Pascal Hitzler's blog

Semantic Web journal:
Special Issue on
Semantic Web for the legal domain

The legal domain is an ideal field of study for Semantic Web researchers, as it uses and contributes to most of the topics that are relevant to the community. Additionally, given the complex interactions of legal actors, legal sources and legal processes, as well as the relevance and potential impact of successful ideas in the political, juridical and social processes of a country, it provides a challenging context and an important opportunity for groundbreaking research results.

Ontologies, knowledge extraction and reasoning techniques have been studied by the AI&LAW community for years but its results have generated few and sparse connections with the Semantic Web community. Thus, the aim of this Special Issue is to look to the legal domain from a Semantic Web perspective, in order to promote the use of legal knowledge for addressing Semantic Web research questions and, vice versa, to use Semantic Web technologies as tools for reasoning over legal texts.

In particular, we are looking for high-level contributions exploring and investigating on (but not limited to) the following topics:
- Modelling access policies to Semantic Web datasets
- Semantic Web and online dispute resolution and mediation
- Law and Regulations patterns of Social Web communities (such as Second Life, Facebook, or Twitter)
- Semantic sensor networks in lawsuits, crisis mapping, emergencies and stand-by forces
- Semantic Web techniques and e-discovery in large legal document collections
- Semantic Web technologies and opinion collection and analysis
- Legal content and knowledge in the Linked Data
- Knowledge acquisition and concept representation on annotations and legal texts
- Legal reasoning and query in the Semantic Web
- Text and legal interpretation in legal semantics
- Scalability issues in representing law and legal texts
- Analysis of provenance information to detect violations of norms/policies
- Legal knowledge in trust models
- Expressive vs. lightweight representations of legal content
- Core and domain ontologies in the legal domain
- Theories, design patterns and ontologies in legal argumentation
- Time and legal content representation (texts, concepts, norms)
- OWL approaches to reasoning and legal knowledge
- Linking legal content to external resources
- Provenance, trust and metadata for authoritative sources
- SPARQL queries on large legal datasets
- Legal knowledge extraction using NLP and ontologies
- User-friendly applications and interface design to interact with legal semantic information
- Publishing/reusing legal-related content in Linked Data
- Legal semantic services and mobile applications
- Rules and Automated Reasoning in the Semantic Web

Submission instructions

Prospective authors must take notice of the submission guidelines posted at http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/authors. Submissions should be uploaded using the regular submission mechanism of the SW journal (see the journal website) - mentioning in the cover letter that the submission is for the "legal domain" special issue.

Deadlines

Submission deadline: 22-Jun-2012
Reviews due: 22-Jul-2012
Notifications: 30-Jul-2012
Second submission: 30-Sep-2012
Second review due: 30-Oct-2012
Second notifications: 7-Nov-2012
Camera ready: 30-Nov-2012

Guest editors

Pompeu Casanovas (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona + Victoria University)
Monica Palmirani (University of Bologna)
Silvio Peroni (University of Bologna)
Fabio Vitali (University of Bologna)

Editorial Board

Gioele Barabucci (University of Bologna)
Nick Bassiliades (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
Eva Blomqvist (Jönköping University)
Guido Boella (University of Turin)
Alexander Boer (University of Amsterdam)
Tom Bruce (University of Cornell)
Nuria Casellas (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Paolo Ciccarese (Harvard University)
Oscar Corcho (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)
John Davies (British Telecomm)
Stefan Dietze (Leibniz University)
Dieter Fensel (University of Innsbruck)
Miriam Fernandez (Open University)
Meritxell Fernandez-Barrera (Université Paris 2)
Enrico Francesconi (Italian National Research Council)
Aldo Gangemi (Italian National Research Council)
Tom Gordon (Fraunhofer Society)
Guido Governatori (National ICT Australia)
Jorge Gracia (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid)
Marco Grobelnik (Jozef Stefan Institute)
Rinke Hoekstra (University of Amsterdam)
Simonetta Montemagni (Italian National Research Council)
Enrico Motta (Open University)
Pablo Noriega (Spanish National Research Council)
Adrian Paschke (Freie Universität Berlin)
Enric Plaza (Spanish National Research Council)
Valentina Presutti (Italian National Research Council)
Piercarlo Rossi (University of Eastern Piedmont)
Marta Sabou (MODUL University Vienna)
Giovanni Sartor (European University Institute)
Christian Sifaqui (Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional de Chile)
Rudi Studer (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
Daniela Tiscornia (Italian National Research Council)
Joan-Josep Vallbé (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)
Frank van Harmelen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Tom van Engers (University of Amsterdam)
Grant Vergottini (Xcential Group)
John Zeleznikow (University of Victoria)
Jun Zhao (University of Oxford)

Semantic Web journal:
Special Call for
Surveys on Application Areas of Semantic Technologies

Semantic Web technologies are currently in a transition from research to practice. The amount of progress made in different application areas, however, differs significantly, as do the challenges which lie ahead.

The Semantic Web journal calls for survey papers on the state of the art in research, development, and deployment of Semantic Web technologies in specific application areas and domains. Surveys should focus on one specific application area and discuss in a comprehensive way

• its importance,
• the particular (past, present, and future) challenges faced in applying Semantic technologies in this area, and
• the state of the art in developing foundational principles and practical solutions related to this area.

Application areas covered may range from those where commercial solutions have already been deployed, to areas where basic research is still under way. They may address very specific needs, e.g., mobile recommender systems, or span broader scientific domains, e.g., the life sciences.

Survey articles should have the potential to become well-known introductory and overview texts. They will be reviewed along the following dimensions: (1) Suitability as introductory text, targeted at researchers, students, or practitioners, to get started on the covered topic. (2) How comprehensive and how balanced is the presentation and coverage. (3) Readability and clarity of the presentation. (4) Importance of the covered material to the broader Semantic Web community.

Prospective authors must take notice of the submission guidelines posted at http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/authors

Deadlines:

Paper submission: May 30th, 2012
First notification: Usually within 8 weeks of submission

In case of questions, please contact the Editors-in-chief:

Pascal Hitzler
Krzysztof Janowicz
contact@semantic-web-journal.net

The most recent issue of the journal Learned Publishing contains the paper