Call for Doctoral Consortium Papers

The ISWC 2015 Doctoral Consortium will take place as part of the 14th International Semantic Web Conference in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA. The Doctoral Consortium provides Ph.D. students working on the Semantic Web area the opportunity to share and discuss their research problems in a critical but supportive environment. The Consortium aims to broaden research perspectives and to improve research and communication skills of the students, in addition to create an international atmosphere where students will meet prominent professors, researchers, and other Semantic Web Ph.D. students from around the world. Students will interact with mentors who are senior members of the Semantic Web research community that will evaluate the proposed research problems as well as potential solutions. Additionally, mentors will conduct reflective and constructive discussions, offer effective feedback, and provide support to explore issues related to academic and research careers. In order to maximize the benefit to the participants and to favor scientific discussion, we require that students have already reached some preliminary results in their thesis, ideally with some preliminary papers accepted or published in public venues.

Submissions

The Doctoral Consortium is intended for students who are at middle, or late stages of a Ph.D. program. Submissions will be considered depending on the advancement into the program.  Early Stage Ph.D. students are welcome to apply and to focus mainly on the research problem, a deep analysis of the state-of-the-art, the research methodology, research questions, and a proposed research plan; however, we expect that some meaningful preliminary results have been achieved and reported in the proposal.  Middle or Final Stage Ph.D. students will also present a research problem, a deep analysis of the state-of-the-art, the research methodology and questions, but they will detail the proposed approach and the results obtained so far.

The proposal paper must include the following sections, depending on the type of submission:

  1. Scene setting: Clear motivation and description of the problem to be addressed as well as the main challenges.
    • Objective of the Research, including Research Questions
    • Motivation and Importance/Relevance: Clearly state the challenges that need to be addressed 
    • Challenges and Opportunities: What are the opportunities, Why existing approaches have never been tried/done/achieved this problem before 
  2. Proposed Approach:
    • Formal Definition and Properties of the Approach
    • Relationship between your approach and state-of-art approaches
  3. Implementation of the Proposed Approach:
    • Describe the Big Picture: How will you demonstrate/implement your approach? Depending on the topic, implementation will be from a software, logical or theoretical point of view. What are the results you expect to observe 
    • Describe your current implementation: Please note that we expect at least a preliminary theoretical demonstration or implementation (again depending on topic). Current limitations
  4. Empirical Evaluation Methodology:
    • General strategy: Hypothesis, Benchmarks (e.g., Collected Data, Gold Standards, Baselines, Metrics, Statistical Methods to Analyze the Data), Type of User Evaluation, Number of Users, and other issues that may be relevant to your project
    • Current state of the evaluation: We expect you to have performed at least some evaluation of part of your thesis project
  5. Lessons Learned, Open Issues, and Future Directions: 

  • Please note: this part is very important. Do not leave it as last paragraph in your submission. We expect this to be a major part of your contribution. We do neither expect you to have solved all issues nor expect you to have finished your Ph.D. However, we expect you to show an understanding of these issues (although open) and to have a clear plan to address them. This symposium is the best place to discuss these issues and plans with experienced researchers and fellow students to get informed feedback! 

Additional submission requirements:

  • All submissions must be single-author submissions. The Ph.D. advisor(s) and other contributors should be included in the Acknowledgements section.
  • The stage of the doctoral work (early, middle, or final) must be declared.
  • Authors of the accepted papers must present their work at the Consortium and stay the whole day.
  • Authors will have neither achieved their Ph.D. degree nor officially submitted their thesis before the Doctoral Consortium.
  • Doctoral Consortium submissions are not regular research papers; the suggested proposal outline should be closely followed.
  • Submissions must be in PDF and authors must respect the Springer publication guideline for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).
  • Submissions must not exceed of 8 pages. All proposals have to be submitted electronically via the EasyChair conference submission System https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iswc2015doctoralcons

Review Process and Acceptance:

All proposals submitted to the Doctoral Consortium will undergo a thorough reviewing process with the goal of providing a detailed, reflective, and constructive feedback. An international program committee will evaluate and select the submissions to be presented at the Doctoral Consortium; the best proposals will be published in the conference proceedings. Categories of the submissions will not affect the chances of the proposal of being accepted. Nevertheless, they will be considered by the reviewers and mentors, and for assigning the length and format of the presentations.

Student Travel award programs will be available to partially support students with accepted papers at the Doctoral Consortium and cover some of their travel expenses.

Proposals will be evaluated in terms of the following criteria:

  • Motivation and Importance/Relevance of the Proposed Research. 
  • Analysis of the State-of-the-Art.
  • Novelty of the Proposed Approach.
  • Relevance of the Initial Results. (Depending on the type of submission).
  • Feasibility of the Empirical Evaluation Methodology.
  • Analysis of Lessons Learned, Open Issues, and Future Directions.
  • Clarity and Presentation.

Topics of Interests:

The Consortium has the same scope of technical topics as the main ISWC conference.

  • Management of Semantic Web data and Linked Data
  • Languages, tools, and methodologies for representing and managing Semantic Web data
  • Database, IR, NLP and AI technologies for the Semantic Web
  • Search, query, integration, and analysis on the Semantic Web
  • Robust and scalable knowledge management and reasoning on the Web
  • Cleaning, assurance, and provenance of Semantic Web data, services, and processes
  • Information Extraction from unstructured data
  • Supporting multi-linguality in the Semantic Web
  • User Interfaces and interacting with Semantic Web data and Linked Data
  • Geospatial Semantic Web
  • Semantic Sensor networks
  • Query and inference over data streams
  • Ontology-based data access
  • Semantic technologies for mobile platforms
  • Ontology engineering and ontology patterns for the Semantic Web
  • Ontology modularity, mapping, merging, and alignment
  • Social networks and processes on the Semantic Web
  • Representing and reasoning about trust, privacy, and security on the Semantic Web
  • Information visualization of Semantic Web data and Linked Data
  • Personalized access to Semantic Web data and applications Semantic Web technologies
  • Semantic Web and Linked Data for Cloud environments

Important Dates

  • Paper Submission: June 8th, 2015, 23:59 Hawaii Time.
  • Notification of acceptance: July 16th, 2015.
  • Camera Ready Versions: August 15th, 2015, 23:59 Hawaii Time.
  • Doctoral Consortium: October 12th, 2015.

Doctoral Consortium Chairs

Fabio Ciravegna, University of Sheffield, UK
Maria-Esther Vidal, Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas, Venezuela.

Program Committee

The list of program committee members can be found here.