Wednesday, October 3, 2007

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.