[CFP] First call for papers: The Fifteenth Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2018)

[Apologies for multiple postings.]

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FIRST CALL FOR PAPERS

This is a joint call for the Research, In-Use, and Resources tracks.

The Fifteenth Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2018)
June 3rd - June 7th, 2018, Heraklion, Crete, Greece.
 
Web Page: https://2018.eswc-conferences.org <https://2018.eswc-conferences.org/>  
Twitter: @eswc_conf 
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ESWCCONF <https://www.facebook.com/ESWCCONF>  

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Important Dates

Abstract submission:      Wednesday 27th December 2017
Paper submission:              Friday 5th January 2018 
Opening of rebuttal period: Friday 9th February 
Closing of rebuttal period:   Wednesday 14th February
Notification to authors:      Friday 23rd February
Camera ready papers due: Friday 16th March

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ESWC Conference:

ESWC is one of the key academic conferences to present research results and new developments in the area of the Semantic Web. For its 15th edition, ESWC will be back in Heraklion (Crete, Greece) from Sunday 3rd June to Thursday 7th June 2018. ESWC2018 features three main tracks (Research, Resources, In-Use), introduces a novel fully open review policy, as well as alternative publishing and decentralisation measures. This is the first call for papers for each of the main tracks.

General Chair: Aldo Gangemi

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Call for Research Track Papers
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Scope and Topics

The goal of the Semantic Web is to create a network of data and knowledge that interconnect across the Web, and where both content and its meaning are manipulated by processes, services and applications. This endeavour naturally draws from and impacts on many disciplines of computing (and connected areas), related to data and information management, knowledge engineering, machine intelligence, human knowledge and languages, software services and applications. We are therefore seeking contribution to research at the intersection of the Semantic Web and these areas, as described in the 9 research tracks of the conferences.

In addition to the main focus on advances in Semantic Web research and technologies, ESWC 2018 is looking to broaden the Semantic Web research community’s understanding and focus on problems and areas that directly impact the development of the Semantic Web. Thus, the 15th edition of ESWC 2018 includes 2 additional research tracks: the Benchmarking and Empirical Evaluations track, and the Semantic Web for Science track.

The aim of the  Benchmarking and Empirical Evaluations track is to encourage the community to submit papers on results of empirical evaluations of state-of-the-art Semantic Web methods; extensive evaluation using existing benchmarks are expected. The papers of this track should follow the scientific method and ensure reproducibility of the reported results by using analytical modelling and statistical methods. Submissions could report on the verification or refutation of already published results, as well as the empirical comparison of state-of-the-art methods. 

Moreover, in the Semantic Web for Science track, submissions presenting domain specific problems that require the use of Semantic Web technologies to be solved are expected. Biomedicine, pharmacogenomic, sociology, scholarly, maritime, or journalism are examples of scientific domains.  The introduction of this theme integrates well with and builds upon tracks of Semantic Data Management and Machine Learning, and allows for the submission of research papers where novel solutions for the management and analytics of scientific data are required.

Research Subtracks:

Vocabularies, Schemas, Ontologies. Chairs:  Sofia Pinto, Christoph Lange
Reasoning. Chairs: Jeff Pan, Diego Calvanese 
Linked Data. Chairs: Hala Skaf-Molli, Jorge Gracia
Social Web and Web Science. Chairs:  Stefan Dietze, Harald Sack
Semantic Data Management, Big data, Scalability. Chairs: Maribel Acosta, Olaf Hartig 
Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval. Chairs: John McCrae, Valentina Presutti
Machine Learning - Chairs:  Andreas Hotho, Achim Rettinger
Mobile Web, Sensors and Semantic Streams. Chairs: Themis Palpanas, Intizar Ali
Services, APIs, Processes and Cloud Computing. Chairs: Amrapali Zaveri, Ruben Verborgh
Special Subtracks:

Benchmarking and Empirical Evaluations. Chairs: Oscar Corcho, Emanuele Della Valle
Semantic Web for Science. Chairs: Catia Pesquita, Adrian Paschke
Research Track chairs

Maria-Esther Vidal, Leibniz Information Centre For Science and Technology University Library, Germany, and Universidad Simon Bolivar, Venezuela
Roberto Navigli, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

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Call for In-Use & Industrial Track Papers
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The Semantic Web In-Use and Industry track provides a forum for researchers and industry to discuss novel research taken to the market, or on any other relevant uptake of semantic technologies outside the lab. Submissions to the track will provide a deeper insight on the exploitation of Semantic Web technologies in different sectors. The track takes a broad view of semantic technologies including natural language processing and machine learning techniques.

Papers will be evaluated on the basis of measurable impact of semantic technologies, and on the extent to which they address real-life problems. In addition, papers will be assessed on the novelty of the techniques applied in practice, and should include an evaluation of the technology or reflect on the pros and cons of the approach. 

