Submission process will be open on Wednesday 15/Oct until 15/Dec.


Special Issue on Semantic Technologies for Collaborative Web

Scope and Objective

Semantic technologies comprise a varied suite of methods and mechanisms aimed at providing sense out of information, pieces of knowledge, facts and data sets. At the core of semantic technologies, there are methodologies, models and techniques for knowledge representation, interpretation, management and exchange. Indeed, a “fully” Collaborative Web entails the creation and maintenance of common layers where services, applications and people can exchange information and functionalities.

However, the Collaborative Web is currently limited by challenges related to various issues, among which knowledge interpretation and sharing. Semantic technologies have been extensively used to address these challenges. Combined together, these technologies can be applied in multiple fields where sharing information under a common understanding is needed, while maintaining consistency along time. Consequently, the Collaborative Web imposes to change the focus of knowledge organization techniques from static knowledge representation (e.g., standardized vocabularies) to new technologies aimed at considering dynamic, adaptive and quality-oriented aspects of collaborative knowledge.

The principal goal of this Special Issue is to explore new directions and approaches about key research topics needed to leverage innovative research aimed at speeding up and ameliorating the effectiveness and usability of the Collaborative Web, based on semantic technologies.

We encourage the submission of ongoing work with already important theoretical and practical results, as well as case studies on existing knowledge engineering techniques, on methodologies to structure knowledge, and on means to capture information from various web resources. The aim is also to highlight the state of the art in the domain of semantic technologies for web-enhanced collaboration. We expect this special issue to draw a significant number of submissions, as well as of readership so reaching numerous citations of the published contributions.

Topics of Interest

This special issue calls for original papers describing the latest research and innovations, solutions and developments on Semantic Technologies for Collaborative Web. The following is the proposed, non-exhaustive, list of topics addressed by this special issue:

Knowledge representation, interpretation and validation mechanisms
Methods for capturing information from various collaborating resources, including methods based on ontologies, texts and multimedia documents, and human experts
Knowledge organization and merging for collaboration using semantic techniques
Methods for extracting semantically-enriched Information from the web
Adaptive and dynamic techniques for knowledge reuse and integration
New mechanisms for automatic construction and maintenance of coherent shared knowledge for collaboration
Privacy and security issues in sharing knowledge through the web.

The submitted papers must be original and must be under consideration in no other venue. This Special Issue is Open. The main provenance of papers be constituted out of the papers accepted at “Web2Touch - Modelling the Collaborative Web Knowledge” (http://web2touch2014.tudor.lu/), a Track of the 23rd IEEE International Conference on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises WETICE 2014 (http://cmt.dmi.unipr.it/). The papers accepted at the host conference are also solicited.

All submissions will be reviewed by at least three independent reviewers. The editors will base the final decision on acceptance according to relevance for the special issue, technical quality, innovation contents, and originality of research approaches and results.

Submission Guidelines

Authors should prepare their manuscript according to the Guide for Authors available from the online submission page of the Future Generation Computer Systems at http://ees.elsevier.com/fgcs/. Authors must select “SI: The Collaborative Web” when they reach the “Article Type” step in the submission process.

Tentative schedule

Initial Date of Submissions: October 15, 2014
Final Deadline of Manuscripts: December 15, 2014
Revisions Due: March 15, 2014
Final Decision Date: May 15, 2014
Final Papers Due: June 30, 2015

Guest Editors

Mariagrazia Fugini – Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria – DEIB, Italy, email : mariagrazia.fugini@polimi.it
Marcos da Silveira – Centre de Recherche Public - CRP, Luxembourg, email : marcos.dasilveira@tudor.lu
Olga Nabuco – Center for Information Technology Renato Archer - CTI, Brazil, email: olgafernanda@gmail.com
Rodrigo Bonacin - Center for Information Technology Renato Archer - CTI, Brazil, email : rodrigo.bonacin@cti.gov.br
Nicoletta Dessì – Università di Cagliari, Dipartimento di Matematica ed Informatica, Italy, email: dessi@unica.it

Resources

On-line Journal: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0167739X

Journal Description: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/fgcs

Electronic Submission: http://ees.elsevier.com/fgcs