Call For Papers

Special Issue on Evaluation of Semantic Technologies
Journal of Web Semantics

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. Submissions should be conducted through Elsevier’s Electronic Submission System. More details on the Journal of Web Semantics can be found on its homepage.

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

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