CFP: Semantic Web Journal: Special Issue on Semantic Web and Reasoning for Cultural Heritage and Cultural Heritage

http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/blog/special-issue-semantic-web-and-reasoning-cultural-heritage-and-digital-libraries

During the past few years, great and continually increasing scientific interest has been paid towards the efficient dissemination and management of the world’s cultural assets on the Web. As more and more cultural heritage institutions tend to exploit World Wide Web’s technologies in order to render their collections globally available, integrated access to this vast amount of content has become an imperative need. Traditionally, the main requisite for integrating diverse resources has been syntactic interoperability. However, in the more knowledge-intensive world of the Semantic Web a number of powerful techniques are offering the promise of knowledge-based management and retrieval instead of mere syntactic data exchange. In particular, techniques for obtaining semantic interoperability and reasoning over metadata and ontologies have been proven powerful tools towards this direction.

In the cultural heritage field, significant efforts have been initiated for achieving semantic-aware data integration, but many issues are still under discussion and problems remain unsolved. Hundreds of existing digital libraries and repository systems, responsible for gathering and disseminating digital objects originating from cultural assets, still lack common standards and best practices for properly ingesting and publishing knowledge. The community is looking for powerful semantic search and navigation mechanisms able to efficiently retrieve and interlink distributed, heterogeneous knowledge about cultural heritage. In addition, it is not clear what might be the most suitable evaluation techniques for analyzing the suggested methods and tools.

Topics

This special issue solicits contributions to the open problems of publishing cultural content on the Semantic Web, such as innovative techniques, tools, case studies, comparisons, and theoretical advances. The papers should consider and present contributions towards representing semantic aspects of cultural heritage information in the web environment, i.e. aspects of modeling, creating, aggregating, managing, publishing, and using content on the Semantic Web in the cultural heritage field.
In particular, topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Semantic-enabled search and recommending
• Reasoning over cultural heritage information
• Semantic content creation and annotation
• Semantic integration of heterogeneous and contradicting information
• Ontologies and vocabularies for cultural heritage
• Linked heritage data and its applications
• Semantic aging and ontology evolution
• Evaluation of semantic techniques and systems
• Web 2.0, collaborative systems, tagging, and user feedback
• Semantic and mental maps of interlinked cultural content
• Visualization techniques and paradigms
• Success reports of in-use applications and projects

Submissions

High-quality papers containing original research results on the above and related topics are solicited. Extended versions of papers previously published in conferences and workshops are also welcome, provided that they are substantially expanded and improved. Authors should submit a manuscript through the Semantic Web Journal on-line system, following the guidelines available at:http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/authors. Manuscripts should have a length of 15-25 pages in IOS Press format. All submissions will undergo an open review process, according to the standards of the Semantic Web Journal.

Important Dates

31/1/2011: Submission Deadline
31/3/2011: Author Notification
30/4/2011: Final Revisions
Summer 2011: Special Issue Publication

Guest Editors

Dimitrios A. Koutsomitropoulos
High Performance Information Systems Laboratory
Computer Engineering and Informatics Dpt.
University of Patras
Patras-Rio, Greece
E-mail: kotsomit@hpclab.ceid.upatras.gr

Eero Hyvönen
Semantic Computing Research Group
Department of Media Technology
School of Science and Technology
Aalto University
Finland
E-mail: eero.hyvonen@tkk.fi

Theodore S. Papatheodorou
High Performance Information Systems Laboratory
Computer Engineering and Informatics Dpt.
University of Patras
Patras-Rio, Greece
E-mail: tsp@hpclab.ceid.upatras.gr