International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies (IJMSO)

Special Issue on
Search using Metadata, Semantic, and Ontologies

The objective of this special issue is to collect and report on recent high
quality research that enables the search of artifacts like documents,
resources, audiovisual media, and records, using metadata, ontologies, and
Semantic Web technologies. Research in this area is important because of
the overwhelming amount of information available in many organizations and
on the Internet itself. Syntactic Web search engines, such as Google and
Yahoo, have given people the ability to access knowledge whenever they need
to verify a piece of information, compare prices or read the news. In
contrast to syntactic Web search, semantic "Web search" and "Semantic Web"
search aim to make information accessible to computer programs by encoding
using interpretable forms such as RDF and OWL. Some interesting projects
have already been launched and have achieved a considerable success.

For example, Swoogle, a crawler-based search engine, indexing and retrieval
system for the Semantic Web built on top of the Google API, serves
knowledge engineers by providing a means for them to find ontologies, terms
and data. Currently, Swoogle contains information on over 700,000 RDF
documents. Digital Libraries have also benefited from the use of Semantic
Web technologies. RDF and OWL can be used as a common interchange format
for catalog metadata and shared vocabularies, which can be used by all
libraries and search engines across the Web. This is important since it is
not uncommon to find library systems based on various metadata formats and
built by different persons for their special purposes. By publishing
ontologies, which can then be accessed by all users across the Web, library
catalogs can use the same vocabularies for cataloging, marking up items
with the most relevant terms for the domain of interest. RDF and OWL
provide a single and consistent encoding so im!
plementers of digital library metadata systems will have their task
simplified when interoperating with other digital library systems. Another
example is Vodafone, a leading mobile phone company. Vodafone has used RDF
to describe and search ring tones, games and pictures in their Web site. As
a result, the page viewed per download has decreased by 50% and revenues
have risen by 20%. Many more successful examples could be enumerated.

High quality contributions addressing related theoretical and practical
aspects are expected. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Semantic-driven indexing and retrieval
Semantic browsing of large data archives
Semantic interfaces for interaction with large repositories
Syntactic browsers enhanced with semantics
Annotation of documents to increase search precision
Search in RDF databases
Annotating HTML documents with semantics
Discovery of semantic Web Services
Semantic Web information retrieval : searching, querying, and ranking
Meta-search engines

Submission Procedure
Prospective contributors are invited to submit papers in A4/US letter,
single column, and double space format, up to 30 pages long including
figures, tables and references. Authors should submit their manuscripts in
pdf format to jcardoso@uma.pt. Camera-ready papers will have to conform to
the style of the target journal.

Important Dates
Deadline for manuscript submission: 30 June 2007
Notification to authors: 30 August 2007
Final accepted manuscript due: 30 September 2007
Publication Date: 2008

Guest Editors
Jorge Cardoso, University of Madeira, Portugal
Christoph Bussler, CISCO Systems, Inc., USA
Francesco Guerra, Universita' di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy