Special issue of the Journal of Web Semantics on data linking

* Apologies for cross-posting *



This special issue of the Journal of Web Semantics focuses on the problem of finding links between datasets published as linked data.



Today the web of data has become a reality. The ever increasing number of datasets published as RDF according to the linked data principles, the support of major search engines, e-commerce sites and social networks give no doubt that the early scenarios of the semantic Web vision will soon become a reality.



The power of the web lies in its networked structure, in the connections between the resources it contains. Similarly, linked data enable the interlinking of data resources so that databases become interconnected and the information they contain become part of a huge distributed database. The transformation of the Web from a "Web of documents" into a "Web of data", as well as the availability of large collections of sensor generated data ("internet of things"), is leading to a new generation of Web applications based on the integration of both data and services. At the same time, new data are published every day out of user generated contents and public Web sites.



This emergence of the Web of data raises many challenges, such as the need of comparing and matching data with the goal of resolving the multiplicity of data references to the same real-world objects and of finding useful and relevant similarities and correspondences among data.

The Web needs techniques and tools for the discovery of data links, and a suitable theory for the understanding and definition of the data links meaning.



About data links, one of the most important goals is to provide means to ensure that the interconnection between data is effective. The design of algorithms, methodologies, languages and tools that provide more efficient and automated ways to link data is essential for the growth of the Web of data rather than a set of disjoint data islands.



While the problems of entity resolution have been studied in the database community for a long time, the Web of data environment presents new important challenges at different levels. Large volumes of data and the variety of repositories which have to be processed rise the need for scalable linking techniques which require minimal user involvement. On the other hand, in cases where user configuration effort is required, there is a need for tools to be usable by non-experts in the domain.



Given that published data links can be used by automatic reasoning tools, it is important to capture the meaning of links in a precise way.

Since quality of automatically generated links can vary, their provenance and reliability have to be modelled in an explicit way.

Finally, to capture and compare the reliability of different tools and techniques, there is a need for evaluation methods for automatic data linking approaches.



Challenges



* Automating the process of finding links between Web datasets

* Scaling data linking algorithms

* Representation and interpretation of links

* Providing efficient user interfaces and interaction methods

* Modeling and reasoning on links trust and provenance information



Topics of Interest



The topics of interest for this special issue include but are not limited to the following.



* data linking tools and frameworks

* techniques for automated data linking

* data similarity measures

* similarity spreading measures

* schema-based similarity measures

* candidate dataset selection and datasets similarity measures

* statistical analysis techniques

* semi-supervised, learning-based data linking methods

* optimization methods for computing similarity

* web data sampling techniques

* identity representation and semantics

* reasoning on links, link propagation

* user interaction for link elicitation and validation

* provenance and trust models on links

* methods for link quality assessment

* innovative applications using links

* evaluation of data linking techniques and tools



Important Dates



We will review papers on a rolling basis as they are submitted and explicitly encourage submissions well before the final deadline.



* 1 June: submission deadline

* 1 September: initial decisions and notifications

* 1 October: major/minor revisions due

* 1 November: final minor revisions due

* 1 December: final decisions and notifications

* 1 January: preprints available publication in 2013





Instructions for submission



Please see the author guidelines for detailed instructions before you submit. Submissions should be conducted through Elsevier's Electronic Submission System. More details on the Journal of Web Semantics can be found on its homepage. See the JWS Guide for Authors for details on the submission process.





Editors



* Alfio Ferrara (Università degli Studi di Milano)

* Andriy Nikolov (Open University)

* François Scharffe (LIRMM, Université de Montpellier 2)







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