JWS policy on special issues
June 25th, 2008 by finin
The Journal of Web Semantics is happy to receive proposals for special issues devoted to a specific topic that is within it’s scope. Successful proposals will focus on research or application areas of emerging significance or for which innovative and novel work is being done. The journal is generally not interested in mounting special issues primarily based on papers that have been published in the proceedings of a conference or workshop.
A special issue (SI) proposal should include the following information.
- One or more people who will serve as the special-issue editors and work with the JWS editors in chief and/or an area editor to produce the issue. A short biosketch should be submitted for each. If there are more than one SI editor, please select one to be the lead point of contact.
- A concise description of the SI topic along with a justification of why a special issue is appropriate at this time.
- A description of the research communities that the SI will draw from or be of interest to.
- Any papers or authors that the SI editors intend to invite.
- Any constraints or preferences for publication date or number of pages for the SI.
The actual publication date and number of pages for accepted proposals will be decided by the editors in chief in consultation with the SI editors and is subject to the constraints imposed by the publisher.
All special issues must have an open call for submissions to which member of the research community can respond by submitting papers. The SI editors are free, of course, to invite submissions. The call will be available on the JWS web site but the SI editors will be expected to advertise the call is appropriate venues.
All papers, whether invited or submitted, will undergo the same thorough review process used for regular papers submitted to the journal. This normally involves seeking reviews from three qualified reviewers. The SI editors will be responsible for recruiting reviewers and ensuring that their reviews are done in a timely manner and of high quality.
The submission and review process must be carried out using Elsevier’s Web-based EES system. This includes accepting initial submissions, recruiting and assigning reviewers, entering reviews, issuing decisions, submitting revised version and providing the final version of accepted papers.
Final decisions of accepted papers must be approved by an editor in chief.
JWS receives high impact factor from Thomson Reuters
June 24th, 2008 by finin
During the past year, the Journal of Web Semantics was added to the list of journals indexed by Thomson Reuters. Their most recent Journal Citation Report (2007) gives the JWS an impact factor of 3.41, which is the third highest out of the 92 titles in its category – Computer Science, Information Systems.
Thomson Reuter’s journal impact factor is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been cited in a particular year. The 2007 impact factor is computed as the citations received in 2007 to all articles published in 2006 and 2005, divided by the number of “source items” published in 2006 and 2005.
JWS aim and scope 2.0
October 3rd, 2007 by finin
Web semantics is an changing field and the JWS needs to evolve along with it. Here is a draft of a new description of the JWS aim and scope. We will be very happy to receive any comments or feedback from the community. Please add comments to this post or send email to jws-eic-discussion@lists.man.ac.uk.
Journal of Web Semantics
Revised Aim and Scope (draft)
The Web is the most important information framework of our generation and probably the next. It has grown from an initial tool to ease access to on-line text and images to be-come a rich and complex repository for virtually all of the world’s knowledge and many of its important services. A key to future evolution is developing capabilities for ma-chines to better understand and exploit the meaning and significance of information and services published on the Web.
The Journal of Web Semantics (JWS) is an archival journal that publishes original, high-quality research that furthers the evolution of the Web toward a universal source of knowledge and intelligent services. Its scope is interdisciplinary and includes computer science, information systems, mathematics, computational linguistics, cognitive science and business. The JWS publishes articles covering both theory and practice and has special categories for short papers on ontologies implemented systems as well as frequent special issued devoted to emerging topics.
As the journal’s name suggests, relevant papers will involve aspects of both the Web and knowledge and include the following topics: all aspects of Semantic Web standards, languages and applications, the development, use and mapping of ontologies, semantic technology for collaboration, cooperation and social networking, representing and reasoning about trust, privacy, and security, storage, search, query, and visualization of the semantic information, Web-scale data and knowledge management, mining Web knowledge through machine learning and human language technologies, semantically augmented services and middleware, agent-based systems on the Web, semantically enhanced information retrieval, applications to business, science, education and engineering.
The JWS also encourages the publication of large scale experiments and their analysis to clearly illustrate scenarios and methods that introduce semantics into existing Web inter-faces, contents and services. The journal emphasizes the publication of papers that combine theories, methods and experiments from different subject areas in order to deliver innovative semantic methods and applications.
Elsevier publishes quarterly electronic issues of the JWS, making papers available online quickly, and issues a comprehensive yearly archival print volume in December. The JWS also has a multi-purpose web site that hosts preprints of accepted papers along with metadata and additional resources. Further in-formation on the JWS, including details on how to submit manuscripts is available at the JWS website.
