Call for Papers: Special Issue on Intelligent Exploration of Semantic Data

Call for papers: Special Issue on

Intelligent Exploration of Semantic Data

Semantic data, including structured and unstructured data linked with knowledge models representing meaning, is becoming widely available in a diversity of contexts and usages. This can make significant contribution to the implementation and the broader utilisation of semantic web in human practice. Users with various backgrounds and expectations are becoming exposed to semantic data, and need to explore such data for different purposes (searching, browsing, summarising, making sense, taking decisions, or learning). Semantic data exploration is becoming a key activity in a range of application domains, such as government and public organisations, education, life science, cultural heritage, media and entertainment to name a few. Several novel interfaces and interaction means for exploration of semantic data are being proposed, for example semantic data browsers, ontology/content visualisation and exploration environments, semantic wikis, intelligent agents. However, the efforts have not been consolidated to capitalise on experience in tackling key issues in exploration of semantic data, and to bring together the main themes: (a) Human Factors: the utility and the added value of exploration approaches to humans; (b) Technology: new technological strands and how these strands impact the algorithms for interaction and exploration; (c) Application Domains: domains that have seen a change because of bringing in semantic data exploration approaches, and the uncharted application domains community has yet to address; and (d) Evaluation: sharing practices on evaluating exploration approaches including gold standards, benchmarks and methodologies.

This SWJ special issue builds upon five consecutive editions of the International Workshop on Intelligent Exploration of Semantic Data (IESD) held in 2012-2016. The aim of the special issue is to present the latest advances in the area and further attract attention to these issues from interested communities in these areas.

The special issue will solicit original and innovative articles on the following topics from the thematic areas:

  1. Human Factors: the utility and the added value of exploration approaches to humans:
    • Effective interaction environments to help users in discovering connections and making sense of large volumes of structured and unstructured heterogeneous data (including large ontologies, Linked Data, semantically augmented corpus, semantically ­enriched social data);
    • Comparison of different approaches to help users in a manner that does not overwhelm or confuse;
    • Intuitive ways to empower lay users of knowledge enriched technologies to explore semantic data.
  2. Technology: new technological strands and how these strands impact the algorithms for exploration:
    • Methods and techniques for analysing semantic data to discover connections (e.g. relatedness, similarity, diversity, complementarity, contradictions, causality);
    • Entity and ontology summarisation methods, graph exploration, visualisation and navigation;
    • User/context/knowledge gap modelling;
    • Adaptation and personalisation;
    • Feedback and prompts.
  3. Application Domains: domains that have seen a change because of bringing in semantic data exploration approaches, and the uncharted application domains community has yet to address:
    • Information needs which require exploration of semantic data;
    • Lessons learnt from applications.
  4. Evaluation: sharing practices on evaluating exploration approaches including gold standards, benchmarks and methodologies:
    • Benchmarks for exploration tasks;
    • Gold standards for bootstrapping and comparing exploration tools;
    • Methodologies for user studies, matrices for evaluation.

Deadline

  • Submission deadline: 15 April 2017. Papers submitted before the deadline will be reviewed upon receipt.

Author Guidelines

The special issue invites original research papers that make significant contributions to the state-of-the-art in "Intelligent Exploration of Semantic Data". The papers must not have been previously published or submitted for journal or conference publications. However, the papers that have been previously published with reputed conferences could be considered for publication in the special issue if they are substantially revised from their earlier versions with at least 30% new contents or results that comply with the copyright regulations, if any.

Submissions shall be made through the Semantic Web journal website at http://www.semantic-web-journal.net. Prospective authors must take notice of the submission guidelines posted at http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/authors. Note that you need to request an account on the website for submitting a paper. Please indicate in the cover letter that it is for the "Intelligent Exploration of Semantic Data" special issue.

All manuscripts will be reviewed based on the SWJ open and transparent review policy and will be made available online during the review process.

Evaluation Criteria

  • Significance to the readership of the journal
  • Relevance to the special issue
  • Originality of idea, technical contribution, and significance of the presented results
  • Quality, clarity, and readability of the written text
  • Quality of references and related work
  • Quality of research hypothesis, assertions, and conclusion

Guest editors

The guest editors can be reached at si-iesd@googlegroups.com

Dhaval Thakker
Lecturer,University of Bradford, United Kingdom
E: d.thakker@bradford.ac.uk W: http://scim.brad.ac.uk/~dthakker/

Daniel Schwabe
Professor, Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil
E: dschwabe@inf.puc-rio.br W: http://www-di.inf.puc-rio.br/schwabe/

Kouji Kozaki
Associate Professor, Osaka University, Japan
E: kozaki@ei.sanken.osaka-u.ac.jp W: http://www.ei.sanken.osaka-u.ac.jp/~kozaki/index_en.html

Roberto García
Associate Professor, Universitat de Lleida, Spain
E: roberto.garcia@udl.cat W: http://rhizomik.net/html/~roberto/

Marco Brambilla
Associate Professor, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
E: marco.brambilla@polimi.it W: http://dbgroup.como.polimi.it/brambilla/

Vania Dimitrova
Associate Professor, University of Leeds, UK
E: V.G.Dimitrova@leeds.ac.uk W: http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/vania/

Guest editorial board

The guest editorial board will be recruited based on the topics of the submitted papers.