The Journal of Web Semantics (http://bit.ly/SVdKIv) seeks submissions for a special issue on Semantic Search to be edited by Roberto Navigli and Fabian M. Suchanek. Submissions are due by 1 July 2013.

Semantic technologies, such as expressive ontology and resource description languages, scalable repositories, reasoning engines and information extraction techniques, are now in a mature state so that they can give a higher level of semantics to Information Retrieval (IR) systems. This application of semantic technologies to IR tasks is typically referred to as Semantic Search. Challenges on this way include (i) identifying tasks and paradigms for semantic search systems, (ii) devising expressive disambiguation and annotation frameworks as well as scalable algorithms and infrastructures, (iii) investigating innovative query paradigms for semantic search systems, and (iv) applying machine learning, natural language processing and information extraction techniques in the context of semantic search.

This special issue will cover interdisciplinary topics between the Semantic Web and IR. These include, but are not limited to the following topics.

* Information Retrieval tasks on the Semantic Web
* Incentives and interaction paradigms for resource annotation
* Interaction paradigms for semantic search
* Statistical and knowledge-rich techniques for semantic search
* Semantic technologies for query interpretation, refinement
and routing
* Modeling expressive resource descriptions
* Natural Language Processing and information extraction for
the acquisition of resource descriptions
* Lexical and knowledge resources for semantic search
* Scalable repositories and infrastructures for semantic search
* Crawling, storing and indexing of expressive resource
descriptions
* Fusion of semantic search results on the Semantic Web
* Algorithms for matching expressive queries and resource
descriptions
* Algorithms and procedures to deal with vagueness,
incompleteness and inconsistencies in semantic search
* Evaluation methodologies for semantic search
* Standard datasets and benchmarks for semantic search
* Semantic Information Retrieval and semantic search engines
* Semantic search in or via linked data

We solicit contributions that address these challenges, as well as reports on novel applications with the potential to push semantic search forward

Submission guidelines

The Journal of Web Semantics solicits original scientific contributions of high quality. Following the overall mission of the journal, we emphasize the publication of papers that combine theories, methods and experiments from different subject areas in order to deliver innovative semantic methods and applications. The publication of large-scale experiments and their analysis is also encouraged to clearly illustrate scenarios and methods that introduce semantics into existing Web interfaces, contents and services. Submission of your manuscript is welcome provided that it, or any translation of it, has not been copyrighted or published and is not being submitted for publication elsewhere. Upon acceptance of an article, the author(s) will be asked to transfer copyright of the article to the publisher. This transfer will ensure the widest possible dissemination of information. Manuscripts should be prepared for publication in accordance with instructions given in the JWS Guide for Authors. The submission and review process will be carried out using Elsevier's Web-based EES system. Final decisions of accepted papers will be approved by an editor in chief.

Final layouted copies of accepted publications will appear in print and at the archival online server. Author preprints of the articles will be made freely accessible on the JWS preprint server (http://websemanticsjournal.org/)

Schedule

* Submission deadline: 1st of July 2013
* Author notification: 1st of October 2013
* Submission deadline for revisions: 1 January 2014
* Author notification: 1st of March 2014
* Submission deadline for camera-ready versions: 1 April 2014

Contact Information

For any further questions regarding the special issue (e.g., appropriateness of your contribution, editorial issues, etc.), please contact the guest editors Roberto Navigli (LASTNAME@di.uniroma1.it) and Fabian M. Suchanek (LASTNAME@mpii.de).