CFP: IJSWIS Special Issue on Visualisation of and Interaction with Semantic Web Data

Hello

We are pleased to announce the call for papers for the following special issue.


==================================================================

            Special Issue on Visualisation of and Interaction 
                              with Semantic Web Data

                                  Special issue of the 
  International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems

                    http://www.ijswis.org/?q=node%2F41


==================================================================

                 Editors: Matthew Rowe , Aba-Sah Dadzie


ABOUT
------

Visualising and easing the interpretation of semantic web data is now 
one of the largest challenges facing the Semantic Web community. The 
growth of the Web of Linked Data has shifted research from being primarily 
focused on producing semantic web data to consuming it, not only are we 
beginning to eat our own dog food, we are starting to offer it to others 
outside of the community to taste and adapt to their needs. Mainstream 
adoption is, however, still limited by a lack of understanding of the 
Semantic Web Technology stack. Questions like ‘What makes the Semantic 
Web different from the World Wide Web?’, ‘What is an ontology?’ and 
‘What is semantic metadata?’ are commonplace when presenting non-semantic 
web savvy users with semantic data. Work is required that allows lay-users 
to consume and interact with semantic web data without a deep knowledge of 
the intricacies of the Semantic Web stack. In providing such approaches 
reuse and consumption of semantic web data will be achieved in areas such 
as education, social awareness and governmental transparency, all areas 
where data is currently available and encoded as Linked Data and/or using 
other semantic representations.

We invite submissions that illustrate interactive visualisation of semantic 
web data, to support activities such as exploratory knowledge discovery and 
browsing of linked data, in order to aid understanding of the very large 
amounts of highly interlinked, high-dimensional data, and therefore demonstrate 
the power and utility of the semantic web.

The volume of semantic web data now available and the rate at which it is being 
produced also provide challenges to data consumers and semantic web developers. 
Without performing a depth-first exploration of a given dataset it is hard to 
know what the dataset may contain, its size, its attributes or whether it is 
useful for what a given consumer needs. Analytics, supported by interactive 
visualisation, plays a vital role in this situation by generating overviews 
and improving the interpretation of statistical analysis that describes dataset 
properties. Such an approach provides consumers with abstract or high-level 
descriptions of what is available and helps to point to what could be useful 
to carrying out their tasks successfully.

We solicit work that illustrates the application of visual analytics to semantic 
web data,. Examples include graph summarisation, network-based analytics and 
plot layouts that provide density and connectivity assessments, used in 
co-ordination with other visual analytics techniques that highlight specific 
attributes, such as time and location.

Ontologies form a vital component of the Semantic Web, allowing community-specific 
terms and colloquial use of language to be expressed using commonly agreed formal 
terms or concepts. Ontologies further ease the definition of the (often multiple) 
relationships between concepts. Despite such formal constructs, presenting 
ontological concepts and their relations in a coherent and legible form still 
remains a challenge. While support for formal knowledge representation is 
available for technical audiences it is unclear if we are close to an agreed 
community-standard or practice for such presentation to other end users? How 
should the presentation be adapted given the audience (technical or lay) in order 
to convey the value of its information content to them?
We invite submissions that provide novel and innovative ways to visualise ontologies, 
concept hierarchies and the dependencies between distributed ontologies, and contrast 
existing ontology visualisation approaches.

Submissions should be suitable for a highly ranked archival journal (IJSWIS is among 
the top journals in WWW).



TOPICS
------

We invite submissions covering the following topics:

-Visualisation of Semantic Web Data
--Browsing Linked Data
--Visual exploratory knowledge discovery and information retrieval (from Linked Data and other Semantic Web Data
--Ontology visualisation
--Big data visualisation
--Including solutions for managing user cognitive load

-Interacting with Semantic Web Data
--Novel interaction paradigms
--Intuitive support for editing or publishing to the Semantic Web

-Visual Analytics of Semantic Web Data
--Graph and network-theoretic analysis
--Geo/socio-temporal and topical analysis
--Statistical analysis
--Visualising (and communicating) uncertainty, validity, dynamicity
--Business-driven analytics (to derive competitive advantage)
---as a tool for sharing knowledge within the enterprise to obtain information for marketing

-Evaluation of interactive, user-oriented applications for the Semantic Web
--Visualisation as a method for increasing usability
--Usability studies
--Semantic-data specific evaluation tasks
--Comparative analysis of existing approaches
--Benchmarks & metrics



KEY DATES
---------

Submission Deadline: 15th May 2012
Notifications: 15th August 2012
Revised Papers (after Revisions): 1st October 2012
Final Versions: November-December 2012



SUBMISSIONS
-----------

Full research papers: typical length: 8k words (longer submissions are possible if editors and reviewers feel content is necessary)
Application papers: 5K- 8K words


We look forward to your submissions! Thanks!

--
Dr Matthew Rowe
Research Associate
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, MK7 6AA
http://people.kmi.open.ac.uk/rowe/ 


-- 
The Open University is incorporated by Royal Charter (RC 000391), an exempt charity in England & Wales and a charity registered in Scotland (SC 038302).