Call for Data Sets and Ontologies

Science, to a large degree is like building a house of ideas on the foundations laid by others. The Data and Ontologies track introduces important data sets and ontologies to the Semantic Web community. This highly important task is often difficult to publish, as its main contribution lies in providing others the means for accomplishing their goals. For example, DBpedia, SIOC and FOAF are some of the of the most valuable and widely used resources in our community, and have made an invaluable contribution to our science. The aim of this track is to provide a forum for such contributions.

We are looking for submissions that describe ontologies and/or data sets that are published using best practices and have demonstrable use or potential for reuse. Additionally, we encourage lessons learned from the creation of these resources. Finally, we are interested in innovative methods for representation and data integration used to create the dataset or ontology.

Review Criteria

We note that the committee considers the dataset and ontology as well as the paper in its review process. Authors must ensure unfettered access to the dataset and/or ontology during the review process. Submissions will be evaluated on the following criteria: novelty, relevance, design and availability. Below, we provide some example questions that provide guidance on how these criteria will be assessed.  

novelty

  • in what way does the resource break new ground or fill a knowledge gap?
  • is there a comparison with other related efforts?

relevance

  • is the resource of interest to the Semantic Web community (and society in general)?
  • is there evidence of using the resource to address important social or scientific issues?
  • is there any evidence of reuse of the datasets by other groups?

design

  • does the resource follow best practices in its design and implementation?
  • does the resource reuse ontologies or link to related datasets?
  • is the resource described using machine readable metadata?
  • is there a schema diagram included?
  • are there machine readable summary statistics provided (e.g. VoID statistics)

availability

  • is the resource registered with community registries such as Linked Open Vocabularies, BioPortal or thedatahub?
  • is the resource available as Linked Data, API, SPARQL endpoint, Linked Data Fragments, bulk download?
  • is there a place for community discussion and advancement? is there a mailing list, issue tracker, and code project?
  • are there policies and mechanisms to ensure sustainability?

Submission

  • Pre-submission of abstracts is a strict requirement. All papers and abstracts have to be submitted electronically via the EasyChair conference submission system https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iswc2015dataonto
  • All research submissions must be in English, and no longer than 8 pages. Papers that exceed this limit will be rejected without review. Submissions must be in PDF formatted in the style of the Springer Publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). For details on the LNCS style, see Springer's Author Instructions. ISWC-2015 submissions are not anonymous.
  • We encourage embedding metadata in the PDF to provide a machine readable link from the paper to the resource.
  • Authors of accepted papers will be required to provide semantic annotations  for the abstract of their submission, which will be made available on the conference web site. Details will be provided at the time of acceptance.
  • Accepted papers will be distributed to conference attendees and also published by Springer in the printed conference proceedings, as part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the conference and present the paper there.

Prior Publication And Multiple Submissions

ISWC 2015 will not accept research papers that, at the time of submission, are under review for or have already been published in or accepted for publication in a journal, another conference, or another ISWC track. The conference organizers may share information on submissions with other venues to ensure that this rule is not violated.

Important Dates

  • Abstracts Due: April 23, 2015
  • Full Papers Due: April 30, 2015 
  • Author Rebuttal: June 3 - 5, 2015
  • Full Paper Notification: June 20, 2015
  • Camera Ready Version: July 18, 2015
  • Conference Dates: October 13-15, 2015

All deadlines are 23:59:00 Hawaiian time.

Committee Chairs

  • Paul Groth - Elsevier Labs
  • Michel Dumontier - Stanford University

Program Committee

The list of program committee members can be found here.