Sunday, December 4, 2011

JWS special issue on semantic sensing, 12/20 deadline

December 20 is the deadline for Journal of Web Semantics special issue on semantic sensing, edited by Harith Alani, Oscar Corcho and Manfred Hauswirth.

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Top Web technology conferences based on citation data

Last week HCI researcher Antti Oulasvirta has an interesting post on ranking HCI conferences using the average citations per paper based on data from Microsoft Academic Search (MAS). Some of the results surprised him, including that the venerable CHI was not the top conference in this group.

WWW, ISWC and WebDB are the top Web conferences based on Microsoft Academic Search citation data
His ranking metric for conference significance is essentially the impact factor (IF) used for journals, a measure of the average number of citations a paper in a given journal receives in a time period. The IF metric has become widely used in the scholarly journal publication industry since it was defined by Eugene Garfield and first implemented by the company he founded, the Institute for Scientific Information.

Oulasvirta used data from Microsoft Academic Search (MAS), which provides citation and publication numbers for conferences in sixteen different subjects domains and a number of sub-domains for each. For computer science, there are 24 sub-domains including one for "World Wide Web" conferences.

Following Oulasvirta, we ranked Web technology conferences using the average number of citations received in the last ten years. Starting with 68 Web technology conferences (not a complete list, btw), we narrowed the set to those that had at least 100 papers in the past ten years and some papers in the past five. This resulted in 26 conferences, eliminating many series that only ran a few times or have stopped. Here are the results.







The results should only be taken as a rough estimate of conference impact. One reason is that IF is only a measure and does not take into account all aspects of scientific importance. For example, as computed here, all citations count equally, including those from high- and low-ranking sources. Another is that while Thompson-Reuters (nee ISI) journal citation data is carefully collected and curated, the Microsoft Academic Search data is the result of a largely automated process that starts with data from Bing. When I tried using the citation information from the past five years, for example, I noted that it reported 23 papers in the past five years for Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems. This is because the conference merged with User Modeling in 2009 to become User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization. Yet another shortcoming is that the MAS list of Web conferences in not complete, for example, omitting the popular ESWC, which has been running since 2004.

The original excel spreadsheet (with full conference names hidden in column B) and a PDF version are available from the UMBC Ebiquity site.

Friday, November 18, 2011

Elsevier press release on 2011 Semantic Web Challenge winners

Elsevier published a press release on the awards for the winners of the 2011 Semantic Web Challenge.
"Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced the winners of the Semantic Web Challenge. Participants in the Challenge applied semantic web techniques in building online end-user applications that integrate, combine and deduce information needed to assist users in performing tasks. The Challenge took place at the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2011) in Bonn, Germany, from October 23-27, 2011."

Sunday, October 23, 2011

ISWC 2010 Meet the editors panel

The Journal of Web Semantics is participating in a 'Meet the Editors' panel at ISWC 2011. The panel will be held 11:00-12:30 on the opening day of ISWC, Tuesday October 25 and chaired by Rudi Studer of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute AIFB.
There are now more than half a dozen journals that publish semantic-web related research, and it is often difficult for authors to navigate this landscape. In this panel discussion, the editors from these journals will help the authors understand the different focus of each journal, the rewards and perils of journal publishing, and the steps in preparing their research for journal publications. The editors will then answer the authors' questions. The editors of the following journals will participate in the discussion.
  • Artificial Intelligence Journal: Frank van Harmelen, Associate Editor
  • Journal of Web Semantics: Tim Finin, Editor In Chief
  • International Journal of Human-Computer Studies: Enrico Motta, Editor In Chief
  • Applied Ontology: Michael Gruninger, Associate Editor
  • Semantic Web Journal : Krzysztof Janowicz, Editor In Chief
  • International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems : Amit Sheth, Editor In Chief
  • IEEE Intelligent Systems: Jim Hendler, Editor In Cheif Emeritus
  • Journal on Data Semantics: Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Co-editor

Preprints from JWS v9n3

Preprints from Journal of Web Semantics v9 n3 are now available on the preprint server. These include papers on Semantic Web Dynamics and papers from the 2010 Semantic Web Challenge.

