Final CfP: Journal of Web Semantics: Special issue on the Semantic and Social Web (21 January 2012)

Journal of Web Semantics: Special issue on the Semantic and Social Web

http://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-web-semantics/call-for-papers/sp
ecial-issue-on-the-semantic-and-social-web/

Submission deadline: 21 January 2012

Guest Editors:
* John Breslin, NUI Galway, Ireland
* Meena Nagarajan, IBM Research, Almaden, CA, USA

The Social Web has grown considerably in the past six or seven years, with
the emergence of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and WordPress.com.
Most sites on the Social Web offer similar functionality: users share
content (be it photos, blog posts, videos, bookmarks, etc.); users connect
with other users, either directly or via common interests often reflected by
shared content; users add free-text tags or keywords to content; users
comment on content items; and so on. There is a huge amount of
inherently-meaningful metadata being made available on the Social Web
through content creation, the formation of social networks, and other tasks
being performed on these sites. However, much of the Social Web exists as
data silos, with connections and content items (and their associated
metadata) locked into various services, either by design or a because of a
lack of standardization across these sites.

In parallel with the development of the Social Web, the Semantic Web has put
in standards and mechanisms for exchanging data between services, for
creating agreed-upon vocabularies of terms in particular domains, and for
enabling information integration across distributed data providers. It has
traditionally suffered from a 'chicken-and-egg' problem, where there was a
lack of interesting applications due to a lack of data adhering to Semantic
Web standards, but with the emergence of the Social Web, a large amount of
data is being created on a daily basis by millions of users, and this
provides a very rich data source for semantically-enabled applications to
work with. The Semantic Web can also assist with the data silo issue
referred to previously, by providing a set of common vocabularies for data
exchange between sites on the Social Web (e.g. FOAF, SIOC, MOAT, Facebook
OGP, etc.).

In this special issue, we solicit papers that tackle challenges or issues
relating to the Social Web using semantic technologies, and to using social
techniques to solve problems in the Semantic Web space. Topics of interest
include, but are not limited to the following.

* Enriching the Social Web with semantic metadata: RDF, microformats, or
other frameworks 
* Mining and analysis of data from the Social Web
* Semantic microblogging
* Semantic wikis and creating semantic knowledge bases using Social Web
systems 
* Semantic blogging or other tools to assist with writing posts
* Data portability and social network portability
* The Social Web and linked data
* Developing vocabularies for the Social Web, or working with existing
vocabularies 
* Semantic reasoning for Social Web applications
* Social bookmarking enhanced with semantics, semantic tagging and
annotation 
* Unifying domain vocabularies by mining over collective behavior (tagging,
sharing, etc.) 
* Using semantic technologies to integrate data from the Social Web
* Security and trust in the Social Web based on semantics
* Producing and querying semantic data from sites on the Social Web
* Other emerging semantic applications for the Social Web

IMPORTANT DATES
We aim at an efficient publication cycle in order to guarantee
up-to-dateness of the published results. We will review papers on a rolling
basis as they are submitted and explicitly encourage submissions well before
the final deadline.
* Submission deadline: 21 January 2012
* Reviews due: 18 March 2012
* Notification: 30 March 2012
* Final version submitted: 27 April 2012
* Publication: July 2012

See the JWS Guide for Authors
<http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/671322/authori
nstructions>  for details on the submission process.

--
John Breslin www.johnbreslin.org
Lecturer, Engineering and Informatics, NUI Galway www.nuigalway.ie
Researcher, Social Software and Semantic Web, DERI www.deri.ie
General Chair, AAAI ICWSM-12, 4-8 June 2012, Dublin www.icwsm.org
johnbreslin on LinkedIn / Skype / Twitter / Facebook