Tuesday, December 13, 2016

CFP: Special Issue of the JWS on Semantic Statistics

Special Issue of the JWS on Semantic Statistics

The Journal of Web Semantics seeks submissions for a special issue on Semantic Statistics to be edited by Jane Hunter, Armin Haller and Franck Cotton.
 
EXTENDED DEADLINE: Submissions are due by February 1st, 2017.


Topics of interest include the following.
  • The application of Semantic Web technologies and standards to the formalization, publishing, analysis and linking of statistical and census datasets and metadata;
  • The application of statistical methods to Linked Data;
  • Vocabularies and ontologies to support the publishing, discovery, linking and re-use of statistical metadata (code lists and classifications, descriptive metadata, provenance and quality information, etc.);
  • Facilitating the re-use of national census datasets via RDF/linked open data approaches using vocabularies and ontologies (e.g., RDF data cubes);
  • Using statistical approaches (e.g., R, SAS, Stata) to derive semantic reasoning, inferencing and classification rules;
  • Representing and inferring the quality of linked data using statistically rigorous methods;
  • Comparisons, analytics, alignment and enrichment of statistical (census) data and associated concepts using semantics;
  • Improving statistical matching and linkage methods using semantic information;
  • Methods for performing data reconciliation, ontology matching, instance matching on statistical data;
  • Representing, correlating and analyzing Linked Statistical data.

Guest Editors

  • Jane Hunter, The University of Queensland, j.hunter@uq.edu.au
  • Armin Haller, Australian National University (ANU), armin.haller@anu.edu.au
  • Franck Cotton, INSEE, France, franck.cotton@insee.fr

Important Dates

  • Call for papers: 15 August 2016
  • Submission deadline: 1 February 2017
  • Author notification: 1 April 2017
  • Final version: 1 June 2017
  • Publication: 3rd quarter, 2017

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. 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's Web-based EES system. 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. Elsevier's liberal preprint policy permits authors and their institutions to host preprints on their web sites. Preprints of the articles will be made freely accessible on the JWS preprint server. Final copies of accepted publications will appear in print and at Elsevier's archival online server.

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

CFP: JWS special issue on Visualization and Interaction for Ontologies and Linked Data


The Journal of Web Semantics invites submissions for a special issue on Visualization and Interaction for Ontologies and Linked Data to be edited by Valentina Ivanova, Patrick Lambrix, Steffen Lohmann and Catia Pesquita

EXTENDED DEADLINE: Submissions are due by February 15, 2017.

Visual representations take advantage of the humans' most powerful perceptual channel - the visual system - and play a crucial role in understanding complex data and acquiring insight. Interacting with visualizations is indispensable in order to facilitate understanding and to overcome limitations of the visual representations. Yet, surprisingly, the importance of visual user interfaces is often overlooked in the Semantic Web domain. The area needs sophisticated visualization and interaction techniques to help its users understand the knowledge represented by ontologies and Linked Data and to utilize it in a multitude of applications and domains. As any other knowledge-intensive area, the Semantic Web deals with inherently intricate content. This poses high demands on its users in their tasks, such as modeling, formalizing, editing, verifying, sensemaking, etc., and involves a variety of cognitive processes - perception, attention, working memory, reasoning, etc. These processes could be more efficiently supported if user interfaces encompassing well-designed visual representations and interaction techniques were available.

Ontologies and Linked Data are being used in more and more application areas and by users with increasingly diverse backgrounds, which presents additional requirements. While a number of user interfaces have become available in the past years, they are rarely based on analytical or empirical studies of users demands, task analysis or advances in cognitive sciences, which can prevent their potential in supporting the interaction between users and the Semantic Web to unfold. User evaluations of different types - observational studies, interviews, etc. - are needed to provide requirements and to analyze the benefits of the proposed solutions. Yet, such evaluations are rather uncommon in the Semantic Web community. Approaches do not only need to consider common interaction contexts but should also take advantage of the opportunities provided by new and emerging interaction contexts, ranging from mobile and touch interaction to visualizations on large and high-resolution displays, and encompassing highly responsive web applications.

Visualization and interaction can be essential to easily provide access to the increasing diversity of the knowledge modeled in ontologies. They are an integral part of ontology engineering to help bridge the gap between domain experts and ontology engineers. Ontology visualization is not a new topic and a number of approaches have become available in recent years, with some being already well-established, particularly in the field of ontology modeling. In other areas of ontology engineering, such as ontology alignment and debugging, although several tools have recently been developed, few provide a graphical user interface, not to mention navigational aids or comprehensive visualization and interaction techniques.

Related to that, the capacity of the Linked Data initiative is underutilized, the main consumers are technology experienced users, one of the reasons being the lack of appropriate user interfaces and visualizations that support other user groups. Various visual and interaction approaches are needed to assist the variety of users who pursue diverse goals and pose individual requirements. In the presence of a huge network of interconnected resources, one of the challenges faced by the Linked Data community is, for instance, the visualization of the multidimensional datasets to provide for efficient overview, exploration and querying tasks.

