Tuesday, July 26, 2011

CfP: JWS special issue on the Semantic and Social Web

Call for Papers: JWS Special Issue The Semantic and Social Web

Guest Editors
The Social Web has grown considerably in the past six or seven years, with the emergence of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and WordPress.com. Most sites on the Social Web offer similar functionality: users share content (be it photos, blog posts, videos, bookmarks, etc.); users connect with other users, either directly or via common interests often reflected by shared content; users add free-text tags or keywords to content; users comment on content items; and so on. There is a huge amount of inherently-meaningful metadata being made available on the Social Web through content creation, the formation of social networks, and other tasks being performed on these sites. However, much of the Social Web exists as data silos, with connections and content items (and their associated metadata) locked into various services, either by design or a because of a lack of standardization across these sites.
In parallel with the development of the Social Web, the Semantic Web has put in standards and mechanisms for exchanging data between services, for creating agreed-upon vocabularies of terms in particular domains, and for enabling information integration across distributed data providers. It has traditionally suffered from a 'chicken-and-egg' problem, where there was a lack of interesting applications due to a lack of data adhering to Semantic Web standards, but with the emergence of the Social Web, a large amount of data is being created on a daily basis by millions of users, and this provides a very rich data source for semantically-enabled applications to work with. The Semantic Web can also assist with the data silo issue referred to previously, by providing a set of common vocabularies for data exchange between sites on the Social Web (e.g. FOAF, SIOC, MOAT, Facebook OGP, etc.).
In this special issue, we solicit papers that tackle challenges or issues relating to the Social Web using semantic technologies, and to using social techniques to solve problems in the Semantic Web space. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following.
  • Enriching the Social Web with semantic metadata: RDF, microformats, or other frameworks
  • Mining and analysis of data from the Social Web
  • Semantic microblogging
  • Semantic wikis and creating semantic knowledge bases using Social Web systems
  • Semantic blogging or other tools to assist with writing posts
  • Data portability and social network portability
  • The Social Web and linked data
  • Developing vocabularies for the Social Web, or working with existing vocabularies
  • Semantic reasoning for Social Web applications
  • Social bookmarking enhanced with semantics, semantic tagging and annotation
  • Unifying domain vocabularies by mining over collective behavior (tagging, sharing, etc.)
  • Using semantic technologies to integrate data from the Social Web
  • Security and trust in the Social Web based on semantics
  • Producing and querying semantic data from sites on the Social Web
  • Other emerging semantic applications for the Social Web

Important Dates

We aim at an efficient publication cycle in order to guarantee up-to-dateness of the published results. We will review papers on a rolling basis as they are submitted and explicitly encourage submissions well before the final deadline.
  • Submission deadline: 21 January 2012
  • Reviews due: 18 March 2012
  • Notification: 30 March 2012
  • Final version submitted: 27 April 2012
  • Publication: July 2012