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