ISWC 2015 Call for Doctoral Consortium Papers: Deadline June 8

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ISWC 2015 Call for Doctoral Consortium Papers:
October 11th-12th, 2015.
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA
http://iswc2015.semanticweb.org/calls/doctoral-consortium

The ISWC 2015 Doctoral Consortium will take place as part of the 14th
International Semantic Web
Conference in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA. The Doctoral Consortium
provides Ph.D. students working
on the Semantic Web area the opportunity to share and discuss their
research problems in a critical
but supportive environment. The Consortium aims to broaden research
perspectives and to improve
research and communication skills of the students, in addition to create an
international atmosphere
where students will meet prominent professors, researchers, and other
Semantic Web Ph.D. students
from around the world. Students will interact with mentors who are senior
members of the Semantic
Web research community that will evaluate the proposed research problems as
well as potential solutions.
Additionally, mentors will conduct reflective and constructive discussions,
offer effective feedback,
and provide support to explore issues related to academic and research
careers. In order to maximize
the benefit to the participants and to favor scientific discussion, we
require that students have
already reached some preliminary results in their thesis, ideally with some
preliminary papers accepted
or published in public venues.

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Submissions
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The Doctoral Consortium is intended for students who are at middle, or late
stages of a Ph.D. program.
Submissions will be considered depending on the advancement into the
program.  Early Stage Ph.D. students
are welcome to apply and to focus mainly on the research problem, a deep
analysis of the state-of-the-art,
the research methodology, research questions, and a proposed research plan;
however, we expect that some
meaningful preliminary results have been achieved and reported in the
proposal.  Middle or Final Stage Ph.D.
students will also present a research problem, a deep analysis of the
state-of-the-art, the research methodology
and questions, but they will detail the proposed approach and the results
obtained so far.

The proposal paper must include the following sections, depending on the
type of submission:

1) Scene setting: Clear motivation and description of the problem to be
addressed as well as the main challenges.
   + Objective of the Research, including Research Questions
   + Motivation and Importance/Relevance: Clearly state the challenges that
need to be addressed
   + Challenges and Opportunities: What are the opportunities, Why existing
approaches have never been
     tried/done/achieved this problem before.
2) Proposed Approach:
   + Formal Definition and Properties of the Approach
   + Relationship between your approach and state-of-art approaches
3) Implementation of the Proposed Approach:
   + Describe the Big Picture: How will you demonstrate/implement your
approach? Depending on the topic,
     implementation will be from a software, logical or theoretical point
of view. What are the results
     you expect to observe.
   + Describe your current implementation: Please note that we expect at
least a preliminary theoretical
     demonstration or implementation (again depending on topic). Current
limitations.
4) Empirical Evaluation Methodology:
   + General strategy: Hypothesis, Benchmarks (e.g., Collected Data, Gold
Standards, Baselines, Metrics,
     Statistical Methods to Analyze the Data), Type of User Evaluation,
Number of Users, and other issues
     that may be relevant to your project.
   + Current state of the evaluation: We expect you to have performed at
least some evaluation of part of
     your thesis project.
5) Lessons Learned, Open Issues, and Future Directions:

** Please note: this part is very important. Do not leave it as last
paragraph in your submission. We expect
   this to be a major part of your contribution. We do neither expect you
to have solved all issues nor expect
   you to have finished your Ph.D. However, we expect you to show an
understanding of these issues (although open)
   and to have a clear plan to address them. This symposium is the best
place to discuss these issues and plans
   with experienced researchers and fellow students to get informed
feedback!


Additional submission requirements:

+ All submissions must be single-author submissions. The Ph.D. advisor(s)
and other contributors should be
included in the Acknowledgements section.
+ The stage of the doctoral work (early, middle, or final) must be declared.
+ Authors of the accepted papers must present their work at the Consortium
and stay the whole day.
+ Authors will have neither achieved their Ph.D. degree nor officially
submitted their thesis before the
  Doctoral Consortium.
+ Doctoral Consortium submissions are not regular research papers; the
suggested proposal outline should be
  closely followed.
+ Submissions must be in PDF and authors must respect the Springer
publication guideline for Lecture Notes in
  Computer Science (LNCS).
+ Submissions must not exceed of 8 pages. All proposals have to be
submitted electronically via the EasyChair
  conference submission System
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iswc2015doctoralcons

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Review Process and Acceptance:
===================================
All proposals submitted to the Doctoral Consortium will undergo a thorough
reviewing process with the goal
of providing a detailed, reflective, and constructive feedback. An
international program committee will evaluate
and select the submissions to be presented at the Doctoral Consortium; the
best proposals will be published in
the conference proceedings. Categories of the submissions will not affect
the chances of the proposal of being
accepted. Nevertheless, they will be considered by the reviewers and
mentors, and for assigning the length and
format of the presentations.

Student Travel award programs will be available to partially support
students with accepted papers at the Doctoral
Consortium and cover some of their travel expenses.

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Proposals will be evaluated in terms of the following criteria:
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+ Motivation and Importance/Relevance of the Proposed Research.
+ Analysis of the State-of-the-Art.
+ Novelty of the Proposed Approach.
+ Relevance of the Initial Results. (Depending on the type of submission).
+ Feasibility of the Empirical Evaluation Methodology.
+ Analysis of Lessons Learned, Open Issues, and Future Directions.
+ Clarity and Presentation.

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Topics of Interests:
====================

The Consortium has the same scope of technical topics as the main ISWC
conference.

+ Management of Semantic Web data and Linked Data
+ Languages, tools, and methodologies for representing and managing
Semantic Web data
+ Database, IR, NLP and AI technologies for the Semantic Web
+ Search, query, integration, and analysis on the Semantic Web
+ Robust and scalable knowledge management and reasoning on the Web
+ Cleaning, assurance, and provenance of Semantic Web data, services, and
processes
+ Information Extraction from unstructured data
+ Supporting multi-linguality in the Semantic Web
+ User Interfaces and interacting with Semantic Web data and Linked Data
+ Geospatial Semantic Web
+ Semantic Sensor networks
+ Query and inference over data streams
+ Ontology-based data access
+ Semantic technologies for mobile platforms
+ Ontology engineering and ontology patterns for the Semantic Web
+ Ontology modularity, mapping, merging, and alignment
+ Social networks and processes on the Semantic Web
+ Representing and reasoning about trust, privacy, and security on the
Semantic Web
+ Information visualization of Semantic Web data and Linked Data
+ Personalized access to Semantic Web data and applications Semantic Web
technologies
+ Semantic Web and Linked Data for Cloud environments

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Important Dates
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Paper Submission: June 8th, 2015, 23:59 Hawaii Time.
Notification of acceptance: July 15th, 2015.
Camera Ready Versions: August 15th, 2015, 23:59 Hawaii Time.
Doctoral Consortium: October 11-15, 2015.

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Doctoral Consortium Chairs
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Fabio Ciravegna, University of Sheffield, UK
Maria-Esther Vidal, Universidad Simon Bolivar, Caracas, Venezuela.

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Program Committee
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+ Harith Alani, KMi, The Open University
+ Oscar Corcho, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid
+ Philippe Cudre-Mauroux, University of Fribourg
+ Fabien Gandon, Inria
+ Siegfried Handschuh, University of Passau
+ Pascal Hitzler, Kno.e.sis Center, Wright State University
+ Lalana Kagal, MIT
+ Diana Maynard, University of Sheffield
+ Enrico Motta, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University
+ Natasha Noy, Google Inc.
+ Guus Schreiber, VU University Amsterdam
+ Elena Simperl, University of Southampton