Calls for papers

 

International Journal of Knowledge Engineering and Data Mining

 

Special Issue on: "Incentives for Semantic Content Creation"

Guest Editors : Elena Simperl and Katharina Siorpaes, University of Innsbruck, Austria
Denny Vrandecic, Universität Karlsruhe, Germany

"The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.” Berners-Lee et al., The Semantic Web, Scientific American, 2001."

Soon a decade will have passed since the publication of this article, but the original vision of the Semantic Web still remains to a large extent unrealised. Web-scale automated computer interaction and intelligent information processing technology producing added value for humans still have to become reality. Nevertheless, the Semantic Web community, academia as well as industry, were very active during the past decade and their efforts resulted in a wide range of maturing methodologies, methods, and tools for creating, processing, managing and using semantic content, be that ontologies or RDF data. A critical mass of useful semantic content is, however, missing; one can only find very few, well-maintained and up-to-date domain ontologies on the Web and even though recently growing, the amount of RDF data publicly available is limited compared to the size of the traditional Web.

One reason for this state of affairs is the lack of user involvement in semantic content creation tasks. Only a small number of Web users, typically members of the Semantic Web community, annotate their Web resources semantically or build and publish ontologies. This is a sharp contrast to several Web 2.0 applications, such as Wikipedia, Del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook or LinkedIn, which exhibit great popularity and user involvement and generate huge amounts of data at comparatively low costs and impressively high quality. To encourage large-scale user participation, the Semantic Web community has to look into incentive structures and means to motivate humans to become part of the Semantic Web movement and to contribute their knowledge and time to create useful ontologies and to use these in annotating documents, images, videos or even Web services.

In this special issue, we aim to present approaches that tackle the incentive bottleneck in semantic content creation. In particular we are looking for high quality research papers describing the way humans can be effectively involved in the development of useful ontologies, and the generation of massive amounts of RDF annotations of resources.

Subject Coverage
Topics of interest for the prospective special issue include, but are not limited to:

• Motivations and incentives of several Web 2.0 applications and their application and applicability to the Semantic Web and semantic applications.
• Incentive structures both within enterprise intranets and the open Web and their semantic extensions.
• Games with a purpose for the creation of semantic content, ontologies as well as RDF data.
• Tools and applications exploiting collective intelligence and the "Wisdom of Crowds" in the context of semantic technologies, and their respective incentive structures.
• Community-driven semantic applications.
• Empirical studies on the usage of Web 2.0 principles to encourage large-scale user participation in Semantic Web-related tasks.
• Instruments to derive and estimate the value of semantic technologies from quantitative and qualitative criteria.
• Experience reports and models of the benefits of semantic technologies.

Notes for Prospective Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Author Guidelines page

Important Dates

Paper submission: 15 September, 2009 (extended)

Acceptance notification: 15 December, 2009

Camera ready papers due: 15 January, 2010