The aim of this special issue is to present latest advances in the area and further attract attention to these issues from interested communities. Ultimately, providing better user interfaces, visual representations and sophisticated interaction techniques will foster wider adoption of Semantic Web technologies and likely lead to higher quality results in different applications employing ontologies and proliferate the consumption of Linked Data.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

  • Visualizations and user interfaces for ontologies and Linked Data (overview, exploration, analysis, visual analytics, querying, etc.)
  • Visualizations and user interfaces for ontology engineering (ontology development, alignment, debugging, evolution, provenance, collaboration, etc.)
  • Case studies of applying visualizations in ontology engineering and Linked Data consumption
  • User evaluations of visual interfaces for Linked Data and ontologies
  • Analyses of different user types and needs
  • Cognitive aspects of interaction and visualization
  • Context-aware visualization and interaction techniques
  • Applications of novel interaction techniques (e.g., touch and gesture interaction)
  • Mobile user interfaces for ontology engineering and Linked Data exploration

Important Dates

  • Call for papers: 30 April 2016
  • Submission deadline: 15 February 2017
  • First notification: mid April 2017
  • Revisions due: mid May 2017
  • Final notification: mid June 2017
  • Final revisions due: mid July 2017
  • Publication: third quarter 2017

Guest Editors

  • Valentina Ivanova, Linköping University, Sweden
  • Patrick Lambrix, Linköping University, Sweden
  • Steffen Lohmann, Fraunhofer IAIS, Germany
  • Catia Pesquita, University of Lisbon, Portugal

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. 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's Web-based EES system. 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. Elsevier's liberal preprint policy permits authors and their institutions to host preprints on their web sites. Preprints of the articles will be made freely accessible on the JWS preprint server. Final copies of accepted publications will appear in print and at Elsevier's archival online server.

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

CFP: JWS Special Issue on Industry and In-use Applications



As the Semantic Web and Linked Data have matured over the past decade, we have witnessed the growth and deployment of a variety of applications that exploit Semantic Web technologies and standards to solve customers’ problems in novel ways:  from semantic search on the Web and question answering systems leveraging large knowledge graphs to information integration and predictive analytics in domains as diverse as healthcare & life sciences and smart cities.  These applications have tested, stressed, and imposed real-world constraints on semantic technologies. First, they have imposed significant scalability requirements on Semantic Web systems such as knowledge graph stores, reasoners, etc.  Second, given the sheer size and decentralized nature of the Semantic Web and Linked Data, they have magnified data integration challenges, which were traditionally limited to integration across a few sources, to practical data integration at Web scale.

The goal of this special issue is to provide a venue for researchers and practitioners to share their experience in designing, developing, deploying and evaluating applications and solutions that leverage semantic technologies and standards to achieve practical benefit.  In addition to submissions addressing traditional challenges of scalability and data integration, we also encourage submissions focused on tooling supporting Semantic Web application development and deployment, concrete use cases and case studies. Specifically, we expect submissions on, but not restricted to, the following topics with an emphasis on how semantic technologies were uniquely able to tackle application requirements and users’ needs:
  • Case studies and use cases for solutions and applications exploiting semantic technologies 
  • Foundations, methods, tools and technologies for facilitating Semantic Web application development and deployment
  • Exploitation of large scale knowledge graphs
  • Applications and solutions using data mining and machine learning on Linked Data.
  • In-use Ontology and domain modeling
In particular, applications not specifically concerned with the (semantic) web are also relevant as long as they exploit semantic technologies.

Guest Editors
Important Dates
  • Call for papers: 30 May 2016
  • Submission deadline: 14 October 2016
  • Author notification: 19 December 2016
  • Publication:  Third Quarter 2017
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. 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's Web-based EES system. 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. Elsevier's liberal preprint policy permits authors and their institutions to host preprints on their web sites. Preprints of the articles will be made freely accessible on the JWS preprint server. Final copies of accepted publications will appear in print and at Elsevier's archival online server.

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

CfP: Special Issue on Visualization and Interaction for Ontologies and Linked Data

Special Issue on Visualization and Interaction for Ontologies and Linked Data


The Journal of Web Semantics invites submissions for a special issue on Visualization and Interaction for Ontologies and Linked Data to be edited by Valentina Ivanova, Patrick Lambrix, Steffen Lohmann and Catia Pesquita. Submissions are due by 31 January 2017.

Friday, May 27, 2016

CFP: Special Issue of the JWS on Semantic Statistics


Special Issue of the JWS on Semantic Statistics

The Journal of Web Semantics seeks submissions for a special issue on Semantic Statistics to be edited by Jane Hunter, Armin Haller and Franck Cotton.

EXTENDED DEADLINE: Submissions are due by February 1st 2017.