Friday, September 2, 2011

CfP: Special Issue on Evaluation of Semantic Technologies

Call For Papers
Special Issue on Evaluation of Semantic Technologies
Journal of Web Semantics
Semantic technologies have become a well-established field of computer science. However, the field is continuously evolving: the number of semantic technologies is constantly increasing, standards evolve and new ones are defined; and, in this scenario, the problem of how to compare and evaluate the various approaches becomes crucial. The consistent evaluation of semantic technologies is critical not only for future scientific progress, by identifying research goals and allowing a rigorous examination of research results, but also for their industrial adoption, by allowing objective measurement and comparison of these technologies and enabling their certification.
Semantic technology evaluation must, on the one hand, be supported by strong methodological approaches and relevant test data and, on the other hand, satisfy the differing needs of developers, researchers and adopters by addressing those quality characteristics that are relevant to each target group. Nevertheless, numerous issues must be faced when evaluating semantic technologies.
On the one hand, because of the fast evolution of the semantic field, previous evaluation methods and techniques need to be adapted and extended and new ones have to be developed. On the other hand, the cost of defining new evaluations methods or reusing existing ones can be prohibitive, so facilitating the understanding of such methods or their automated processing becomes highly significant.
The goal of this special issue is to present current advances and trends in semantic technology evaluation (theories and models, methods and techniques, evaluation campaigns, technology comparison, etc.). Therefore we solicit papers that improve evaluation paradigms of semantic technologies. At the same time papers that evaluate a particular method, technology or system without investigating the evaluation regime itself will be considered out of scope and will be returned to the authors with no review.

Topics of interest

Relevant topics for the special issue include, but are not limited to, the following.
  • Semantic technology evaluation methods
  • Test data for semantic technology evaluation
  • Automation of semantic technology evaluation
  • Evaluation of semantic technologies in real world scenarios
  • Evaluation of linked data technologies
  • Quality requirements for semantic technologies
  • Semantic technology certification
  • Maturity models for semantic technologies
  • Semantic technology selection
  • Semantic technology quality estimation
  • Interoperability and conformance of semantic technologies
  • Semantic technology efficiency and scalability
  • Usability of semantic technologies

Important dates

We will aim at an efficient publication cycle in order to guarantee prompt availability of the published results. To this end, we encourage submissions well before the submission deadline.
  • Submission deadline. 29 February 2012
  • Author notification. 31 May 2012
  • Final version. 31 July 2012
  • Publication. Fall 2012

Instructions for submission

Please see the author guidelines for detailed instructions before you submit. Submissions should be conducted through Elsevier’s Electronic Submission System. More details on the Journal of Web Semantics can be found on its homepage.

Editors

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

CfP: Semantic Sensing JWS Special Issue

Special Issue on Semantic Sensing Journal of Web Semantics
Editors:
The Journal of Web Semantics announces a call for papers for a special issue on semantic sensing edited by Harith Alani, Oscar Corcho and Manfred Hauswirth. We will review papers on a rolling basis and explicitly encourage submissions well before the final deadline of 20 December 2011.

