Research Papers Track

Call for Papers

The research track is the core and technical anchor of the ISWC conference series, whose goal is presentation of novel and innovative research that demonstrates new trends or addresses scientific challenges for the Semantic Web.  Traditionally, this track has included papers addressing logic-based or statistical reasoning on the web of data, new approaches in distributed computing, web engineering, information systems, natural language processing and artificial intelligence, as well as successful results in new application areas, and solutions for the presentation of and interaction with the web of data.

To encourage awareness of new lines of semantic web research, we are introducing two cross-cutting themes for 2011: Citizen Users and Rules. Authors will be asked in their submissions to identify these themes in the list of keywords when applicable.  Citizen Users papers should create or reuse personas from the ISWC persona archive that identify characteristics of users that would be interested in the technology or research results reported in the paper. Rules papers should identify ways in which the use of rule interchange or new rule-based dialects would benefit the work reported in the paper. Note that we are encouraging authors of all papers to think about these themes, not only papers about user studies or rules. 

The ISWC 2011 research track solicits the submission of original research papers dealing with analytical, theoretical, empirical, and practical aspects of all areas of Semantic Web research. Papers in the research track are expected to clearly present their contribution and to provide some principled means of evaluation. We especially encourage papers that ensure the repeatability of their experiments and share with the community their data and test harnesses.

To maintain the high level of quality and impact of the ISWC series all papers will be reviewed by three program committee members and one vice chair of the program committee. To assess papers, reviewers will judge their originality and significance for further research or practice related to the Semantic Web, as well as the technical soundness of the proposed approaches and the overall readability of the submitted papers. Specific attention will be given to the evaluation of the approaches described in the papers. We strongly encourage evaluations that are repeatable. Depending on the type of the paper and the proposed approach, indications for repeatability may vary: papers describing work with an empirical basis may want to provide web access to training/test data, experimental results, or supporting movies (as supplementary data); papers describing case studies may link to case study journals for deeper insights; papers describing systems may provide download of the software or a Web client together with full assessments in user studies; papers describing new algorithms may want to provide the algorithm in source code and in an easy-to-install manner.

Topics Of Interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Management of Semantic Web Data
• Languages, tools, and methodologies for representing and managing Semantic Web data
• Database, IR, and AI technologies for the Semantic Web
• Search, query, integration, and analysis on the Semantic Web
• Robust and scalable knowledge management and reasoning on the Web
• Cleaning, assurance, and provenance of Semantic Web data, services, and processes
• Principles and applications of very large Semantic Web data bases
• Semantic wikis
• Semantic Web Services
• Evaluation of semantic web technology
• Natural Language Processing
• Machine learning and information extraction for the Semantic Web
• Semantic web population from the human web
• Exploiting tags, categories, wikis for the semantic web
• Application of semantic web to NLP
• Ontologies and Semantics
• Specific ontologies and ontology patterns for the semantic web
• Ontology methodology, evaluation, reuse, extraction, and evolution
• Ontology modularity, mapping, merging, and alignment
• Searching for and ranking ontologies
• Reasoning over Semantic Web data
• New formalisms for Semantic Web (such as probabilistic approaches)
• Lightweight semantics (linked data, microformats, etc.)
• Semantic Web Engineering 
• Methods for Semantic Web application development 
• Tools for Semantic Web application development 
• Evaluation of Semantic Web technologies or data
• Including legacy applications into the Semantic Web
• Impact of specific application areas (e.g. e-science, e-gov, sensors) on semantic web design
• Social Semantic Web
• Social networks and processes on the Semantic Web
• Semantic Web technologies for collaboration and cooperation
• Representing and reasoning about trust, privacy, and security
• Modeling users and contexts in Semantic Web applications
• User Interfaces to the Semantic Web
• Interacting with Semantic Web data
• Semantic Web content creation and annotation
• Mashing up Semantic Web data and processes
• Novel interaction paradigms aimed at linked data
• Semantic web applications to Web 2.0 sites
• Natural language Semantic Web interfaces
• Information visualization of Semantic Web data
• Personalized access to Semantic Web data and applications

Submission of Abstracts and Papers

Submission is  closed.

Pre-submission of abstracts is a strict requirement. All papers and abstracts have to be submitted electronically via the Conference Submission System. To submit an abstract (now closed), go to the submission site and select "new submission", then fill in authors, title, abstract (check "full papers"), keywords (choose your own, at least three), and topics; under the "upload paper" section, check the "abstract only" box, then submit.  Make sure an author is identified as the corresponding author. The pre-submitted abstract will be used to assign reviewers, so be sure it identifies the subject area and expertise required to evaluate your work.

All research paper submissions must be in English, and no longer than 16 pages. Papers that exceed this limit will be rejected without review. Submissions must be in PDF 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. ISWC-2011 submissions are not anonymous, identify authors and affiliations as you would in the final version.

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. 

Prior Publication And Multiple Submission

ISWC 2011 will not accept research papers that, at the time of submission, are under review for or have already been published in or accepted for publication in a journal or another conference. The conference organizers may share information on submissions with other venues to ensure that this rule is not violated.

Submit a Poster or Demo together with your Accepted Research Paper

Authors of accepted papers are invited to submit also a poster or a demo to the Posters and Demo track. The submission format is the same as for normal poster and demo submissions but the submission must cite the accepted full paper and include an explanation on what the demo or poster adds to the research paper. Such added value could include: 

• extended results and experiments not presented in the conference paper for space reasons, or
• a demo of a supporting implementation.

All such poster and demo submissions will undergo a common review process respectively posters and demos.

Important Dates

No extensions of the submission deadline will be granted.

Organization

Chairs

• Lora Aroyo, VU University of Amsterdam
• Chris Welty, IBM Research

Senior Program Committee

• Philippe Cudre-Mauroux, MIT
• Mathieu d'Aquin, Open University
• Jerome Euzenat, INRIA Rhone-Alpes
• Aldo Gangemi, CNR-ISTC
• Jeff Heflin, Lehigh University
• Ian Horrocks, Oxford University
• Geert-Jan Houben, Technical University Delft
• Aditya Kalyanpur, IBM Research
• David Karger, MIT
• Manolis Koubarakis, Athens University
• Diana Maynard, University of Sheffield
• Peter Mika, Yahoo! Research
• Peter Patel-Schneider, Bell Labs
• Axel Polleres, DERI Galway
• Jie Tang, Tsinghua University
• Paolo Traverso, FBK
• Lei Zhang, IBM China Research

Program Committee