restricted to) the following topics:

Foundational and formal aspects of Semantic Web dynamics
Language extensions for Semantic Web dynamics
Reasoning with dynamic data and ontologies
Engineering dynamic data and ontologies
Requirements and practical issues for Semantic Web dynamics
Applications of dynamic data and ontologies
Theory for stream reasoning
Logic language for stream reasoning
Scalability issues in stream reasoning
Ontologies for dynamic environments
Dynamic knowledge building, and (re-)use
Ontology evolution and versioning
Language extensions for evolution
Belief revision for ontologies
Change propagation in ontologies dynamic datasets and ontologies
Inconsistency in evolving semantic information
Incremental reasoning
Case studies and applications of ontology and knowledge evolution
Tools to support dynamic data and ontologies

Important Dates

~~31 May 2010: Submission deadline~~
14 June 2010: Submission deadline
31 August 2010: First-round reviews complete
31 October 2010: Revised papers submitted
23 December 2010: Final acceptance decisions

Method of Submission

Submission should be realized through Elsevier's Electronic Submission system (EES), selecting "Special Issue: Semantic Web Dynamics" as article type. A guide for authors is available concerning the use of this system here.

Guest Editors/Contacts

Grigoris Antoniou - FORTH, Greece (antoniou@ics.forth.gr)
Mathieu d’Aquin - The Open University, United Kingdom (m.daquin@open.ac.uk)
Jeff Z. Pan - University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom (jeff.z.pan@abdn.ac.uk)

Follow JWS on facebook and twitter

2009-11-11T09:23:00.001-05:00

The Journal of Web Semantics now has a facebook page and a Twitter account to augment this blog. All three will be used for news and announcements of call for papers, special issues, availability of new papers, etc. As you might expect, the tweets will be terse items, the facebook updates longer notes and the blog posts full of details. Those who are interested can follow @journalWebSem on Twitter, become a fan of the JWS on facebook, and subscribe to this blog's feed.

JWS special issue on semantic search

2009-11-08T11:50:00.007-05:00

Yong Yu and Rudi Studer are editing a special issue of the Journal of Web Semantics on “Semantic Search” that will appear in the summer 2010. Semantic technologies, namely expressive ontology and resource description languages, scalable repositories, reasoning engines and information extraction techniques are now in a mature state such that they can be applied to enable a higher level of semantic underpinning in real‐world 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 annotation frameworks as well as scalable algorithms and infrastructures, (iii) investigating innovative query paradigms for semantic search systems, and (iv) applying machine learning and information extraction techniques in the context of semantic search. This special issue will cover interdisciplinary topics between Semantic Web and search. These include but are not limited to:

Information retrieval tasks on the Semantic Web
Incentives and interaction paradigms for resource annotation
Interaction paradigms for semantic search
Semantic technologies for query interpretation, refinement and routing
Modeling expressive resource descriptions
natural language processing and information extractions for the acquisition of resource descriptions
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 procedure to deal with vagueness, incompleteness and inconsistencies in semantic search
Evaluation methodologies for semantic search
Standard datasets and benchmarks for semantic search

We solicit contributions to tackle the above mentioned challenges, as well as reports on novel applications with the potential to push semantic search practical.

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.

Important Dates

Papers due Jan 20, 2010
Reviews due March 14, 2010
Notification due March 20, 2010
Final Revisions by April 16, 2010
Publication July 2010

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:

Yong Yu (yyu at apex sjtu edu cn)
Rudi Studer (studer at aifb uni-karlsruhe de)

JWS special issue on Semantic Web dynamics

2009-11-07T10:15:00.012-05:00

Furthermore, ontologies, just like any structure holding knowledge and information, need to be updated too: changes could be initiated because of a change in the world being modeled; or by a change in the users’ needs which would require a different conceptualization; or by the acquisition of knowledge previously unknown, unclassified or otherwise unavailable; or by the noticing of a design flaw in the original conceptualization. In all these cases, the representation of knowledge in the ontology should be modified so as to form a more accurate or adequate conceptualization of the domain.

Topics of Interest

Foundational and formal aspects of Semantic Web dynamics
Language extensions for Semantic Web dynamics
Reasoning with dynamic data and ontologies
Engineering dynamic data and ontologies
Requirements and practical issues for Semantic Web dynamics
Applications of dynamic data and ontologies
Theory for stream reasoning
Logic language for stream reasoning
Scalability issues in stream reasoning
Ontologies for dynamic environments
Dynamic knowledge building, and (re-)use
Ontology evolution and versioning
Language extensions for evolution
Belief revision for ontologies
Change propagation in ontologies dynamic datasets and ontologies
Inconsistency in evolving semantic information
Incremental reasoning
Case studies and applications of ontology and knowledge evolution
Tools to support dynamic data and ontologies

Important Dates

31 May 2010: Submission deadline
31 August 2010: First-round reviews complete
31 October 2010: Revised papers submitted
23 December 2010: Final acceptance decisions

Method of Submission

Papers must be submitted using the online submission and editorial system for the Journal of Web Semantics.

Guest Editors

Grigoris Antoniou (FORTH, Greece)
Mathieu d’Aquin (The Open University, United Kingdom)
Jeff Z. Pan (University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom)

Journal of Web Semantics maintains high impact factor

2009-07-05T11:17:00.003-04:00

The latest Journal Citation Reports (2009) published by Thomson Reuters shows that the Journal of Web Semantics continues to enjoy a very high impact factor. The 2008 measure was 3.023, which was the 12th highest out of the 94 journals in the category of Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence. Thomson Reuter’s journal impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. The 2008 impact factor is computed as the citations received in 2008 to all articles published in 2006 and 2007, divided by the number of “source items” published in 2006 and 2007.

CFP: JWS special issue on Semantic Web and Social Media

2009-06-27T10:17:00.014-04:00

important dates
abstracts	21 Sept 09
submissions	01 Oct 09
notification	15 Dec 09
final copy	15 Jan 10
publication	April 10

The Journal of Web Semantics will publish a special issue on Data Mining and Social Network Analysis for integrating Semantic Web and Web 2.0 in the spring of 2010. The special issue will be edited by Bettina Berendt, Andreas Hotho and Gerd Stumme and initial abstracts for papers must be submitted via the Elsevier EES system by September 21, 2009. The special issue, invites contributions that show how synergies between Semantic Web and Web 2.0 techniques can be successfully used. Since both communities work on network-like data structures, analysis methods from different fields of research could form a link between those communities. Techniques can be - but are not limited to - social network analysis, graph analysis, machine learning and data mining methods. Relevant topics include

ontology learning from Web 2.0 data
instance extraction from Web 2.0 systems
analysis of Blogs
discovering social structures and communities
predicting trends and user behaviour
analysis of dynamic networks
using content of the Web for modelling
discovering misuse and fraud
network analysis of social resource sharing systems
analysis of folksonomies and other Web 2.0 data structures
analysis of Web 2.0 applications and their data
deriving profiles from usage
personalized delivery of news and journals
Semantic Web personalization
Semantic Web technologies for recommender systems
ubiquitous data mining in Web (2.0) environment
applications