CfP: IJSWIS Special Issue on Scalability and Performance of Semantic Web Systems

[Apologies for cross-posting]

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Scalability and Performance of 
Semantic Web Systems

International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (IJSWIS[1])

Editor in Chief: Prof. Amit Sheth, Kno.e.sis Center, Wright State University

Submission Deadline: September 1, 2008

Guest Editors:

Vassilis Christophides (University of Crete and FORTH-ICS, Heraklion, 
Greece)

christop@ics.forth.gr

Stefan Decker (DERI National University of Ireland, Galway)

stefan.decker@deri.org

Jeff Heflin (Lehigh University, Bethlehem, USA)
heflin@cse.lehigh.edu

Scope and Topics

There has been an explosion recently in the development of Semantic Web 
(SW) applications in various application areas (e.g. in e-science, 
digital libraries). As the size of the SW is expected to further grow in 
the coming years, scalability and performance of SW systems becomes 
increasingly important. Typically, such systems deal with information 
described in SW languages like OWL and RDF(S), and provide services for 
storing, querying, updating and reasoning over large volumes of triples. 
Defining adequate performance targets is one of the major challenges for 
the development of SW systems that integrate reasoning with manipulation 
of large scale RDF/OWL ontologies and their instances. In particular, 
many traditional reasoning algorithms raise serious scalability concerns 
because they do not rely on secondary storage and appropriate indexing 
techniques.

In order to be able to evaluate the scalability and performance of SW 
systems, the existence of agreed benchmarking datasets is also of 
crucial importance. In many related domains such as databases and 
theorem proving, standard benchmarks exist and are ready to guide 
research on optimization techniques. In the SW area, such benchmarks 
have only just started to emerge (e.g. LUBM). Yet, there is no commonly 
agreed benchmark covering the complexity of real SW ontologies and 
related instances. Further research need to be conducted on the 
synthetic generation of SW datasets that simulate the various 
distributions of graph features (in/out property degrees, subsumption 
relationships, etc.) exhibited by existing SW applications.��

TOPICS OF INTERESTS for the IJSWIS special issue include, but are not 
limited to:

* Foundations, methods and tools for SW benchmarking;
* Scalability metrics and performance targets of SW systems;
* Performance evaluation of existing SW query, update and reasoning 
services;
* Design and implementation of high performance SW systems;
* Analysis of synthetic and real large-scale SW repositories.

Submission Process

Submissions to this special issue should follow the journal's guidelines 
for submission 
(http://www.idea-group.com/journals/details.asp?ID=4625&v=guidelines). 
After submitting the paper, please also inform guest editors by an email 
with the paper ID assigned by the submission system. Papers must be of 
high quality and should clearly state the technical issue(s) being 
addressed as related to scalability and performance of SW systems. 
Research papers should present a proof of concept for any novel 
technique they are proposing. Case studies should discuss the 
significance and applicability of their proposed architecture/system. If 
a submission is based on a prior publication in a workshop or 
conference, the journal submission must involve substantial advance (a 
min. of 30%) in conceptual terms as well as in exposition (e.g., more 
comprehensive testing/evaluation/validation or additional 
applications/usage).

All papers must be submitted by September 1, 2008. The editors recommend 
that the number of pages should not exceed 35. All papers are subject to 
peer review performed by three established researchers selected from a 
panel of experts established for this special issue. Accepted papers 
have an opportunity for further revision and an additional round of 
reviewer feedback. Information on the journal with online submission can 
be found at: http://www.ijswis.org. Please submit manuscripts through 
that online system.

Important Dates
* Submissions: September 1, 2008
* Completion of first round of reviews November 1, 2008
* Notifications: November 10, 2008
* Revised papers: December 20, 2008
* Notifications of final acceptance: January 15, 2009
* Final papers: February 27, 2009
* Publication: Next available issue of 2009 (vol 5)

Useful Links
http://iswc2008.semanticweb.org/?p=14
http://esw.w3.org/topic/RdfStoreBenchmarking


[1] IJSWIS (http://ijswis.org) is indexed by Thomson Scientific/ISI and 
other major indices. CfP for special issues can be found at: 
http://www.igi-pub.com/journals/details.asp?ID=4625&v=callForPapers or 
http://www.ijswis.org/cfp.html Content of earlier issues can be found at 
http://www.igi-global.com/journals/details.asp?id=4625&mode=tocVolumes.

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martin hepp, http://www.heppnetz.de
mhepp@computer.org, skype mfhepp