Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Follow JWS on facebook and twitter

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.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

CfP: JWS special issue on semantic search


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)

Saturday, November 7, 2009

CfP: JWS special issue on Semantic Web dynamics

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 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.
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
  • 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

Sunday, July 5, 2009

Journal of Web Semantics maintains high impact factor

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.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

CFP: JWS special issue on Semantic Web and Social Media

important dates
abstracts21 Sept 09
submissions01 Oct 09
notification15 Dec 09
final copy15 Jan 10
publicationApril 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

Thursday, January 15, 2009

CfP: JWS special issue on New Interaction Designs

Special issue of the Journal of Web Semantics on

Exploring New Interaction Designs Made Possible by the Semantic Web

Overview

Note: paper deadline extended to April 30.
In this special issue of the Journal of Web Semantics we seek papers that look at the challenges and innovate possible solutions for everyday computer users to be able to produce, publish, integrate, represent and share, on demand, information from and to heterogeneous data sources. Challenges touch on interface designs to support end-user programming for discovery and manipulation of such sources, visualization and navigation approaches for capturing, gathering and displaying and annotating data from multiple sources, and user-oriented tools to support both data publication and data exchange. The common thread among accepted papers will be their focus on such user interaction designs/solutions oriented linked web of data challenges. Papers are expected to be motivated by a user focus and methods evaluated in terms of usability to support approaches pursued.

Motivation

The current personal computing paradigm of single applications with their associated data silos may finally be on its last legs as increasing numbers move their computing off the desktop and onto the Web. In this transition, we have a significant opportunity – and requirement – to reconsider how we design interactions that take advantage of this highly linked data system. Context of when, where, what, and whom, for instance, is increasingly available from mobile networked devices and is regularly if not automatically published to social information collectors like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Intriguingly, little of the current rich sources of information are being harvested and integrated. The opportunities such information affords, however, as sources for compelling new applications would seem to be a goldmine of possibility. Imagine applications that, by looking at one's calendar on the net, and with awareness of whom one is with and where they are, can either confirm that a scheduled meeting is taking place, or log the current meeting as a new entry for reference later. Likewise, documents shared by these participants could automatically be retrieved and available in the background for rapid access. Furthermore, on the social side, mapping current location and shared interests between participants may also recommend a new nearby location for coffee or an art exhibition that may otherwise have been missed. Larger social applications may enable not only the movement of seasonal ills like colds or flus to be tracked, but more serious outbreaks to be isolated. The above examples may be considered opportunities for more proactive personal information management applications that, by awareness of context information, can better automatically support a person's goals. In an increasingly data rich environment, the tasks may themselves change. We have seen how mashups have made everything from house hunting to understanding correlations between location and government funding more rapidly accessible. If, rather than being dependent upon interested programmers to create these interactive representations, we simply had access to the semantic data from a variety of publishers, and the widgets to represent the data, then we could create our own on-demand mashups to explore heterogeneous data in any way we chose. For each of these types of applications, interaction with information – be it personal, social or public – provides richer, faster, and potentially lighter-touch ways to build knowledge than our current interaction metaphors allow. What is the bottleneck to achieving these enriched forms of interaction? Fundamentally, we see the main bottleneck as a lack of tools for easy data capture, publication, representation and manipulation.

Example

The mashup is a summative demonstration of the problem: to combine only two resources like a map and an apartment listing, one requires an API for a map service, programming knowledge/skills to get the apartment data from one source, say by having to scrape web pages, and plug that into the other. If the person wishes to use a different map, they may need to rewrite how the data from the apartment listing is plugged into that visualization. If they wish to use a completely different visualization, such as a heat graph, they will need to develop that code themselves. The barrier to entry for non-programmers is too high for most to be interested to attempt construction. By the time they would have the data they need, it may no longer even be relevant for the questions they wish to explore. Even for sufficiently skilled programmers, there are better things we could be doing with our time than constantly re-inventing the wheel.
Challenges to be addressed in this issue include, but are not restricted to the following.
  • approaches to support integrating data that is readily published, such as RSS feeds that are only lightly structured.
  • approaches to apply behaviors to these data sources.
  • approaches to make it as easy for someone to create and to publish structured data as it is to publish a blog.
  • approaches to support easy selection of items within resources for export into structured semantic forms like RDF.
  • facilities to support the pulling in of multiple sources; for instance, a person may wish to pull together data from three organizations. Where will they gather this data? What tools will be available to explore the various sources, align them where necessary and enable multiple visualizations to be explored?
  • methods to support fluidity and acceleration for each of the above: lowering the interaction cost for gathering data sources, exploring them and presenting them; designing lightweight and rapid techniques.
  • novel input mechanisms: most structured data capture requires the use of forms. The cost of form input can inhibit that data from being captured or shared. How can we reduce the barrier to data capture?
  • evaluation methods: how do we evaluate the degree to which these new approaches are effective, useful or empowering for knowledge builders?
  • user analysis and design methods: how do we understand context and goals at every stage of the design process? What is different about designing for a highly personal, contextual, and linked environment?
This issue focuses on innovative interaction design that takes advantage of linked, semantic data on the Web. Therefore, particularly relevant work includes interaction designs to support rapid data selection or production, reuse, representation, and designs that help users understand and control their data environment. Real user evaluations that demonstrate that these attributes are experienced as facile and fluid are expected as part of work presented. We are also interested in evaluated models or frameworks that will support such interaction, either by dealing with the limitations of current data sources, or in particular, by making it easy for ordinary computer users to produce shared data formats for these data interaction tools. The preference is for RDF-based tools. Also of interest is what new applications may be produced when such effortless heterogeneous data merging becomes possible not just for Ajax hackers but for anyone currently using the Web.
We welcome three types of submission for this special issue:
  • Full papers from 10-30 pages of journal format.
  • Short papers (4-6 page) demonstration papers with evaluations of new tools that address any of the above challenges.
  • Short (1-2 page) forward-looking more speculative papers addressing the challenges outlined above.

Key Dates

  • Papers due April 20 April 30
  • Reviews to Authors by May 15
  • Authors’ Revisions by June 7
  • Additional comments by Reviewers to Authors by June 23
  • Final Revisions by July 15
  • Publication Jan 2010

Editorial Committee for the Special Issue

Co-editors
Program Committee