Topics:
Best practices and lessons learnt from the use of semantic technologies in real-world settings
Comparison of semantic technologies with alternative or conventional approaches
Industry and business trends regarding the use of semantic technologies
Ontology-based data access in large-scale and industrial systems
Cloud Computing and Mobile apps based on semantic technologies
Knowledge Graphs in real-world settings
Semantic technologies and Machine Learning
Natural Language Processing and machine reading techniques applied in practice
Sentiment Analysis and Social Networks in action
Intelligent User Interfaces and Interaction paradigms for semantic applications
Corporate Data and Knowledge Management over large, heterogeneous and diverse data; Semantic Big Data
Semantic technologies and corporate data governance 
The use of Schema.org <http://schema.org/>, microformats and other open markup languages and standards
Security and Privacy issues in semantic applications
Collaborative Content Management Systems, including Wikis
Industry and Business Analytics solutions using semantic technology
Internet of Things, sensor networks
Applications in domain-specific areas such as Health & Life Sciences, Digital Libraries & Cultural Heritage, Media & Entertainment, Smart Cities, and Open Government
In-use Track chairs:
Anna Tordai, Elsevier
Laura Hollink, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), NL
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Call for Resources Track Papers
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Scope and Topics

Many of the research efforts in the areas of the Semantic Web and Linked Data focus on publishing scientific papers that prove a hypothesis. However, scientific advancement is often reliant on good quality resources, that provide the necessary scaffolding to support the scientific publications; yet the resources themselves rarely get the same recognition as the advances they facilitate. Sharing these resources and the best practices that have lead to their development with the research community is crucial, to consolidate research material, ensure reproducibility of results and in general gain new scientific insights.

The ESWC 2018 Resources Track aims to promote the sharing of resources including, but not restricted to: datasets, evaluation benchmarks and annotated corpora, ontologies and vocabularies, knowledge graphs of remarkable interest, machine learning models (e.g. embeddings) that are not trivial to (re-)train, software frameworks, tools, libraries and APIs attached to an open license, etc. In particular, we encourage the sharing of such resources following best and well established practices within the Semantic Web community, including the provision of an open license and a permalink identifying the resource. This track calls for contributions that provide a concise and clear description of a resource and its usage. 

A typical Resource track paper may reporting on one of the following categories, though the list is not exhaustive:
Ontologies developed for an application, with a focus on describing the modelling process underlying their creation and their usage;
Datasets and annotated corpora produced to support specific evaluation tasks;
Knowledge graphs or remarkable interest that comprehensively cover new vertical domains;
Machine learning models that would impact the knowledge engineering community. Examples include comprehensive word embeddings trained on large corpora, models for computer vision such as Inception v3 or ResNet50, CRNN for music, etc. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_datasets_for_machine_learning_research <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_datasets_for_machine_learning_research>   
Description of a reusable research prototype / service supporting research or applications; 
Description of community shared software frameworks that can be extended or adapted.
Specific Review Criteria for Resource Papers
The program committee will consider the quality of both the resource and  the paper in its review process. Therefore, authors must ensure unfettered access to the resource during the review process, ideally by the resource being cited at a permanent location specific for the resource. For example, data available in a repository such as FigShare, Zenodo, or a domain specific repository; or software code being available in public code repository such as GitHub or BitBucket. The resource MUST be publicly available.

We welcome the description of well established as well as emerging resources. Resources will be evaluated along the following generic review criteria that should be carefully considered both by authors and reviewers:

Potential impact:
Does the resource break new ground?
Does the resource plug an important gap?
How does the resource advance the state of the art?
Has the resource been compared to other existing resources (if any) of similar scope?
Is the resource of interest to the Semantic Web community?
Is the resource of interest to society in general?
Will the resource have an impact, especially in supporting the adoption of Semantic Web technologies?
Is the resource relevant and sufficiently general, does it measure some significant aspect?
Reusability:
Is there evidence of usage by a wider community beyond the resource creators or their project? Alternatively, what is the resource’s potential for being (re)used; for example, based on the activity volume on discussion forums, mailing list, issue tracker, support portal, etc?
Is the resource easy to (re)use?  For example, does it have good quality documentation? Are there tutorials availability? etc.
Is the resource general enough to be applied in a wider set of scenarios, not just for the originally designed use?
Is there potential for extensibility to meet future requirements?
Does the resource clearly explain how others use the data and software?
Does the resource description clearly state what the resource can and cannot do, and the rationale for the exclusion of some functionality?
Design & Technical quality:
Does the design of the resource follow resource specific best practices?
Did the authors perform an appropriate re-use or extension of suitable high-quality resources?  For example, in the case of ontologies, authors might  extend upper ontologies and/or reuse ontology design patterns.
Is the resource suitable to solve the task at hand?
Does the resource provide an appropriate description (both human and machine readable), thus encouraging the adoption of FAIR principles? Is there a schema diagram? For datasets, is the description available in terms of VoID/DCAT/DublinCore?
If the resource proposes performance metrics, are such metrics sufficiently broad and relevant?
If the resource is a comparative analysis or replication study, was the coverage of systems reasonable, or were any obvious choices missing?
Availability:
Is the resource (and related results) published at a persistent URI (PURL, DOI, w3id)?
Does the resource provide a licence specification? (See creativecommons.org <http://creativecommons.org/>, opensource.org <http://opensource.org/> for more information)
How is the resource publicly available? For example as API, Linked Open Data, Download, Open Code Repository.
Is the resource publicly findable? Is it registered in (community) registries (e.g. Linked Open Vocabularies, BioPortal, or DataHub)? Is it registered in generic repositories such as  FigShare, Zenodo or GitHub?
Is there a sustainability plan specified for the resource? Is there a plan for the maintenance of the resource?
Does it use open standards, when applicable, or have good reason not to?
Resource Track Chairs
Pascal Hitzler, Wright State University, USA
Raphaël Troncy, EURECOM, France