JWS system papers
July 25th, 2007 by finin
The Journal of Web Semantics has a special category for systems papers that describe a substantial, implemented software system, service, programming environment, tool or application. The system should be publicly available, either as a running web service, as a downloadable application or as source code available for others to try, use and/or build upon. JSW is happy to host archival versions of executables, source code or data on its preprint server in the form of zip or tar files to accompany system papers.
The objective for a systems paper should be to convey a basic understanding of what the system does, why it is useful or significant, outline significant techniques or algorithms used, discuss performance if relevant and give some example use cases. These papers should help researchers understand and, if desired, duplicate significant applications and should not be product descriptions, feature lists or marketing white papers.
System papers should be mostly descriptive and are not expected to provide extensive background information, discuss related work, describe alternatives, prove theorems, include results of extensive evaluation experiments or have a large number of citations.
System papers are typically at most six pages in length but can be up to eight pages. They should be formatted like regular papers and include some references.
Riichiro Mizoguchi replaces Rudi Studer as a JWS editor-in-chief
June 27th, 2007 by finin
Dr. Rudi Studer is stepping down as a founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Web Semantics after more than four years of excellent service and leadership. Professor Riichiro Mizoguchi will replace him as one of the journals three editors-in-chief.
Rudi Studer is as Professor in Applied Informatics at the University of Karlsruhe, Institute AIFB. His research interests include knowledge management, Semantic Web technologies and applications, ontology management, data and text mining, service-oriented architectures, peer-to-peer systems, and Semantic Grid.
Dr. Riichiro Mizoguchi is a Professor at the Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research in Osaka University, Japan. His research topics include the Semantic Web, knowledge-based systems, knowledge management, and intelligent educational systems.
The Elsevier Journal of Web Semantics is the first journal devoted to the broad topic of the semantic web — building intelligent systems and services on the World Wide Web. Since its establishment in 2003, it has published four issues per year. Dr. Mizoguchi joins continuing JWS editors-in-chief Drs. Carole Goble and Tim Finin.
JWS latex template
June 27th, 2007 by finin
A latex template for the Journal of Web semantics can be found in this directory of latex files. The file jws.tex is an example that demonstrates the use of Elsevier’s latex style files to prepare a document for the JWS. Short version:
- copy elsart* to your directory.
- use jws.tex as a model for your latex file
- jwsTemplate.tex is a simplified template
See jws1.pdf and the comments in jws.tex for more information.
JWS special issue on Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web
March 19th, 2007 by finin
The Journal of Web Semantics solicits papers for a special issue on the impact the Web 2.0 revolution on the Semantic Web to be edited by Mark Greaves and Peter Mika.
The cluster of technologies and design patterns known as Web 2.0 has now emerged as the leading contender for “the next evolution of the Web.†Researchers, developers, and venture capitalists are all flocking toward the banner of Web 2.0, based on its promise of massively increased sharing and participation among web users. At the same time, the technologies of the Semantic Web have been quietly maturing and spreading, and now provide a clear way to apply a basic level of formal semantics to a web infrastructure. In their own way, both of these technologies address the fundamental semantic concepts of shared meaning.
The Journal of Web Semantics solicits high quality papers on the impact of the Web 2.0 revolution and the technology, deployment, and vision of the Semantic Web. We are interested comparative papers that address both directions of the impact:
- How can we exploit the wisdom of crowds to extend and maintain ontologies and instance information? Could social software provide the missing mechanisms for sharing ontologies and metadata? Are there implications for existing family of web ontology languages?
- Is the existing work on Semantic Web Services adequate to support the Web 2.0 world’s practice of creating mashups?
- Are there particular extensions to the Semantic Web base architecture, such as privacy, trust, and provenance, that could provide elegant and economical solutions to Web 2.0 issues?
- Are the various Semantic Web “bridge” technologies (like RDFa, GRDDL, and SPARQL) adequate to the semantic demands of Web 2.0 applications?
- Can Semantic Web techniques be used to substantially enhance perceived user value in Web 2.0 social networks, for example by linking across communities?
- How could we leverage commercial Web 2.0 applications and design patterns to increase the traction and uptake of the Semantic Web?
Topics of interest range from theoretical issues, methods, tools, system descriptions and applications. We are also interested in high-quality, carefully-argued discussion papers on the possibilities for convergence between these two technologies.
