CFP: Journal of Web Semantics - New Interaction Designs for Semantic Web (2 more weeks)

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   CALL FOR JOURNAL PAPERS
   (apologies for cross-posting)
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   Exploring New Interaction Designs Made Possible by the Semantic Web
   
   Special Issue Call: Journal of Web Semantics
   
   Overview:
   In this Special Issue, we seek papers that look at the challenges and
   innovate possible solutions for everyday computer users to be able to
   produce, publish, integrate, represent and share, on demand, information
   from and to heterogeneous data sources. Challenges touch on interface
   designs to support end-user programming for discovery and manipulation of
   such sources, visualization and navigation approaches for capturing,
   gathering and displaying and annotating data from multiple sources, and
   user-oriented tools to support both data publication and data exchange. The
   common thread among accepted papers will be their focus on such user
   interaction designs/solutions oriented linked web of data challenges.
   Papers are expected to be motivated by a user focus and methods evaluated
   in terms of usability to support approaches pursued.
   
   Motivation:
   The current personal computing paradigm of single applications with their
   associated data silos may finally be on its last legs as increasing numbers
   move their computing off the desktop and onto the Web. In this transition,
   we have a significant opportunity, and requirement, to reconsider how we
   design interactions that take advantage of this highly linked data.
   Context of when, where, what, and whom, for instance, is increasingly
   available from mobile networked devices and is regularly if not
   automatically published to social information collectors like Facebook,
   LinkedIn, and Twitter.
   
   Intriguingly, little of the current rich sources of information are being
   harvested and integrated. The opportunities such information affords,
   however, as sources for compelling new applications would seem to be a
   goldmine of possibility. Imagine applications that, by looking at one's
   calendar on the net, and with awareness of whom one is with and where they
   are, can either confirm that a scheduled meeting is taking place, or log
   the current meeting as a new entry for reference later. Likewise, documents
   shared by these participants could automatically be retrieved and available
   in the background for rapid access. Furthermore, on the social side,
   mapping current location and shared interests between participants may also
   recommend a new nearby location for coffee or an art exhibition that may
   otherwise have been missed. Larger social applications may enable not only
   the movement of seasonal ills like colds or flus to be tracked, but more
   serious outbreaks to be isolated.
   
   The above examples may be considered opportunities for more proactive
   personal information management applications that, by awareness of context
   information, can better automatically support a person's goals. In an
   increasingly data rich environment, the tasks may themselves change. We
   have seen how mashups have made everything from house hunting to
   understanding correlations between location and government funding more
   rapidly accessible. If, rather than being dependent upon interested
   programmers to create these interactive representations, we simply had
   access to the semantic data from a variety of publishers, and the widgets
   to represent the data, then we could create our own on-demand mashups to
   explore heterogeneous data in any way we chose.
   
   For each of these types of applications, interaction with information - be
   it personal, social or public - provides richer, faster, and potentially
   lighter-touch ways to build knowledge than our current interaction
   metaphors allow. What is the bottleneck to achieving these enriched forms
   of interaction? Fundamentally, we see the main bottleneck as a lack of
   tools for easy data capture, publication, representation and manipulation.
   
   Example:
   The mashup is a summative demonstration of the problem: to combine only two
   resources like a map and an apartment listing, one requires an API for a
   map service, programming knowledge/skills to get the apartment data from
   one source, say by having to scrape web pages, and plug that into the
   other. If the person wishes to use a different map, they may need to
   rewrite how the data from the apartment listing is plugged into that
   visualization. If they wish to use a completely different visualization,
   such as a heat graph, they will need to develop that code themselves.
   
   The barrier to entry for non-programmers is too high for most to be
   interested to attempt construction. By the time they would have the data
   they need, it may no longer even be relevant for the questions they wish to
   explore. Even for sufficiently skilled programmers, there are better things
   we could be doing with our time than constantly re-inventing the wheel.
   
   Challenges:
   Challenges to be addressed in this issue include, but are not restricted
   to:
   
    - approaches to support integrating data that is readily published,
   such as RSS feeds that are only lightly structured.
   
    - approaches to apply behaviors to these data sources.
   
    - approaches to make it as easy for someone to create and to publish
   structured data as it is to publish a blog.
   
    - approaches to support easy selection of items within resources for
   export into structured semantic forms like RDF.
   
    - facilities to support the pulling in of multiple sources; for
   instance, a person may wish to pull together data from three organizations.
   Where will they gather this data? What tools will be available to explore
   the various sources, align them where necessary and enable multiple
   visualizations to be explored?
   
    - methods to support fluidity and acceleration for each of the
   above: lowering the interaction cost for gathering data sources, exploring
   them and presenting them; designing lightweight and rapid techniques.
   
    - novel input mechanisms: most structured data capture requires the
   use of forms. The cost of form input can inhibit that data from being
   captured or shared. How can we reduce the barrier to data capture?
   
    - evaluation methods: how do we evaluate the degree to which these
   new approaches are effective, useful or empowering for knowledge builders?
   
    - user analysis and design methods: how do we understand context and
   goals at every stage of the design process? What is different about
   designing for a highly personal, contextual, and linked environment?
   
   This issue focuses on innovative interaction design that takes advantage
   of linked, semantic data on the Web. Therefore, particularly relevant work
   includes interaction designs to support rapid data selection or production,
   reuse, representation, and designs that help users understand and control
   their data environment. Real user evaluations that demonstrate that these
   attributes are experienced as facile and fluid are expected as part of work
   presented. We are also interested in evaluated models or frameworks that
   will support such interaction, either by dealing with the limitations of
   current data sources, or in particular, by making it easy for ordinary
   computer users to produce shared data formats for these data interaction
   tools. The preference is for RDF-based tools. Also of interest is what new
   applications may be produced when such effortless heterogeneous data
   merging becomes possible not *just* for Ajax hackers but for
   anyone currently using the Web.
   
   Submission:
   
   We welcome three types of submission for this Special Issue:
   
      Full papers from 10-30 pages of journal format.
      Short papers (4-6 page) demonstration papers with evaluations of new tools
          that address any of the above challenges.
      Short (1-2 page) forward-looking more speculative papers addressing the
          challenges outlined above.
   
   Please upload papers to the Journal of Web Semantics
   http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/671322/description#description
   
   Key Dates:
       Papers due April 20
       Reviews to Authors by May 15
       Authors' Revisions by June 7
       Additional comments by Reviewers to Authors by June 23
       Final Revisions by July 15
       Publication Jan 2010
   
   Editorial Committee for the Special Issue:
   
   Co-editors:
       mc schraefel, University of Southampton, UK
       Lloyd Rutledge, Open Universiteit Nederland
   
   Program Committee:
       Abraham Bernstein, U of Zürich
       Duane Degler, IPGEMS
       Steven Drucker, LiveLabs Research, Microsoft
       Jennifer Golbeck, U of Maryland
       David Karger, MIT
   
   Homepage: http://swui.webscience.org/JWS2009/

Received on Monday, 6 April 2009 12:31:38 UTC