Special Issue on Semantic Sensing

Journal of Web Semantics

Editors

* Harith Alani (Open University)
* Oscar Corcho (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)
* Manfred Hauswirth (DERI)

The Journal of Web Semantics announces a call for papers for a special issue on semantic sensing edited by Harith Alani, Oscar Corcho and Manfred Hauswirth. We will review papers on a rolling basis and explicitly encourage submissions well before the final deadline of 20 December 2011.

Motivation

The areas of social media, mobile communication networks, pervasive environments, and Internet of Things are currently converging towards novel integrated communication environments to deliver information in a context-dependent form whenever and wherever the user needs it. In future communication systems, sensors will become a central information provider about the user's physical environment, which needs to be integrated with the user's preferences, the user's online communication channels and social connections along with any relevant information from Web-based information systems. We use the term sensor here to refer to any device that supplies time-dependent information about the real world, including human-generated information.

Semantic technologies are becoming increasingly popular for providing descriptive and structured integration layers for the heterogenous sensor networks and other information sources mentioned above. Semantics are used to describe, map, and reason over the data from these sources by turning the data into machine processable and sharable structured knowledge.

On the scientific side this vision requires research into information-driven integration of sensing technologies, self-organization, large-scale stream information management - all with semantics as a core building block to support optimal use of these information sources but also to enable simple and flexible cross-layer integration on a technical level. This knowledge layer on top of the Internet of Things is a critical enabler for the Sensor Web.

However, until now the virtual world of information sources and activities in the real world are still largely disconnected: Knowledge accessible on the Web (the virtual world) may influence activities in the real world and vice versa. However, these influences are usually indirect and not immediate, usually only by means of custom-built, closed applications. Several challenges arise at different layers.

On the networking side, this requires IP-based access to smart objects and sensors (Internet-connected Objects) as a unifying network layer which is already being addressed by significant efforts, e.g., CoAP, 6LoWPAN, and ROLL.

On the distributed systems/middleware layer, self-organization mechanisms along with flexible service abstractions to cut the cost and complexity of application development are necessary.
At the database and Web layers, data access is essential with support for semantics and stream processing, as future communication systems depend on the efficient, machine-supported access to time-dependent information. Specifically, this requires flexible platforms to connect information coming from Internet-connected Objects and mobile devices into the Web, for example, by means of the linked data paradigm, to serve as the basis for semantic knowledge management approaches which equally take into account the virtual and physical side, specifically addressing the strong time-dependency of information and the resource constraints of the information producers and consumers. A particular challenge here is that the semantic layers need to take into account the resource constraints of the underlying sensing layers.
At the user interface layers, dynamic data coming from information sources, and their connections to other information sources, have to be visualised effectively in order to support decision making.

Topics of Interest

The topics of interest for this special issue include but are not limited to the following.

* Approaches for efficiently producing and processing stream data
* Linked stream data
* Stream reasoning
* RESTful and linked data approaches for semantic data streams
* Opportunistic sensing with semantics
* RDF/Linked Data storage and processing on sensors and mobile devices
* Pub-/sub-systems and middleware for semantic sensing application
* Semantic cloud sensing
* Semantic integration of sensor data with online data
* Semantic sensing user interfaces

Important Dates

We will review papers on a rolling basis as they are submitted and explicitly encourage submissions well before the final deadline.

* Submission deadline: 20 December 2011
* Notification: 31 March 2012
* Final version submitted: 31 May 2012
* Publication: Fall 2012

See the JWS Guide for Authors for details on the submission process.