Important Dates
- Deadline for submission: 1 June 2007
- Notification of acceptance: 20 July 2007
- Final Papers due: 10 August 2007
- Special issue’s publication: December 2007
Submissions
We are interested in shorter (~10 pages), highly-targeted papers, which may include concurrent publication (via the Journal of Web Semantics’ Preprint Server) of companion ontologies, folksonomies, open-source code, and the like. On-line paper submission is required, via Elsevier’s Author’s Portal for the Journal of Web Semantics. Elsevier has requested that we remind authors to select “Special Issue: Socio-Semantic Web†when they reach the “Article Type†step in the on-line submission process.
Key URLs and Contact Info
Elsevier “Journal of Web Semantics” home page and Author Portal
Journal of Web Semantics Preprint Server
For any questions, please contact the guest editors.
Mark Greaves
Vulcan Inc.
505 Fifth Ave S., Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104 USA
markg@vulcan.com
+1 (206) 342 2276Peter Mika
Yahoo! Research Barcelona
Ocata 1, 1st floor
08003 Barcelona
Catalunya, Spain
pmika@yahoo-inc.com
+34 935 421 165
JWS special issue on Semantic Multimedia
March 18th, 2007 by finin
The Journal of Web Semantics solicits papers for a special issue on “Semantic Multimedia”.
The objective of this special issue is to collect and report on recent high quality research that narrows the large disparity between the low-level descriptors typically computed automatically from multimedia content and the richness and subjectivity of semantics in user queries and human interpretations of audiovisual media i.e. the so called Semantic Gap. Research in this area is important because of the overwhelming amount of information available as multimedia for the purpose of entertainment, security, teaching or technical documentation and the very limited understanding of the semantics of such data sources and, hence, the limited ways in which they can be accessed by users.
In spite of the multitude of such activities, there is a lack of appropriate outlets for presenting high-quality research in the area of “Semantic Multimediaâ€. This special issue of the Journal of Web Semantics will cater towards those members of the Semantic Web community interested in applying their semantic technologies to the field of multimedia. This means that it targets core semantic web research with multimedia as its field of application. The benefit is to explore how multimedia content and annotation can be used in Semantic Web applications, increasing the value of the Semantic Web. High quality contributions addressing related theoretical and practical aspects are expected.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Integration of multimedia processing and Semantic Web technologies
- Multimedia ontologies and infrastructures
- Knowledge assisted multimedia data mining
- Knowledge based inference for semi-automatic semantic media annotation
- Revelance feedback for finding semantics
- Semantic-driven multimedia indexing and retrieval
- Metadata management for multimedia
- Semantic Browsing of large multimedia archives
- Semantic interfaces and semantic personalisation for interaction with large multimedia repositories
- Semantics-driven multimedia presentation generation
- Standards bridging the multimedia and knowledge domains
A Double Special Issue
Simultaneously with this special issue, another special issue of the Multimedia Tools and Applications Journal is addressed to core research in multimedia being improved by exploiting Semantic Web technologies. Authors have the possibility to submit specifically to either the Journal of Web Semantics or to Multimedia Tools and Applications. However it is also possible to submit to this joint double special issue and leave it to the editors to decide about acceptance for one of the two journals.
Submission Procedure
Prospective contributors are invited to submit papers in A4/US letter, single column, double space format, up to 30 pages long including figures, tables and references. Authors should submit their manuscripts in pdf format described online indicating their submission target as “MTAPâ€, “JoWS†or “BOTHâ€. Camera-ready papers will have to conform to the style of the target journal.
Important Dates
- Deadline for manuscript submission: March 2007
- Notification to authors: June 2007
- Final accepted manuscript due: July 2007
- Publication date: 2008
Guest Editors
- Yannis Avrithis, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
- Steffen Staab, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
- Noel O’Connor, Dublin City University, Ireland
- Raphael Troncy, CWI, The Netherlands
Journal of Web Semantics blog
March 18th, 2007 by finin
The JWS blog is for announcements about the Journal of Web Semantics published by Elsevier.
The Journal of Web Semantics 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 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. The journal emphasizes the publication of papers that combine theories, methods and experiments from different subject areas in order to deliver innovative semantic methods and applications.
The blog is run by the JWS editors-in-chief with occasional posts by area editors and editors of special issues. We will use it for news and announcements about the journal, including calls for papers, descriptions of upcoming special issues and their deadlines, availability of preprints, publication of online material, etc.
