Special Issue on Ontology Engineering

The Journal of Web Semantics invites submissions for a special issue on Ontology Engineering to be edited by Valentina Tamma, Matthew Horridge, and Bijan Parsia. Submissions are due by 15 November, 2017.

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) became a World Wide Web Consortium standard in 2004. It has since been used in many diverse domains from geography to medicine where many people, groups, and consortia build, maintain and regularly publish high-quality, production-level ontologies. In this time ontology engineering has evolved considerably with the development of new methodologies, techniques, tools, and processes for ontology creation and maintenance. The actual process of creating ontologies has begun to shift from being a small scale, completely manual process to a combination of manual, semi-automated, and programmatic techniques and from single-person or small-group efforts to large-scale collaborative efforts. Concurrently, ontology engineering research, often drawing inspiration from the increasing empirical rigor of the software engineering community, has grown more sophisticated.

The goal for this special issue is to provide a venue to showcase the breadth and depth of ontology engineering and ontology engineering research. We are particularly interested in empirical papers which aim to explore or demonstrate the benefits of ontologies to larger efforts or of some technique or tooling on the development of ontologies. We encourage principled methodological diversity and welcome papers with significant methodological interest even if the results are null or negative. In addition to standard research papers, we welcome submission of short case studies or system/ontology/method/application descriptions, though we would encourage more general reviews where possible, reserving short papers for cases with some special focus, novelty, or clear interest. We recommend consulting with the Guest Editors before submission of such papers.

We are happy to receive pre-submission of an experimental plan especially if the risk of null results is high and will provide feedback.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Ontology Engineering Research Methodology

• Ontology Engineering Methodologies
• Ontology Learning (from text, data, or other sources)
• Ontology Visualisation
• Quality Assurance
• Ontology Debugging
• Collaborative Ontology Engineering practices
• Ontology Engineering workflows
• Document based ontology engineering
• Continuous Integration for Ontology Engineering
• Ontology Testing
• Explanation of Entailments in Ontologies
• Ontology Comprehension
• Ontology Design Patterns
• Ontology Versioning, Change, and Evolution
• Ontology Engineering Case Studies
• Agile Practices in Ontology Engineering
• User Studies on Ontology Engineering
• Ontology Modularisation
• Programmatic Approaches to Ontology Engineering
• Problems and Challenges of Reusing Ontologies
• Ontology Publishing Strategies
• Application of Software Engineering Techniques to Ontology Engineering
• Metrics for Ontology Engineering

Guest Editors

Valentina Tamma, University of Liverpool, v.tamma@liverpool.ac.uk

Matthew Horridge, Stanford University, matthew.horridge@stanford.edu

Bijan Parsia, University of Manchester, bijan.parsia@manchester.ac.uk

Important Dates

Submission deadline: 13 November 2017

Author notification: 5 February 2017

Final version: 16 April 2018

Final notification: 14 May 2018

Publication: 3rd Quarter 2018

Submission Guidelines

The Journal of Web Semantics solicits original scientific contributions of high quality. Following the overall mission of the journal, we emphasize the publication of papers that combine theories, methods and experiments from different subject areas in order to deliver innovative semantic methods and applications. The publication of large-scale experiments and their analysis is also encouraged to clearly illustrate scenarios and methods that introduce semantics into existing Web interfaces, contents and services.

Submission of your manuscript is welcome provided that it, or any translation of it, has not been copyrighted or published and is not being submitted for publication elsewhere. Manuscripts should be prepared for publication in accordance with instructions given in the JWS guide for authors. The submission and review process will be carried out using Elsevier\’s Web-based EES system. Upon acceptance of an article, the author(s) will be asked to transfer copyright of the article to the publisher. This transfer will ensure the widest possible dissemination of information. Elsevier\’s liberal preprint policy permits authors and their institutions to host preprints on their web sites. Preprints of the articles will be made freely accessible on the JWS preprint server. Final copies of accepted publications will appear in print and at Elsevier\’s archival online server.