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.

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

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

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

• mc schraefel, University of Southampton, UK
• Lloyd Rutledge, Open University, Netherlands

Program Committee

• Abraham Bernstein, University of Zurich
• Duane Degler, IPGEMS
• Steven Drucker, Microsoft Live Labs
• Jennifer Golbeck, University of Maryland
• David Karger, MIT

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.

Special issue of the JWS on The Web of Data

Axel Polleres and David Huynh are editing a special issue of the Journal of Web Semantics on “The Web of Data” that will appear in the Summer 2009.

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

Particularly, for the first three items we solicit contributions which for instance (i) push the boundaries of scale towards Web size, (ii) suggest novel ranking techniques for the Web of data, or (iii) deal with the evolutionary and structural characteristics of the Web of Data. We also solicit reports on novel applications using the Web of Data, as well as strategic and practical contributions with the potential to drive the idea of the Web of Data forward.

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)

JWS policy on special issues

The Journal of Web Semantics is happy to receive proposals for special issues devoted to a specific topic that is within it's scope. Successful proposals will focus on research or application areas of emerging significance or for which innovative and novel work is being done. The journal is generally not interested in mounting special issues primarily based on papers that have been published in the proceedings of a conference or workshop. A special issue (SI) proposal should include the following information.

• 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.

The actual publication date and number of pages for accepted proposals will be decided by the editors in chief in consultation with the SI editors and is subject to the constraints imposed by the publisher. All special issues must have an open call for submissions to which member of the research community can respond by submitting papers. The SI editors are free, of course, to invite submissions. The call will be available on the JWS web site but the SI editors will be expected to advertise the call is appropriate venues. All papers, whether invited or submitted, will undergo the same thorough review process used for regular papers submitted to the journal. This normally involves seeking reviews from three qualified reviewers. The SI editors will be responsible for recruiting reviewers and ensuring that their reviews are done in a timely manner and of high quality. The submission and review process must be carried out using Elsevier's Web-based EES system. This includes accepting initial submissions, recruiting and assigning reviewers, entering reviews, issuing decisions, submitting revised version and providing the final version of accepted papers. Final decisions of accepted papers must be approved by an editor in chief.

JWS receives high impact factor from Thomson Reuters

During the past year, the Journal of Web Semantics was added to the list of journals indexed by Thomson Reuters. Their most recent Journal Citation Report (2007) gives the JWS an impact factor of 3.41, which is the third highest out of the 92 titles in its category -- Computer Science, Information Systems. 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 2007 impact factor is computed as the citations received in 2007 to all articles published in 2006 and 2005, divided by the number of "source items" published in 2006 and 2005.

JWS aim and scope 2.0

Web semantics is an changing field and the JWS needs to evolve along with it. Here is a draft of a new description of the JWS aim and scope. We will be very happy to receive any comments or feedback from the community. Please add comments to this post or send email to jws-eic-discussion@lists.man.ac.uk.

Journal of Web Semantics Revised Aim and Scope

The Web is the most important information framework of our generation and probably the next. It has grown from an initial tool to ease access to on-line text and images to be-come a rich and complex repository for virtually all of the world's knowledge and many of its important services. A key to future evolution is developing capabilities for ma-chines to better understand and exploit the meaning and significance of information and services published on the Web. The Journal of Web Semantics (JWS) is an archival journal that publishes original, high-quality research that furthers the evolution of the Web toward a universal source of knowledge and intelligent services. Its scope is interdisciplinary and includes computer science, information systems, mathematics, computational linguistics, cognitive science and business. The JWS publishes articles covering both theory and practice and has special categories for short papers on ontologies implemented systems as well as frequent special issued devoted to emerging topics. As the journal's name suggests, relevant papers will involve aspects of both the Web and knowledge and include the following topics: all aspects of Semantic Web standards, languages and applications, the development, use and mapping of ontologies, semantic technology for collaboration, cooperation and social networking, representing and reasoning about trust, privacy, and security, storage, search, query, and visualization of the semantic information, Web-scale data and knowledge management, mining Web knowledge through machine learning and human language technologies, semantically augmented services and middleware, agent-based systems on the Web, semantically enhanced information retrieval, applications to business, science, education and engineering. The JWS also encourages the publication of large scale experiments and their analysis to clearly illustrate scenarios and methods that introduce semantics into existing Web inter-faces, contents and services. The journal emphasizes the publication of papers that combine theories, methods and experiments from different subject areas in order to deliver innovative semantic methods and applications. Elsevier publishes quarterly electronic issues of the JWS, making papers available online quickly, and issues a comprehensive yearly archival print volume in December. The JWS also has a multi-purpose web site that hosts preprints of accepted papers along with metadata and additional resources. Further in-formation on the JWS, including details on how to submit manuscripts is available at the JWS website.