Motivation

The areas of social media, mobile communication networks, pervasive environments, and Internet of Things are currently converging towards novel integrated communication environments to deliver information in a context-dependent form whenever and wherever the user needs it. In future communication systems, sensors will become a central information provider about the user's physical environment, which needs to be integrated with the user's preferences, the user's online communication channels and social connections along with any relevant information from Web-based information systems. We use the term sensor here to refer to any device that supplies time-dependent information about the real world, including human-generated information.
Semantic technologies are becoming increasingly popular for providing descriptive and structured integration layers for the heterogenous sensor networks and other information sources mentioned above. Semantics are used to describe, map, and reason over the data from these sources by turning the data into machine processable and sharable structured knowledge.
On the scientific side this vision requires research into information-driven integration of sensing technologies, self-organization, large-scale stream information management - all with semantics as a core building block to support optimal use of these information sources but also to enable simple and flexible cross-layer integration on a technical level. This knowledge layer on top of the Internet of Things is a critical enabler for the Sensor Web.
However, until now the virtual world of information sources and activities in the real world are still largely disconnected: Knowledge accessible on the Web (the virtual world) may influence activities in the real world and vice versa. However, these influences are usually indirect and not immediate, usually only by means of custom-built, closed applications. Several challenges arise at different layers.
  • On the networking side, this requires IP-based access to smart objects and sensors (Internet-connected Objects) as a unifying network layer which is already being addressed by significant efforts, e.g., CoAP, 6LoWPAN, and ROLL.
  • On the distributed systems/middleware layer, self-organization mechanisms along with flexible service abstractions to cut the cost and complexity of application development are necessary.
  • At the database and Web layers, data access is essential with support for semantics and stream processing, as future communication systems depend on the efficient, machine-supported access to time-dependent information. Specifically, this requires flexible platforms to connect information coming from Internet-connected Objects and mobile devices into the Web, for example, by means of the linked data paradigm, to serve as the basis for semantic knowledge management approaches which equally take into account the virtual and physical side, specifically addressing the strong time-dependency of information and the resource constraints of the information producers and consumers. A particular challenge here is that the semantic layers need to take into account the resource constraints of the underlying sensing layers.
  • At the user interface layers, dynamic data coming from information sources, and their connections to other information sources, have to be visualised effectively in order to support decision making.

Topics of Interest

The topics of interest for this special issue include but are not limited to the following.
    • Approaches for efficiently producing and processing stream data
    • Linked stream data
    • Stream reasoning
    • RESTful and linked data approaches for semantic data streams
    • Opportunistic sensing with semantics
    • RDF/Linked Data storage and processing on sensors and mobile devices
    • Pub-/sub-systems and middleware for semantic sensing application
    • Semantic cloud sensing
    • Semantic integration of sensor data with online data
    • Semantic sensing user interfaces

    Important Dates

    We will review papers on a rolling basis as they are submitted and explicitly encourage submissions well before the final deadline.
    • Submission deadline: 20 December 2011
    • Notification: 31 March 2012
    • Final version submitted: 31 May 2012
    • Publication: Fall 2012
    See the JWS Guide for Authors for details on the submission process.

