Monday, September 6, 2010

SWSA seeks bids for ISWC 2012, 11th Int. Semantic Web Conf.

The Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) is seeking statements of interest from organizations or consortia interested in hosting the 11th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2012. The conference series moves regularly between the Americas, Europe, and the Asia/Pacific region and we expect that the 2012 edition will be held in the US Americas in late October or early November 2012.
Organizations wishing to host ISWC 2012 should contact SWSA President Professor James Hendler (swsa-president@aifb.uni-karlsruhe.de) who will work with the SWSA members who are co-ordinating the bidding process for ISWC 2012.
The process comprises two stages. During the first stage, statements of interest are solicited through an open call that request responses using a simple form. Once the first phase is complete, SWSA will shortlist a number of applications, who will be invited to submit a full proposal, using a standard form and budget template. More information about the ISWC Conference Series and the bidding process for hosting a conference in the series can be found in the ISWC Conference Guide.
The important dates for applying to host a Conference in 2012 are:
  • September 30, 2010: Deadline for receiving statements of interest
  • November 15, 2010: Notifications to shortlisted bids are sent out
  • January 15, 2011: Formal applications received from shortlisted bids
  • March 1, 2011: SWSA decides on location for the 2012 Conference

Monday, March 15, 2010

CFP: Using Provenance in the Semantic Web

Journal of Web Semantics Special Issue on
Using Provenance in the Semantic Web
Editors: Yolanda Gil, University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute and Paul Groth, Free University of Amsterdam
The Web is a decentralized system full of information provided by diverse open sources of varying quality. For any given question there will be a multitude of answers offered, raising the need for assessing their relative value and for making decisions about what sources to trust. In order to make effective use of the Web, we routinely evaluate the information we get, the sources that provided it, and the processes that produced it. A trust layer was always present in the Web architecture, and Berners-Lee envisioned an “oh-yeah?” button in the browser to check the sources of an assertion. The Semantic Web raises these questions in the context of automated applications (e.g. reasoners, aggregators, or agents), whether trying to answer questions using the Linked Data cloud, use a mashup appropriately or determine trust on a social network. Therefore, provenance is an important aspect of the Web that becomes crucial in Semantic Web research.
This special issue on Using Provenance in the Semantic Web of the Journal of Web Semantics aims to collect representative research in handling provenance while using and reasoning about information and resources on the web. Provenance has been addressed in a variety of areas in computer science targeting specific contexts, such as databases and scientific workflows. Provenance is important in a variety of contexts, including open science, open government, and intellectual property and copyright. Provenance requirements must be understood for specific kinds of Web resources, such as documents, services, ontologies, workflows, and datasets.
We seek high quality submissions that describe recent projects, articulate research challenges, or put forward synergistic perspectives on provenance. We solicit submissions that advance the Semantic Web through exploiting provenance, addressing research issues including:
  • representing provenance
  • relating provenance to the underlying data and information
  • managing provenance in a distributed web
  • reasoning about trust based on provenance
  • handling incomplete provenance
  • taking advantage of the web’s structure for provenance
Submissions may focus on uses of provenance in the Semantic Web for:
  • linked data
  • social networking
  • data integration
  • inference from diverse sources
  • trust and proof
Papers may also focus on application areas, highlighting the challenges and benefits of using provenance:
  • provenance in open science
  • provenance in open government
  • provenance in copyright and intellectual property for documents
  • provenance in web publishing

Important Dates

We will aim at an efficient publication cycle in order to guarantee prompt availability of the published results. We will review papers on a rolling basis as they are submitted and explicitly encourage submissions well before the submission deadline. Submit papers online at the journal's Elsevier Web site.
  • Submission deadline: 5 20 September 2010
  • Author notification: 15 December 2010
  • Revisions submitted: 1 February 2010
  • Final decisions: 15 March 2011
  • Publication: 1 April 2011

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 "Guide for Authors" (available from the publisher), details can be found online. 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.
The current Editors-in-Chief are Tim Finin, Riichiro Mizoguchi and Steffen Staab. For all editors information, see our site.
The Journal of Web Semantics offers to its authors and readers:
  • 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

