The Role of Semantics in Smart Cities

Cities around the world aspire to provide superior quality of life to their citizens. Furthermore, many are also seen as centers of unique opportunities, like business, fashion, entertainment and governance, for their citizens. Cities want to retain such pre-eminent positions or re-position themselves for newer opportunities. But, resources needed to reach and sustain such aspirations are decreasing while the expectations continue to rise from an increasing population-base. A positive trend of the Internet age is that more data than even before is open and accessible, including from governments at all levels of jurisdiction, which enables rigorous analysis.
The term smart cities refers to urbanized areas where citizens, public and private organizations exchange contextualized information with the final goal of having a better and more sustainable living environment. In the last years, we have witnessed an increase in the amount of systems and applications oriented to make cities smarter, such as building management systems, environmental sensors to determine air quality, applications for public transportation services, or autonomous cars, among others. However, the interaction among all the smart city actors and these heterogeneous solutions still remains a challenge.

Extracting meaningful information from all the data generated in a smart city is complex because of the heterogeneity of the data, the rate of data generation, and the volume. Semantic technologies allow increasing interoperability, easing data integration and providing support to information retrieval and knowledge discovery tasks. This special issue focuses on the application of semantic technologies in the context of smart cities. We welcome original submissions that address (but are not restricted to) the following areas:

Semantics and open data for cities
Ontologies for smart cities
Smart city sensing
Semantics on the Internet of Things
Data, information and knowledge interoperability in smart cities
RDF stream processing for smart city applications
Stream reasoning for smart city applications
Spatio-temporal reasoning in smart cities
Crowdsourcing and semantics in smart cities
Big data for smart cities
Semantics and mobility
Semantics and security
Semantics in water / energy / building / traffic / citizen care management
Semantics and eGovernment
Semantics and geomarketing
Semantic-based Web and mobile applications for Smart Cities
Semantic event detection and classification in Smart Cities
Semantic-based Cloud applications for Smart Cities
Semantic for citizen-centric Smart cities
Semantics for visualization in smart cities
Scaling smart systems to the city
Challenges with managing and integrating real-time and historical data in smart cities
Provenance, access control and privacy-preserving issues in smart cities
Quantified self data analysis

November 14, 2014 - Paper submission deadline

Submissions shall be made through the Semantic Web journal website at http://www.semantic-web-journal.net. Prospective authors must take notice of the submission guidelines posted at http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/authors. Note that you need to request an account on the website for submitting a paper. Please indicate in the cover letter that it is for the Semantics in Smart Cities special issue.
Submissions are possible in all standing paper type of the journal, see http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/authors for descriptions: full research papers, surveys, linked dataset descriptions, ontology descriptions, application reports, tool/systems reports.

Guest editors

Stéphane Roche, Center for Research in Geomatic, Université Laval
Freddy Lecue, IBM Research, Dublin Research Centre
Alejandro Llaves, Ontology Engineering Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Oscar Corcho, Ontology Engineering Group, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
The editors can be reached by email to semantics.smartcities.swj@gmail.com
Guest Editorial Board
to be completed
Sven Schade, European Commission – DG Joint Research Centre (JRC)
Boris Villazón-Terrazas, iSOCO
Bernd Resch, University of Heidelberg
Carsten Keßler, City University of New York
John Goodwin, Ordnance Survey
Mathieu D'Aquin, Open University
Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, University of Leipzig
Raul Garcia-Castro, Universidad Politécnica Madrid
Kerry Taylor, CSIRO
Dumitru Roman, SINTEF / University of Oslo
Kostis Kyzirakos, CWI Amsterdam
Werner Kuhn, UC Santa Barbara
Mir Abolfazl Mostafavi, Université Laval
Carlos Granell, Universitat Jaume I
Renee Sieber, McGill University
Christoph Stasch, University of Muenster
Alessandra Mileo, INSIGHT Centre for Data Analytics
Tope Omitola, University of Southampton, UK
John Breslin, National University of Ireland, Galway
Payam Barnaghi, University of Surrey, UK