Wednesday, July 25, 2007

JWS system papers

The Journal of Web Semantics has a special category for systems papers that describe a substantial, implemented software system, service, programming environment, tool or application. The system should be publicly available, either as a running web service, as a downloadable application or as source code available for others to try, use and/or build upon. JSW is happy to host archival versions of executables, source code or data on its preprint server in the form of zip or tar files to accompany system papers. The objective for a systems paper should be to convey a basic understanding of what the system does, why it is useful or significant, outline significant techniques or algorithms used, discuss performance if relevant and give some example use cases. These papers should help researchers understand and, if desired, duplicate significant applications and should not be product descriptions, feature lists or marketing white papers. System papers should be mostly descriptive and are not expected to provide extensive background information, discuss related work, describe alternatives, prove theorems, include results of extensive evaluation experiments or have a large number of citations. System papers are typically at most six pages in length but can be up to eight pages. They should be formatted like regular papers and include some references.