Friday, January 22, 2010

CfP: Web-scale Semantic Information Processing

Web-scale Semantic Information Processing

Note revised dates
One of the greatest challenges for the Semantic Web is achieving web-scale. While the information retrieval community has developed successful strategies for coping with the scale of the web using statistical techniques, semantic web technologies are still struggling with scaling up to the web as such. This is in part due to the need to preserve the data’s structure and the need to perform various forms of reasoning in order to more effectively leverage the available information. The need to handle vast amounts of structured data on the web is now widely recognized and efforts like the Billion Triples Challenge have been launched to advance the state of the art with this respect.
For this special issue, we seek papers that present algorithms and architectures that help semantic web systems achieve any form of scalability possessed by contemporary, state-of-the-art web applications, including, but not limited to:
  • answering queries and/or reasoning with billions of triples
  • operating over hundreds of ontologies or schemas simultaneously
  • supporting hundreds of thousands of users and/or concurrently handling semantic web requests from thousands of users
Accepted papers will have to provide detailed descriptions of their algorithms, architectures, and data structures and include systematic empirical evaluations that clearly demonstrate their claims of scalability. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
  • semantic web search engines,
  • benchmark evaluations of the state-of-the-art systems
  • systems that process data streams from multiple sensors
  • parallel and distributed reasoning,
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. The Journal of Web Semantics offers to its authors and readers:
  • 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"
Submissions should describe original contributions and should not have been published or submitted elsewhere. Submissions based on conference papers should be extended and include a reference to the corresponding proceedings.
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 Editorial System (http://ees.elsevier.com/jws/). Final decisions of accepted papers will be approved by an editor in chief.
The schedule for the special issue is the following:
  • Submissions Due: July 1st 2010 October 1, 2010
  • Notification: December 1st 2010 January 15, 2011
  • Revised Papers: February 1st 2011 February 15, 2011
  • Final Decision: April 1st 2011
  • Camera Ready Version: May 1st 2011
For any further questions regarding the special issue (appropriateness of your contribution, editorial issues, etc.), please feel free to contact the guest editors:
Prof. Dr. Heiner Stuckenschmidt (managing guest editor)
Computer Science Institute
University of Mannheim
B6, 26 68159 Mannheim
Germany
Phone.: +49 621 181 2530
Fax: +49 621 181 2682
Email: heiner@informatik.uni-mannheim.de

Jeff Heflin
Associate Professor
Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
Lehigh University, 19 Memorial Drive West
Bethlehem, PA 18015
Phone: +1 610 758-6533
Fax: +1 610 758-4096
E-Mail: heflin@cse.lehigh.edu

CfP: Special Issue on Semantic Web Dynamics

CALL FOR PAPERS Special Issue on Semantic Web Dynamics

Description

Recent years have witnessed the arrival of more and more semantically annotated data and related ontologies in the Semantic Web. For example, the linked data initiative has been very successful in making datasets available online, with a total of about 5 billion triples all together so far. While existing semantic tools and reasoning engines are year after year getting better in dealing with time invariant domain of ontological knowledge, supporting rapidly changing information has not yet attracted sufficient attention.
There are more and more heterogeneous and/or dynamic data types being created and which integration could lead to interesting applications and models (e.g. sensor data streams, geospatial information and imagery, financial transactions, news feeds, 3D models, engineering data, information for policy intelligence etc.). Current Stream Database Management Systems provide on the fly analysis of data streams, but they suffer several limitations: they cannot handle heterogeneous data streams originating from a variety of already deployed sensors; they cannot combine data streams with slowly evolving knowledge at query time; and they cannot perform reasoning tasks. And in the area of reasoning, while the problem of classical, time invariant domain of ontological knowledge has been extensively studied, the task of reasoning with rapidly changing information has been mostly neglected and constitutes a new challenge.
Furthermore, ontologies, just like any structure holding knowledge and information, need to be updated too: changes could be initiated because of a change in the world being modelled; or by a change in the users’ needs which would require a different conceptualization; or by the acquisition of knowledge previously unknown, unclassified or otherwise unavailable; or by the noticing of a design flaw in the original conceptualization. In all these cases, the representation of knowledge in the ontology should be modified so as to form a more accurate or adequate conceptualization of the domain.
This general issue of Semantic Web Dynamics includes difficulties from both practical and theoretical points of view, raising a variety of research questions and development challenges, such as how to support the ontology and data publishers in maintaining up-to-date, adequate representations; how to detect the need for evolution and changes; how to facilitate the integration of new, dynamic sources in existing datasets and ontologies; how to validate and evaluate the impact of the changes on semantic information; how to handle changes triggered from multiple sources and collaborative updates; and how to keep track of (possibly concurrent) versions of and ensure the delivery of up-to-date and valid knowledge.

Topics of Interest

For this special issue, we seek articles describing foundational and theoretical work as well as technological solutions to these challenges. More specifically, we expect submission on (but not restricted to) the following topics:
  • Foundational and formal aspects of Semantic Web dynamics
  • Language extensions for Semantic Web dynamics
  • Reasoning with dynamic data and ontologies
  • Engineering dynamic data and ontologies
  • Requirements and practical issues for Semantic Web dynamics
  • Applications of dynamic data and ontologies
  • Theory for stream reasoning
  • Logic language for stream reasoning
  • Scalability issues in stream reasoning
  • Ontologies for dynamic environments
  • Dynamic knowledge building, and (re-)use
  • Ontology evolution and versioning
  • Language extensions for evolution
  • Belief revision for ontologies
  • Change propagation in ontologies dynamic datasets and ontologies
  • Inconsistency in evolving semantic information
  • Incremental reasoning
  • Case studies and applications of ontology and knowledge evolution
  • Tools to support dynamic data and ontologies

Important Dates

  • 31 May 2010: Submission deadline
  • 14 June 2010: Submission deadline
  • 31 August 2010: First-round reviews complete
  • 31 October 2010: Revised papers submitted
  • 23 December 2010: Final acceptance decisions

Method of Submission

Submission should be realized through Elsevier's Electronic Submission system (EES), selecting "Special Issue: Semantic Web Dynamics" as article type. A guide for authors is available concerning the use of this system here.

Guest Editors/Contacts

  • Grigoris Antoniou - FORTH, Greece (antoniou@ics.forth.gr)
  • Mathieu d’Aquin - The Open University, United Kingdom (m.daquin@open.ac.uk)
  • Jeff Z. Pan - University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom (jeff.z.pan@abdn.ac.uk)