[DL] Special Issue of JWS: Reasoning with Context in the Semantic Web

[ARCOE]

(Apologies for multiple postings.)

Call for Papers:
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Special Issue of the Journal of Web Semantics on
 "Reasoning with context in the Semantic Web"
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 Mechanisms for reasoning with context have become increasingly important
factors in the Semantic Web. There is a growing need for general and robust
reasoning techniques that make it possible to integrate heterogeneous
knowledge or to use homogeneous knowledge across different domains.

 Research on this topic has so far, and not surprisingly, concentrated on
formal ontologies, i.e., on the logical structures that encode the semantics
of a software's domain of application. Work on the Semantic Web as well as
on information integration, distributed knowledge management, multi-agent
and distributed reasoning has focussed on the relationship between an
ontology and its context. This has aimed at clarifying how to relate
knowledge that is distributed over many resources. Recent Semantic Web
specific developments suggest that aspects of this relation can be captured
by means of named graphs (to express meta-information), the use of
provenance (to track the context where data/axioms came from) and querying
(to facilitate reasoning).

 Other neighbouring research areas,  though,  have also investigated topics
that shed light on how to reason with context in the Semantic Web. Ontology
Engineering and Maintenance, for instance, has tackled the problems faced by
ontology engineers when developing and maintaining an ontology. The yielded
automation of the process of ontology development and of its phases (e.g.
knowledge elicitation, revision cycles, alignment with pre-existing
ontologies etc.) has improved efficiency, reduced the introduction of
unintended meanings into ontologies and in general made explicit the
relationship between an ontology and its development context. Finally,
research on Problem Solving and Agent Communication has explored how an
agent's ontology needs to change at run-time because of interactions with
its context – for instance with other agents whose ontologies are not
known or with new non-classifiable world situations. This type of research
has delivered a deeper understanding of the evolution of an ontology and is
often based on non-monotonic reasoning, belief revision or changes of
signature, i.e., of the grammar of the ontology's language, with a minimal
disruption to the original theory.

* Topics of interest:

 This special issue aims at bringing together work on reasoning with context
in the Semantic Web from the integration, development and evolutionary
perspectives described above. Submitted articles, which may describe either
theoretical results or applications, must clearly pertain to the Semantic
Web and/or to semantic technologies. They should  present either Semantic
Web specific approaches to reasoning with context, or approaches that have
characteristics that are interesting for the Semantic Web (e.g.,
scalability, bounded reasoning), or approaches that are of value to a larger
community containing a non-trivial Semantic Web sub-community (e.g.
revision/update techniques and error pin-pointing).

 Submissions are welcome on topics relevant to reasoning with context in the
Semantic Web and that include but are not limited to:

- Named graphs
- Provenance
- Knowledge representation languages for semantic technologies
- Planning and reasoning about action and change in the Semantic Web
- Ontology fault diagnosis and repair
- Pinpointing of logical errors in contexts and ontologies
- Explanation and justifications in DL ontologies
- Ontology and context evolution, debugging, update and merging
- Inconsistency handling in contexts and ontologies
- Uncertainty handling, defeasible reasoning and argumentation in
ontologies
- Non-classical belief revision
- Context revision and theory change in DL ontologies
- Ontology and context versioning
- Semantic difference in ontologies and in contexts
- Information and knowledge integration
- The role of context and ontology in distributed reasoning and knowledge
management
- Heuristic and approximate reasoning
- Bounded reasoning and bounded rationality in the Semantic Web
- Adaptive systems and reconfiguration
- Ontology-based data access
- Querying
- Multi-Agent systems in the Semantic Web
- Temporal and spatial reasoning
- Normative reasoning in the Semantic Web
- General problem solving for semantic technologies
- Machine learning for the Semantic Web
- Philosophical foundations of reasoning about context and ontology
evolution
- Comparison of uses of contexts and ontologies

* How to submit:

 Maximal length of submissions is 25 pages. Authors should upload
submissions on Elsevier's Electronic Submission System at

http://ees.elsevier.com/jws

Choose "Reasoning with context in SW" as article type. See the link "Guide
Authors" on the above url for instructions.

* Important dates:

- Submission deadline: 15 June 2011
- First-round reviews: 5 September 2011
- Revised papers submitted: 30 September 2011
- Final acceptance decisions: 31 October 2011
- Tentative publication date: April 2012

* Guest editors:

- Alan Bundy http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/bundy
University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

- Jos Lehmann http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/people/staff/Jos_Lehmann.html
University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom

- Ivan Varzinczak http://en.varzinczak.net16.net
CSIR Meraka Institute, South Africa

Send enquiries and communications to: organization [at] arcoe [dot] org
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