COFSED 2014

Call for papers

With the increased use of the Semantic Web and the emergence of new applications (such as in bioinformatics, environment and medicine) requiring data models that support complex relationships and rich constructs, a huge amount of RDF data are produced and several data sets are made available on the Web (e.g, YAGO or DBpedia). To provide an efficient management of these data, specialized databases called Semantic Web Databases (SWDBs) have been designed. SWDBs have attracted the attention and the interest of both scientific and industrial communities leading to the development of products such as Oracle Semantic Technologies or Jena.

Some of the most crucial challenges that modern-day SWDBs have to face are related to the massive data (which can be heterogeneous, imprecise, uncertain, incomplete and/or inconsistent) and to the complex and diverse nature of users' needs (which can be imprecise, partially known and ill-expressed). Thus, it is highly desirable that such systems should, on the one hand, show some advanced forms of flexibility and, on the other hand, exhibit capabilities of cooperative and intelligent behaviors.

Flexibility in such a context might be intended in several ways; among which the following ones: (i) the capability of querying large amount of data in a user-friendly way so as to retrieve the information which is the most relevant to specific user needs; (ii) the capability of managing and exploiting imprecise, partially known, and uncertain data.

As for cooperativeness, one might think to the ability of such systems to provide correct, nonmisleading and useful answers, rather than literal answers to users' queries. Answers that, on the one hand, better serve the users' needs and expectations and, on the other hand, do not result in a tedious and time consuming task when selecting the best ones. Avoiding thus the common problem of the empty/unsatisfactory answers and that of the too many results.

This special session will provide an opportunity to exchange ideas and to discuss recent theoretical and experimental results on the two above research topics in the context of Semantic Web Databases. Hopefully, it will contribute to identifying new promising directions of research and unsolved problems in this area.

We invite contributions that address the following areas, but are not limited to:

• Query relaxation/intensification
• Empty/plethoric answers problem
• Cooperative and intelligent query answering
• Flexible/personalized querying
• Managing incomplete/missing data
• Soft computing applied to semantic Web databases
• Dealing with large semantic datasets in cooperative and flexible way

We encourage submissions of papers, which have not been published or submitted to any other conference, about theoretical advances in these core areas as well as papers which deal with some practical insights resulting from experiments or implementations.

The same deadline as for the regular papers to be submitted to the ISMIS 2014 will be observed, i.e. February 17, 2014 (http://isl.ruc.dk/ismis2014/index.php). However, the potential contributors are requested to send at their earliest convenience an e-mail message, addressed to allel.hadjali@ensma.fr or to dolog@cs.aau.dk, confirming the intent to submit a paper and giving its tentative title and a list of the authors.

Submitted papers must comply with the ISMIS 2014 guidelines for submission (http://isl.ruc.dk/ismis2014/paper_submission/). They will be reviewed by three special session PC members. The accepted papers will be published in the main conference proceedings.

Paper should be submitted in PDF form via ISMIS 2014 Online Submission System to appear soon.

Importante Dates

• Paper submission due: February 17, 2014
• Notification of review results: March 17, 2014
• Camera ready papers due: April 14, 2014