Call for Book Chapters: "Towards the Multilingual Semantic Web", to be published by Springer

=== Call for Book Chapters ===

"Towards the Multilingual Semantic Web" (to be published by Springer, 
autumn 2013)

Editors: Paul Buitelaar (DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway, 
Ireland) and Philipp Cimiano (CITEC, University of Bielefeld, Germany)

We invite submissions of book chapter abstracts for a new book "Towards 
the Multilingual Semantic Web" to be published by Springer.

=== Motivation ===

The amount of Internet users with native languages other than English 
has seen a substantial growth in recent years. As a consequence, the Web 
is turning more and more into a truly multilingual platform in which 
individuals and organizations with different cultural and linguistic 
backgrounds collaborate, consuming and producing information at a scale 
without precedent. In such a multilingual web, differences in language 
should not become a barrier for information access, but contribute to 
plurality and diversity of opinion and culture. The creation of a level 
playing field in which users from different cultural and linguistic 
backgrounds have access to the same body of information and have 
comparable opportunities to contribute to that information, is a crucial 
goal to achieve. Such a level playing field would also reduce 
information hegemonies and biases, allowing to access various opinions 
and perspectives. In the traditional Web, language represents an 
important barrier for information access as it is not straightforward to 
access information produced in a foreign language. Towards this end, new 
principles, methods and architectures need to be developed that foster 
the access to information across the boundaries of languages and 
countries, allowing to aggregate and compare content and opinions 
originating in different cultural contexts and languages.

Originally conceived by Tim Berners-Lee et al. as an extension to the 
traditional Web, the Semantic Web is "an extension of the current web in 
which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling 
computers and people to work in cooperation". The Semantic Web has seen 
an impressive growth in recent years in terms of the amount of data 
published on the Web using the RDF and OWL data models. The kind of data 
published nowadays on the Semantic Web or Linked Open Data cloud is 
mainly of a factual nature and thus represents a basic body of knowledge 
that is accessible to mankind as a basis for informed decision-making. 
The Semantic Web vision bears an excellent potential to create a level 
playing field for users with different cultural backgrounds, native 
languages and originating from different geo-political environments. 
Such potential exists, as information available on the Semantic Web is 
expressed in a language-independent fashion and is thus accessible to 
speakers of different languages if the right mechanisms are in place. 
However, so far the relation between multilingualism and the Semantic 
Web has not received enough attention in the research community. 
Exploring and advancing the state-of-the-art in information access to 
the Semantic Web across languages is the goal of the edited book 
proposed here.

=== Structure of the book===

The planned book will consist of around 15 chapters of about 20 pages, 
divided in three sections: Principles, Methods and Applications.

Principles: The section on principles will be concerned with models, 
architectures, and methodologies that enrich the current Semantic Web 
Architecture with features necessary to handle different languages. 
Examples are:

- models for the integration of linguistic information with ontologies, 
i.e., models for multilingualism in knowledge representation, in 
particular OWL and RDF(S)
- extensions of state-of-the-art querying languages (SPARQL) to account 
for multilinguality
- web architecture to support multilinguality

Methods: The methods section will contain papers describing particular 
methods and approaches to solving some of the key issues in the area of 
the Multilingual Semantic Web, including but not limited to:

- multilingual and cross-lingual ontology alignment
- ontology translation and localization
- multilingual and cross-lingual aspects of semantic search and querying 
of knowledge repositories
- cross-lingual information retrieval
- cross-lingual question answering over Linked Data
- automatic integration and adaptation of (multilingual) lexicons with 
ontologies
- multi- and cross-lingual ontology-based information extraction and 
ontology population
- multilingualism and linked data (generation, querying, browsing, 
visualization and presentation)
- multilingual aspects of ontology verbalization
- ontology learning across languages
- collaborative ontology design across languages and cultures
- NLP methods to construct the multilingual Semantic Web

Applications: The applications section will describe innovative and 
relevant applications and solutions for use cases in the area of the 
Multilingual Semantic Web.

=== Submission ===

Submission will be in two stages. At the first stage, an abstract of 5 
pages (incl. References) should be submitted, describing the main topic 
and table of contents for the proposed chapter. Each abstract should 
mention explicitly which of the above topics are addressed, and stating 
also whether the chapter is concerned primarily with principles, methods 
or applications. At the second stage, authors of selected abstracts will 
be invited to submit a full chapter.

=== Timeline ===

December 2, 2012        Deadline for abstract submission
December 10, 2012      Notification of acceptance / rejection
March 31, 2013            Submission of chapter (20 pages maximum)
Mai 31, 2013                Review of chapter to authors
June 30, 2013               Submission of pre-final version
July 31, 2013                Review of pre-final version to authors
August 31, 2013          Camera-ready version
September 2013           Book publication

-- 
Prof. Dr. Philipp Cimiano
Semantic Computing Group
Excellence Cluster - Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC)
University of Bielefeld

Phone: +49 521 106 12249
Fax: +49 521 106 12412
Mail: cimiano@cit-ec.uni-bielefeld.de

Room H-127
Morgenbreede 39
33615 Bielefeld

Received on Monday, 1 October 2012 14:00:31 UTC