Semantic technologies have become a well-established field of computer science. However, the field is continuously evolving: the number of semantic technologies is constantly increasing, standards evolve and new ones are defined; and, in this scenario, the problem of how to compare and evaluate the various approaches becomes crucial.

The consistent evaluation of semantic technologies is critical not only for future scientific progress, by identifying research goals and allowing a rigorous examination of research results, but also for their industrial adoption, by allowing objective measurement and comparison of these technologies and enabling their certification.

Semantic technology evaluation must, on the one hand, be supported by strong methodological approaches and relevant test data and, on the other hand, satisfy the differing needs of developers, researchers and adopters by addressing those quality characteristics that are relevant to each target group.

Nevertheless, numerous issues must be faced when evaluating semantic technologies.

On the one hand, because of the fast evolution of the semantic field, previous evaluation methods and techniques need to be adapted and extended and new ones have to be developed.

On the other hand, the cost of defining new evaluations methods or reusing existing ones can be prohibitive, so facilitating the understanding of such methods or their automated processing becomes highly significant.

The goal of this special issue is to present current advances and trends in semantic technology evaluation (theories and models, methods and techniques, evaluation campaigns, technology comparison, etc.). Therefore we solicit papers that improve evaluation paradigms of semantic technologies. At the same time papers that evaluate a particular method, technology or system without investigating the evaluation regime itself will be considered out of scope and will be returned to the authors with no review.

Topics of interest

Relevant topics for the special issue include, but are not limited to, the following:

Semantic technology evaluation methods
Test data for semantic technology evaluation
Automation of semantic technology evaluation
Evaluation of semantic technologies in real world scenarios
Evaluation of linked data technologies
Quality requirements for semantic technologies
Semantic technology certification
Maturity models for semantic technologies
Semantic technology selection
Semantic technology quality estimation
Interoperability and conformance of semantic technologies
Semantic technology efficiency and scalability
Usability of semantic technologies
Important dates
We will aim at an efficient publication cycle in order to guarantee prompt availability of the published results. To this end, we encourage submissions well before the submission deadline.

Submission deadline. 29 February 2012
Author notification. 31 May 2012
Final version. 31 July 2012
Publication. Fall 2012
Instructions for submission

Please see the author guidelines for detailed instructions before you submit:
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/671322/authorinstructions

Submissions should be conducted through Elsevier’s Electronic Submission System (http://ees.elsevier.com/jws/).

More details on the Journal of Web Semantics can be found on its homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/websem

Editors

Raúl García-Castro (rgarcia@fi.upm.es), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Heiner Stuckenschmidt, University of Mannheim
Stuart Wrigley, University of Sheffield
Jeff Heflin, Lehigh University