    Tuesday, July 26, 2011

    CfP: JWS special issue on the Semantic and Social Web

    Call for Papers: JWS Special Issue The Semantic and Social Web

    Guest Editors
    The Social Web has grown considerably in the past six or seven years, with the emergence of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and WordPress.com. Most sites on the Social Web offer similar functionality: users share content (be it photos, blog posts, videos, bookmarks, etc.); users connect with other users, either directly or via common interests often reflected by shared content; users add free-text tags or keywords to content; users comment on content items; and so on. There is a huge amount of inherently-meaningful metadata being made available on the Social Web through content creation, the formation of social networks, and other tasks being performed on these sites. However, much of the Social Web exists as data silos, with connections and content items (and their associated metadata) locked into various services, either by design or a because of a lack of standardization across these sites.
    In parallel with the development of the Social Web, the Semantic Web has put in standards and mechanisms for exchanging data between services, for creating agreed-upon vocabularies of terms in particular domains, and for enabling information integration across distributed data providers. It has traditionally suffered from a 'chicken-and-egg' problem, where there was a lack of interesting applications due to a lack of data adhering to Semantic Web standards, but with the emergence of the Social Web, a large amount of data is being created on a daily basis by millions of users, and this provides a very rich data source for semantically-enabled applications to work with. The Semantic Web can also assist with the data silo issue referred to previously, by providing a set of common vocabularies for data exchange between sites on the Social Web (e.g. FOAF, SIOC, MOAT, Facebook OGP, etc.).
    In this special issue, we solicit papers that tackle challenges or issues relating to the Social Web using semantic technologies, and to using social techniques to solve problems in the Semantic Web space. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following.
    • Enriching the Social Web with semantic metadata: RDF, microformats, or other frameworks
    • Mining and analysis of data from the Social Web
    • Semantic microblogging
    • Semantic wikis and creating semantic knowledge bases using Social Web systems
    • Semantic blogging or other tools to assist with writing posts
    • Data portability and social network portability
    • The Social Web and linked data
    • Developing vocabularies for the Social Web, or working with existing vocabularies
    • Semantic reasoning for Social Web applications
    • Social bookmarking enhanced with semantics, semantic tagging and annotation
    • Unifying domain vocabularies by mining over collective behavior (tagging, sharing, etc.)
    • Using semantic technologies to integrate data from the Social Web
    • Security and trust in the Social Web based on semantics
    • Producing and querying semantic data from sites on the Social Web
    • Other emerging semantic applications for the Social Web

    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 2012
    • Reviews due: 18 March 2012
    • Notification: 30 March 2012
    • Final version submitted: 27 April 2012
    • Publication: July 2012

    Tuesday, June 14, 2011

    Call to Host the 2013 International Semantic Web Conference

    The Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) is seeking statements of interest from organizations or consortia interested in hosting the 12th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2013. The conference series usually moves regularly between the Americas, Europe, and the Asia/Pacific region. For the 2013 edition, we will accept bids from all locations, but we will give preference to the bids from the Asia/Pacific region. We expect the conference to take place in late October or early November 2013.
    Organizations wishing to host ISWC 2013 should contact SWSA Secretary Dr. Natasha Noy who will work with the SWSA members who are co-ordinating the bidding process for ISWC 2013.
    The process comprises two stages. During the first stage, SWSA solicits the statements of interest through an open call. They should be submitted using the statement of interest 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 2013 are:
    • August 1, 2011: Deadline for receiving statements of interest
    • September 15, 2011: Notifications to shortlisted bids are sent out
    • October 20, 2011: Formal applications received from shortlisted bids
    • October 24 or 25, 2011: Presentation of the bid at the SWSA meeting in Bonn, Germany
    • October 25, 2011: SWSA decides the location of the 2013 conference

    Tuesday, April 12, 2011

    New Journal of Web Semantics preprint server

    The new Journal of Web Semantics preprint server is now online. Final drafts of accepted papers will be added to the preprint server as papers are accepted for publication, making a preprint available as soon as possible.
    We are currently loading papers from back issues into the preprint server as time permits. The preprint server is based on the Open Journal Systems software and hosted by Gesis, the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.
    After drafts are on the preprint server, they enter Elsevier's production pipeline in which they are professionally copy edited, formatted for the journal, and proofed by the authors. The result is assigned a DOI and put online as a JWS article in press available to to individual and institutional subscribers. When the article is assigned to an issue and printed, the final copy will be available online to subscribers in Elsevier's Science Direct system.
    We would like to thank the people who helped stand up the new preprint server, including Ute Koch of Gesis, Kaixuan Wang of the University of Manchester, and Silke Werger of the University of Koblenz and Landau.

    New JWS preprint server

    The new Journal of Web Semantics preprint server is now online. Final drafts of accepted papers will be added to the preprint server as papers are accepted for publication, making a preprint available as soon as possible.
    We are currently loading papers from back issues into the preprint server as time permits. The preprint server is based on the Open Journal Systems software and hosted by Gesis, the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences.
    After drafts are on the preprint server, they enter Elsevier's production pipeline in which they are professionally copy edited, formatted for the journal, and proofed by the authors. The result is assigned a DOI and put online as a JWS article in press available to to individual and institutional subscribers. When the article is assigned to an issue and printed, the final copy will be available online to subscribers in Elsevier's Science Direct system.
    We would like to thank the people who helped stand up the new preprint server, including Ute Koch of Gesis, Kaixuan Wang of the University of Manchester, and Silke Werger of the University of Koblenz and Landau.

