CfP: IJSWIS Special Issue on Scalability and Performance of Semantic Web Systems

[Apologies for cross-posting]

Call for Papers: Special Issue on Scalability and Performance of
Semantic Web Systems

International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems (IJSWIS[1])

Editor in Chief: Prof. Amit Sheth, Kno.e.sis Center, Wright State University

Submission Deadline: September 1, 2008

Guest Editors:

Vassilis Christophides (University of Crete and FORTH-ICS, Heraklion,
Greece)

christop@ics.forth.gr

Stefan Decker (DERI National University of Ireland, Galway)

stefan.decker@deri.org

Jeff Heflin (Lehigh University, Bethlehem, USA)
heflin@cse.lehigh.edu

Scope and Topics

There has been an explosion recently in the development of Semantic Web
(SW) applications in various application areas (e.g. in e-science,
digital libraries). As the size of the SW is expected to further grow in
the coming years, scalability and performance of SW systems becomes
increasingly important. Typically, such systems deal with information
described in SW languages like OWL and RDF(S), and provide services for
storing, querying, updating and reasoning over large volumes of triples.
Defining adequate performance targets is one of the major challenges for
the development of SW systems that integrate reasoning with manipulation
of large scale RDF/OWL ontologies and their instances. In particular,
many traditional reasoning algorithms raise serious scalability concerns
because they do not rely on secondary storage and appropriate indexing
techniques.

In order to be able to evaluate the scalability and performance of SW
systems, the existence of agreed benchmarking datasets is also of
crucial importance. In many related domains such as databases and
theorem proving, standard benchmarks exist and are ready to guide
research on optimization techniques. In the SW area, such benchmarks
have only just started to emerge (e.g. LUBM). Yet, there is no commonly
agreed benchmark covering the complexity of real SW ontologies and
related instances. Further research need to be conducted on the
synthetic generation of SW datasets that simulate the various
distributions of graph features (in/out property degrees, subsumption
relationships, etc.) exhibited by existing SW applications.��

TOPICS OF INTERESTS for the IJSWIS special issue include, but are not
limited to:

* Foundations, methods and tools for SW benchmarking;
* Scalability metrics and performance targets of SW systems;
* Performance evaluation of existing SW query, update and reasoning
services;
* Design and implementation of high performance SW systems;
* Analysis of synthetic and real large-scale SW repositories.

Submission Process

Submissions to this special issue should follow the journal's guidelines
for submission
(http://www.idea-group.com/journals/details.asp?ID=4625&v=guidelines).
After submitting the paper, please also inform guest editors by an email
with the paper ID assigned by the submission system. Papers must be of
high quality and should clearly state the technical issue(s) being
addressed as related to scalability and performance of SW systems.
Research papers should present a proof of concept for any novel
technique they are proposing. Case studies should discuss the
significance and applicability of their proposed architecture/system. If
a submission is based on a prior publication in a workshop or
conference, the journal submission must involve substantial advance (a
min. of 30%) in conceptual terms as well as in exposition (e.g., more
comprehensive testing/evaluation/validation or additional
applications/usage).

All papers must be submitted by September 1, 2008. The editors recommend
that the number of pages should not exceed 35. All papers are subject to
peer review performed by three established researchers selected from a
panel of experts established for this special issue. Accepted papers
have an opportunity for further revision and an additional round of
reviewer feedback. Information on the journal with online submission can
be found at: http://www.ijswis.org. Please submit manuscripts through
that online system.

Important Dates
* Submissions: September 1, 2008
* Completion of first round of reviews November 1, 2008
* Notifications: November 10, 2008
* Revised papers: December 20, 2008
* Notifications of final acceptance: January 15, 2009
* Final papers: February 27, 2009
* Publication: Next available issue of 2009 (vol 5)

Useful Links
http://iswc2008.semanticweb.org/?p=14
http://esw.w3.org/topic/RdfStoreBenchmarking


[1] IJSWIS (http://ijswis.org) is indexed by Thomson Scientific/ISI and
other major indices. CfP for special issues can be found at:
http://www.igi-pub.com/journals/details.asp?ID=4625&v=callForPapers or
http://www.ijswis.org/cfp.html Content of earlier issues can be found at
http://www.igi-global.com/journals/details.asp?id=4625&mode=tocVolumes.

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martin hepp, http://www.heppnetz.de
mhepp@computer.org, skype mfhepp