Special Issue on Web Scale Reasoning: Scalable, Tolerant and Dynamic

        International Journal of Semantic Computing (IJSC)
                 (Publisher: World Scientific)
                 
             http://webscare.larkc.eu

Guest Editors: Z. Huang, U. Keller, S. Schlobach, and N. Zhong ===========================================================

The Semantic Web is the vision of a Web of data usable for both humans but also machines. This Web consists of inter-connected instance data annotated with possibly expressive ontologies. Therefore a tremendous amount of information becomes available that should be processed based on formal semantics attached to it.  The Semantic Web community has developed a number of languages (such as RDF, RDF Schema, OWL) that deploy logic for this purpose. Impressive progress has been made on scalable storage, querying and inference for these languages, and they are successfully being deployed on large intranets and medium-scale web-applications.

However existing reasoning techniques often fail to live up to the expectations put into them in this context.  They can often neither deal with high number of instances, the expressiveness of the ontologies describing them or the inherent inconsistency and incompleteness of data on the Web.

This special issue is intended to focus on these problems of scalability and robustness of reasoning on the Web, and furthermore to investigate alternative reasoning methods, which take incompleteness and distribution of data and knowledge as inherent properties into account.

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Topics
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Original contributions, not currently under review or accepted by another journal, are solicited in relevant areas including (but not limited to) the following:

* Scalable reasoning for the Web
* Web scale querying and searching
* Reasoning with inconsistent ontologies
* Stream reasoning in the Semantic Web
* Efficient storage of structured data that scale to a very large size
* Computational learning theory for the Web
* Meta-reasoning for the Web
* Complex reasoning: how to find implicit information efficiently in large,
  expressive, or distributed ontologies.

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Submission Guidelines
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Papers should be submitted to the easychair website:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=webscare09

Details of the journal, manuscript preparation, and recent articles are available on the website: http://www.worldscinet.com/ijsc/ijsc.shtml

See the website of this special issue http://webscare.larkc.eu for further announcement.
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Schedule
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Deadline for paper submission: March 10, 2009
Completion of first review:    June 10, 2009
Minor/Major revision due:      August 10, 2009
Final decision notification:   October 10, 2009
Publication materials due:     December 1, 2009
Publication date (tentative):  May 2010

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Guest Editors
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Zhisheng Huang
Vrije Univerisity Amsterdam, The Netherlands huang AT cs.vu.nl

Uwe Keller
University of Innsbruck, Austria
uwe.keller AT sti2.at.  

Stefan Schlobach
Vrije University Amsterdam, The Netherlands schlobac AT few.vu.nl

Ning Zhong
Maebashi Institute of Technology, Japan and International WIC Institute/BJUT, China zhong AT maebashi-it.ac.jp

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Contact Person
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Florian Fischer
Semantic Technology Institute, University of Innsbruck, Austria florian.fischer AT sti2.at

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Editorial Board of the Special Issue
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(to be announced)