[ecrea] CfP IEEE Intelligent Systems - special issue on Linked Open Government Data

/IEEE Intelligent Systems /is seeking papers for :
*Special Issue on Linked Open Government Data *
*
Submission deadline: 1 September 2011

Publication: March/April 2012

*Government data, also known as public-sector information, contains 
multiyear authoritative information about political regions, such as 
societal, economic, or environmental aspects. Government data can be 
linked with data from other sources (such as companies and universities) 
to support cross-disciplinary scientific analyses as well as 
context-dependent business decisions. Recently, Open Government Data 
(OGD) initiatives pioneered in the US and UK have been emerging in many 
countries around the world. By proving open access to raw government 
data, OGD activities are promoting better community participation, 
business development, and governmental transparency.

A number of challenges have been observed in current OGD practices:

   * /Interoperability/: Reusing OGD data is still difficult because
     OGD is typically published in various nonstandard formats and
     encoded using isolated vocabularies.
   * /Tractability/: It is hard to find, manage, and interconnect OGD
     that is distributed across independent agencies.
   * /Scalability/: The cost of processing and analyzing OGD can be
     prohibitively high due to the huge volume of existing OGD and the
     nontrivial cost of processing individual OGD datasets.
   * /Open web and society/: OGD data can be reused in serendipitous
     ways, and its interaction with the social web could increase its
     value.

These challenges lead to big opportunities for both researchers and 
practitioners. In both the US and the UK portals, Linked OGD (LOGD) 
infrastructures have been designed and deployed using a variety of 
technologies such as the Semantic Web, natural language processing, 
entity resolution, machine learning, policy/rule-based reasoning, and 
social networking. Such infrastructures helps researchers accumulate 
expertise in combining machine power and human power to enable 
large-scale collaboration between distributed OGD and other data 
sources, especially the Web of Data. In the realm of eGovernment 
activity, the World Wide Web Consortium shows strong standardization 
interest in OGD metadata and infrastructure. In the European Union, 
there is increasing interest and funding for Linked Data research with a 
special focus on public-sector information, while the European 
Commission, through the SEMIC.EU platform, is promoting the idea of 
Linked Government Metadata.

Areas of interest include but are not limited to original research in 
the following areas and topics:

   * Interoperable and meaningful LOGD representation
         o Space management of uniform resource identifiers and
           identifiers
         o Catalogs and registries for LOGD datasets
         o Ontologies, vocabularies, and semantic annotation for large
           and/or dynamic LOGD data
         o Vocabulary management for LOGD metadata reuses and
           specializations
         o Context, provenance, quality, uncertainty, and
           trustworthiness of LOGD
   * Scalable semantic data management and processing for LOGD
         o Smart integration with legacy systems, barriers, formats
         o Extensible infrastructure for collaborative LOGD data
           management and processing
         o Smart link generation, learning, validation, and reasoning
         o Scalable LOGD data discovery, access, query, and search
         o Persistence, version freshness, and obsolescence of LOGD
   * LOGD deployment and society
         o Deployment cost and benefits
         o Transparency vs. privacy
         o Free, open data vs. business models
         o License, policy, and legal issues
         o Community engagement, best practices, and lessons learned
   * Innovative and intelligent LOGD consumption
         o User interaction models: cost reduction and usability
           improvements
         o Social LOGD mashups: personalization, collaboration, and trust
         o Mobile applications and "mGovernment"
         o Intelligent web applications using LOGD as a data source
         o Use-cases for scientific discovery, business analysis, and
           administrative decision making

*Guest Editors*

   * Vassilios Peristeras <mailto:(vassilios.peristeras /at/ ec.europa.eu)>,
     European Commission, Directorate-General for Informatics,
     Interoperability Solutions for European Public Administrations
     (ISA) Unit, Belgium
   * Michael Hausenblas <mailto:(michael.hausenblas /at/ deri.org)>, Linked
     Data Research Centre, DERI, National University of Ireland
   * Li Ding <mailto:(dingl /at/ cs.rpi.edu)%20>, Tetherless World
     Constellation, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA

Submission Guidelines
Submissions should be 3,000 to 5,400 words (counting a standard figure 
or table as 200 words) and should follow /IEEE Intelligent Systems/ 
style and presentation guidelines (www.computer.org/intelligent/author). 
The manuscripts cannot have been published or be currently submitted for 
publication elsewhere.
We strongly encourage submissions that include audio, video, and 
community content, which will be featured on the IEEE Computer Society 
Web site along with the accepted papers.

*Questions?*

   * For more information about the special issue focus: contact
     Vassilios Peristeras <mailto:(vassilios.peristeras /at/ ec.europa.eu)>
   * For general author guidelines: see
     www.computer.org/intelligent/author
   * For submission details: email (intelligent /at/ computer.org)
     <mailto:(intelligent /at/ computer.org)>
   * To submit an article: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/is-cs
     (select "Special Issue on OGD")

More information: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/iscfp2