The chairs can be contacted at eswc2018-resource-track-chairs@googlegroups.com <mailto:eswc2018-resource-track-chairs@googlegroups.com>

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Submission Information, Reviewing
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ESWC 2018 welcomes the submission of original research and application papers dealing with all aspects of representing and using semantics on the Web. We encourage theoretical, methodological, empirical, and applications papers. Submitted papers should describe original work, present significant results, and provide rigorous, principled, and repeatable evaluation. 
We strongly encourage and appreciate the submission of papers incorporating links to data sets and other material used for evaluation as well as to live demos and software source code. 
ESWC will not accept papers that, at the time of submission, are under review for or have already been published in or accepted for publication in a journal, another conference, or another ESWC track. The conference organizers may share information on submissions with other venues to ensure that this rule is not violated.
The proceedings of this conference will be published in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. Decentralised publishing of pre- and post-prints e.g. along the lines of LORC and Linked Data Notifications (see https://linkedresearch.org/cloud <https://linkedresearch.org/cloud>) is strongly encouraged, and will be supported by a dedicated team.

Rules include:
Pre-submission of abstracts is a strict requirement. All papers and abstracts have to be submitted electronically via the EasyChair conference submission system. Abstracts alone will not be reviewed.
Papers describing a resource must not exceed 15 pages (including references). Papers that exceed the page limit will be rejected without review.
All research submissions must be in English.
Submissions must be either in PDF or in HTML, formatted in the style of the Springer Publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). For details on the LNCS style, see Springer’s Author Instructions. For HTML submission guidance, see below, and the website. 
We encourage embedding metadata in the PDF/HTML to provide a machine readable link from the paper to the resource.
Authors will have the opportunity to submit a rebuttal to the reviews to clarify questions posed by program committee members.
Authors of accepted papers will be required to provide semantic annotations for the abstract of their submission, which will be made available on the conference web site. Details will be provided at the time of acceptance.
Accepted papers will be distributed to conference attendees and also published by Springer in the printed conference proceedings, as part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series.
At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the conference and present the paper there.
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Useful tips for HTML submissions
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The Research Articles in Simplified HTML (RASH) Framework provides a terse markup language for writing scientific articles in (X)HTML. It is possible to include also RDF statements as RDFa annotations and/or as Turtle, JSON-LD and RDF/XML triples by using the tag "script". Tools exist for converting RASH-compliant ODT or DOCX to LaTeX (see http://dasplab.cs.unibo.it/rocs <http://dasplab.cs.unibo.it/rocs>).
Dokieli is a client-side editor for decentralized article publishing in HTML+RDFa, annotations and social interactions, compliant with the Linked Research initiative. There are a variety of examples available online https://github.com/linkeddata/dokieli/wiki#examples-in-the-wild <https://github.com/linkeddata/dokieli/wiki#examples-in-the-wild>, where the LNCS author guidelines as a template may be particularly useful.
Accepted papers for which there is an HTML version will be made available online through the ESWC website. For HTML submission, please submit a ZIP archive containing an HTML file with all the additional stylesheets and scripts for guaranteeing a correct visualization of the document in browsers.
For references, e.g. see the "Reference" section in https://datasciencehub.net/content/guidelines-authors <https://datasciencehub.net/content/guidelines-authors>.
Please note that independent of the format used, we require submissions to abide by the permitted number of pages, font sizes, font selection, margins, etc. This is to ensure visual consistency of the proceedings as well as to have comparative page limits.

Submissions and reviewing will be supported by the EasyChair system: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eswc2018 <https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=eswc2018> 

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A Fully Open Review Policy
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This year, the ESWC 2018 review process will be fully open. The basic principles are:

The submitted papers will be publicly posted on the ESWC 2018 web site upon submission
The authors will be known to reviewers (i.e., submissions are NOT anonymous)
The reviewers will be known to authors by default. However, reviewers can also explicitly opt-out.
The reviews and the rebuttal will be made publicly available upon final notification (post-rebuttal), including reviewer identity (unless they have opted out), both for the PC members (unless they have opted out) and the senior PC members (which cannot opt out).
On explicit request made by the authors, the rejected papers and their reviews will be removed from the Web after the conference.
For accepted papers, the reviews will stay online at least 12 months. They will be removed at the author’s requests after this embargo period.
Upon posting submissions on the ESWC 2018 web site (point 1 above), any researcher can also contribute open reviews. Decentralisation will be handy here e.g. with openreview.org <http://openreview.org/> (for PDF) or hypothes.is <http://hypothes.is/> or dokieli (for HTML), plus Linked Data Notifications.