    Sunday, March 6, 2011

    CfP: JWS special issue on the Semantic Web in a Mobile World

    Call for Papers
    Special Issue of the Journal of Web Semantics on
    Semantic Web in a Mobile World
    Mobile users’ information needs are becoming more important than ever. It is estimated that access to the Internet by mobile phones will exceed desktop computers by 2013. This will make Internet-enabled mobile devices the key access point to the information and service infrastructure of the Internet. When accessing the web with a mobile device, one is not only overwhelmed with the information provided but also hampered by the limitations mobile devices have such as limited interaction possibilities and smaller display size.
    On the other hand, mobile devices provide various sensors, for instance GPS/aGPS, accelerometer, compass, microphone, and cameras. These sensors can enable capturing the users’ context and using the context to addressing the mobile users’ needs. The Semantic Web is of high benefit for mobile computing. Not only does it provide a common interlingua for devices to reason and negotiate about context, it also provides a lot of “facts” that can be used in inferring context, such as knowledge about individuals, places, organizations, and events. The availability of such information has blossomed since the advent of the Linked Data movement in 2007. However, such a Mobile Semantic Computing is still in its early beginnings.
    In this special issue, we invite original work in the area of Mobile Semantic Computing that show innovative solutions and demonstrate the benefits of semantic technologies for mobile devices and mobile applications. Besides a solid research contribution, we expect systems and applications that have been evaluated with respect to its usefulness. In addition, we like to see contributions that share their data set or make services they use publicly available.

    Topics of Interest

    The topics of interests for this special issue include but are not limited to the following.
    • RDF/Linked Data storage and processing on mobile devices
    • Data and information management on mobile devices
    • Reasoning on mobile devices
    • Mobile indexing and retrieving of multimedia data such as audio, video, images, and text
    • Pub-/sub-systems and middleware for mobile semantic applications
    • Scalability and performance of semantic mobile technologies
    • Mobile semantic user profiling and context modeling
    • Mobile semantic cloud computing
    • Interoperability of mobile semantic applications
    • Browsing semantic data on mobile devices
    • Mobile semantic annotation and peer tagging
    • Mobile semantic mash-ups
    • Mobile semantic multimedia
    • Mobile applications for the social semantic web
    • Mobile semantic e-learning and collaboration
    • Location-aware mobile semantic applications
    • Mobile semantic eGovernment applications and services
    • Innovative and novel user interfaces for mobile semantic applications
    • Development methods and tools for mobile semantic applications
    • Privacy and security for mobile semantic devices and applications
    • Data sets for the mobile semantic web

    Important Dates

    • Submission of papers October 1, 2011
    • Acceptance/revision notification: December 20, 2011
    • Revised manuscript due: February 29, 2012
    • Final acceptance notification: May 1, 2012
    • Final manuscript due: June 15, 2012
    • Tentative publication: August/September 2012

    Submissions

    Submissions should be conducted through Elsevier’s Electronic Submission System . More details on the Journal of Web Semantics can be found on its homepage. Please see the author guidelines for detailed instructions before you submit.

