Sunday, July 5, 2009
Journal of Web Semantics maintains high impact factor
Saturday, June 27, 2009
CFP: JWS special issue on Semantic Web and Social Media
| important dates | |
| abstracts | 21 Sept 09 |
| submissions | 01 Oct 09 |
| notification | 15 Dec 09 |
| final copy | 15 Jan 10 |
| publication | April 10 |
- 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
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?
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 20April 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- mc schraefel, University of Southampton, UK
- Lloyd Rutledge, Open University, Netherlands
- Abraham Bernstein, University of Zurich
- Duane Degler, IPGEMS
- Steven Drucker, Microsoft Live Labs
- Jennifer Golbeck, University of Maryland
- David Karger, MIT
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
JWS blog moved
We've moved the Journal of Web Semantics blog from a self-hosted Wordpress installation to Google-hosted blogger. We've moved the old posts (manually!) and the recommended public feed remains the same: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ jwsBlog.
Our move was motivated by a desire to make it easier for more people to contribute to the blog, a need to streamline the maintenance of the JWS infrastructure, and a goal to make the tools we use independent of the institutions of the current editors-in-chief.
Monday, November 10, 2008
Special issue of the JWS on The Web of Data
As the core of the Semantic Web matures, we see parallel trends such as microformats, RDFa, and Linked Data evolve with it, all of which complementing each other in what we may well call a machine-readable Web. Yet, scalable techniques to deal with this Web of Data in its entirety, i.e. using the "Web as the data base", as the Semantic Web was once envisioned, still misses some important puzzle pieces. Scalability here does not only include the ability to handle amounts of data at Web scale in terms of actual data processing, but also human-scalable and user-friendly tools that open the Web of Data to the current Web user.
This special issue shall encompass the recent trends of the "traditional" Web and the Semantic Web converging into the Web of Data.
Topics include (but are not limited to):- Querying the Web of Data
- Searching and Browsing the Web of Data
- Reasoning for the Web of Data
- Using models of provenance and trust
- Probabilistic models for data integration
- Strategies for dealing with the natural inconsistencies on the Web
- Populating the Web of Data (information retrieval, linked data, automatic annotation, deep Web crawling, etc.)
- Principles and Structure of the Web of Data
- Data Models for the Web - RDF & its "alternatives" (GRDDL, RDFa, microformats,etc.)
- Personal/personalized Web of Data (particularly, consumer-oriented products)
- Tools & Mash-ups
- Web of Data vs. Web 2.0
- Web of Data and Social Networks
- The Web of Data as a New Medium
- Practical Stepping Stones & Strategies Towards the Web of Data
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.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. Editors-in-Chief: Tim Finin, Riichiro Mizoguchi, Steffen Staab For all editors information, see http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaleditorialboard.cws_home/671322/editorialboard The Journal of Web Semantics offers to its authors and readers:- Free availability of papers on the Web at http://www.semanticwebjournal.org/
- 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"
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 2009 |
| Reviews due: | 18 March 2009 |
| Notification: | 30 March 2009 |
| Final version submitted: | 27 April 2009 |
| Publication: | July 2009 |
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:- Axel Polleres (axel.polleres at deri org)
- David Huynh (dfhuynh at alum mit edu)
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
JWS policy on special issues
- One or more people who will serve as the special-issue editors and work with the JWS editors in chief and/or an area editor to produce the issue. A short biosketch should be submitted for each. If there are more than one SI editor, please select one to be the lead point of contact.
- A concise description of the SI topic along with a justification of why a special issue is appropriate at this time.
- A description of the research communities that the SI will draw from or be of interest to.
- Any papers or authors that the SI editors intend to invite.
- Any constraints or preferences for publication date or number of pages for the SI.
