Sincere apologies for cross-posting.

Call for Papers:
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Special Issue of the Journal of Web Semantics on
  "Reasoning with context in the Semantic Web"
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  Mechanisms for reasoning with context have become increasingly important 
factors in the Semantic Web. There is a growing need for general and robust 
reasoning techniques that make it possible to integrate heterogeneous knowledge 
or to use homogeneous knowledge across different domains. 

  Research on this topic has so far, and not surprisingly, concentrated on 
formal ontologies, i.e., on the logical structures that encode the semantics of 
a software's domain of application. Work on the Semantic Web as well as on 
information integration, distributed knowledge management, multi-agent and 
distributed reasoning has focussed on the relationship between an ontology and 
its context. This has aimed at clarifying how to relate knowledge that is 
distributed over many resources. Recent Semantic Web specific developments 
suggest that aspects of this relation can be captured by means of named graphs 
(to express meta-information), the use of provenance (to track the context 
where data/axioms came from) and querying (to facilitate reasoning). 

  Other neighbouring research areas,  though,  have also investigated topics 
that shed light on how to reason with context in the Semantic Web. Ontology 
Engineering and Maintenance, for instance, has tackled the problems faced by 
ontology engineers when developing and maintaining an ontology. The yielded 
automation of the process of ontology development and of its phases (e.g. 
knowledge elicitation, revision cycles, alignment with pre-existing ontologies 
etc.) has improved efficiency, reduced the introduction of unintended meanings 
into ontologies and in general made explicit the relationship between an 
ontology and its development context. Finally, research on Problem Solving and 
Agent Communication has explored how an agent's ontology needs to change at 
run-time because of interactions with its context – for instance with other 
agents whose ontologies are not known or with new non-classifiable world 
situations. This type of research has delivered a deeper understanding of the 
evolution of an ontology and is often based on non-monotonic reasoning, belief 
revision or changes of signature, i.e., of the grammar of the ontology's 
language, with a minimal disruption to the original theory. 

* Topics of interest:

  This special issue aims at bringing together work on reasoning with context 
in the Semantic Web from the integration, development and evolutionary 
perspectives described above. Submitted articles, which may describe either 
theoretical results or applications, must clearly pertain to the Semantic Web 
and/or to semantic technologies. They should  present either Semantic Web 
specific approaches to reasoning with context, or approaches that have 
characteristics that are interesting for the Semantic Web (e.g., scalability, 
bounded reasoning), or approaches that are of value to a larger community 
containing a non-trivial Semantic Web sub-community (e.g. revision/update 
techniques and error pin-pointing).

  Submissions are welcome on topics relevant to reasoning with context in the 
Semantic Web and that include but are not limited to:

- Named graphs 
- Provenance 
- Knowledge representation languages for semantic technologies 
- Planning and reasoning about action and change in the Semantic Web 
- Ontology fault diagnosis and repair 
- Pinpointing of logical errors in contexts and ontologies 
- Explanation and justifications in DL ontologies 
- Ontology and context evolution, debugging, update and merging 
- Inconsistency handling in contexts and ontologies 
- Uncertainty handling, defeasible reasoning and argumentation in ontologies 
- Non-classical belief revision 
- Context revision and theory change in DL ontologies 
- Ontology and context versioning 
- Semantic difference in ontologies and in contexts 
- Information and knowledge integration 
- The role of context and ontology in distributed reasoning and knowledge 
management 
- Heuristic and approximate reasoning 
- Bounded reasoning and bounded rationality in the Semantic Web 
- Adaptive systems and reconfiguration 
- Ontology-based data access 
- Querying 
- Multi-Agent systems in the Semantic Web 
- Temporal and spatial reasoning 
- Normative reasoning in the Semantic Web 
- General problem solving for semantic technologies 
- Machine learning for the Semantic Web 
- Philosophical foundations of reasoning about context and ontology evolution 
- Comparison of uses of contexts and ontologies

* How to submit

  Maximal length of submissions is 25 pages. Authors should upload submissions 
on Elsevier's Electronic Submission System at

http://ees.elsevier.com/jws

Choose "Reasoning with context in SW" as article type. See the link "Guide 
Authors" on the above url for instructions.

* Important dates:

- Submission deadline: 15 June 2011
- First-round reviews: 5 September 2011   
- Revised papers submitted: 30 September 2011
- Final acceptance decisions: 31 October 2011
- Tentative publication date: April 2012

* Guest editors:

Alan Bundy (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom)
Jos Lehmann (University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom)
Ivan Varzinczak (CSIR Meraka Institute, South Africa)

Send enquiries and communications to: organization [at] arcoe [dot] org

--
Ivan José Varzinczak - http://krr.meraka.org.za/~ivarzinczak
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Meraka Institute, CSIR
Pretoria, South Africa

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