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)