CALL FOR PAPERS

IEEE Intelligent Systems special issue on

SEMANTIC WEB TECHNOLOGY

MOTIVATION

In less than a decade, the World Wide Web (WWW) has become a major component of modern life. With the growing amount of information on the Web, however, users are losing the means to organize and to search through all this content. Search engines produce more and more irrelevant hits, and the business community struggles to provide the necessary levels of interoperability and data exchange necessary for the world of e-commerce.

There is an emerging awareness that providing the next wave of major change on the Web, and enabling business-to-business e-commerce requires a new set of markup languages and tools that will allow more of the Web content—not just form—to become machine readable. Languages must be developed that will allow for the recognition of the semantic context in which Web materials are used, for the reconciliation of terminological differences between diverse user communities.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, has named this web of ontology and logic the "semantic web". In recent years, a research community has come into existence to make the vision a reality. Work in this area has led to exciting new innovations, including

• languages for expressing Web resources in a machine-interpretable manner
• new system architectures for enabling intelligent information access
• tools for providing support for finding, accessing, presenting, and maintaining information sources
• applications that fully exploit the new possibilities provided by machine-processable semantics.

BACKGROUND

The Web has dramatically changed the availability of information. Currently there are around 1000 million documents in the Web, which are used by more than 200 million users internationally. Moreover, the number of Web resources is growing astronomically. The exponential grow of the Web makes it increasingly difficult to find, access, present, and maintain the information of use to a wide variety of users. Currently, pages on Web must use representations rooted in languages such as HTML or SGML and must make use of protocols that allow browsers to present information to human readers. The information content, however, is mainly presented by natural language. Thus, there is a wide gap between the information available to computer-based tools and the information kept in human-readable form.

We are soliciting papers for a special issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems that describe approaches that may help to realize the vision of the "semantic Web". In particular, we are seeking papers on languages, architectures, tools, and applications of and for the semantic web.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Authors should note that IEEE Intelligent Systems is a journal of applied artificial intelligence, addressing the needs of both the research community and the engineering community. A direct and lively writing style should be adopted. Manuscripts should be original and should have between 6 and 10 magazine pages (not more than 7500 words) with up to 10 references. For additional details, please refer to http://www.computer.org/intelligent/author.htm. Manuscripts should be sent to dieter@cs.vu.nl in PDF format by December 20, 2000.

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