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