    Guest Editors

    Friday, March 4, 2011

    CfP: JWS special issue: reasoning with context in the Semantic Web

    Call for Papers
    Special Issue of the Journal of Web Semantics on
    Reasoning with context in the Semantic Web
    New submission deadline: 26 June 2011
    Mechanisms for reasoning with context have become increasingly important factors in the Semantic Web. There is a growing need for general and robust reasoning techniques that make it possible to integrate heterogeneous knowledge or to use homogeneous knowledge across different domains.
    Research on this topic has so far, and not surprisingly, concentrated on formal ontologies, i.e., on the logical structures that encode the semantics of a software's domain of application. Work on the Semantic Web as well as on information integration, distributed knowledge management, multi-agent and distributed reasoning has focussed on the relationship between an ontology and its context. This has aimed at clarifying how to relate knowledge that is distributed over many resources. Recent Semantic Web specific developments suggest that aspects of this relation can be captured by means of named graphs (to express meta-information), the use of provenance (to track the context where data/axioms came from) and querying (to facilitate reasoning).
    Other neighbouring research areas, though, have also investigated topics that shed light on how to reason with context in the Semantic Web. Ontology Engineering and Maintenance, for instance, has tackled the problems faced by ontology engineers when developing and maintaining an ontology. The yielded automation of the process of ontology development and of its phases (e.g. knowledge elicitation, revision cycles, alignment with pre-existing ontologies etc.) has improved efficiency, reduced the introduction of unintended meanings into ontologies and in general made explicit the relationship between an ontology and its development context.
    Finally, research on Problem Solving and Agent Communication has explored how an agent's ontology needs to change at run-time because of interactions with its context - for instance with other agents whose ontologies are not known or with new non-classifiable world situations. This type of research has delivered a deeper understanding of the evolution of an ontology and is often based on non-monotonic reasoning, belief revision or changes of signature, i.e., of the grammar of the ontology's language, with a minimal disruption to the original theory.

    Topics of interest

    This special issue aims at bringing together work on reasoning with context in the Semantic Web from the integration, development and evolutionary perspectives described above. Submitted articles, which may describe either theoretical results or applications, must clearly pertain to the Semantic Web and/or to semantic technologies. They should present either Semantic Web specific approaches to reasoning with context, or approaches that have characteristics that are interesting for the Semantic Web (e.g., scalability, bounded reasoning), or approaches that are of value to a larger community containing a non-trivial Semantic Web sub-community (e.g., revision/update techniques and error pin-pointing).
    Submissions are welcome on topics relevant to reasoning with context in the Semantic Web and that include but are not limited to the following.
    • Named graphs
    • Provenance
    • Knowledge representation languages for semantic technologies
    • Planning and reasoning about action and change in the Semantic Web
    • Ontology fault diagnosis and repair
    • Pinpointing of logical errors in contexts and ontologies
    • Explanation and justifications in DL ontologies
    • Ontology and context evolution, debugging, update and merging
    • Inconsistency handling in contexts and ontologies
    • Uncertainty handling, defeasible reasoning and argumentation in ontologies
    • Non-classical belief revision
    • Context revision and theory change in DL ontologies
    • Ontology and context versioning
    • Semantic difference in ontologies and in contexts
    • Information and knowledge integration
    • The role of context and ontology in distributed reasoning and knowledge management
    • Heuristic and approximate reasoning
    • Bounded reasoning and bounded rationality in the Semantic Web
    • Adaptive systems and reconfiguration
    • Ontology-based data access
    • Querying
    • Multi-Agent systems in the Semantic Web
    • Temporal and spatial reasoning
    • Normative reasoning in the Semantic Web
    • General problem solving for semantic technologies
    • Machine learning for the Semantic Web
    • Philosophical foundations of reasoning about context and ontology evolution
    • Comparison of uses of contexts and ontologies

    How to submit

    Maximal length of submissions is 25 pages. Authors should upload submissions on Elsevier's Electronic Submission System choosing "Reasoning with context in SW" as the article type. See the Author Guide for more detailed instructions.

    Important dates

    • Submission deadline: 15 26 June 2011
    • First-round reviews: 5 September 2011
    • Revised papers submitted: 30 September 2011
    • Final acceptance decisions: 31 October 2011
    • Tentative publication date: April 2012

    Guest editors

    Send enquiries and communications to organization[at]arcoe[dot]org