Processing data streams is one of the main challenges facing today’s decentralised and distributed systems, given the high dynamicity, heterogeneity and volume of real-time data generated by contemporary IT infrastructures. The application domains where streams play a central role include social networks, smart cities, mobile wearable sensors, internet of things, environmental monitoring and stock market analysis, to name just a few. All these streams of data, or infinite flows of information, already exist and are available in pervasive and ubiquitous data-rich environments. However it remains difficult and challenging to effectively process, query and derive results from them. In the area of databases, these research challenges led to the emergence of data stream and complex event processing systems, including data models, query languages, algebra and operational semantics for them. Nevertheless, research opportunities in this area are far from being exhausted. The imminent realization of the Internet of Things and the abundance of new sources of streaming data raise a set of new challenges, especially dealing with the variety and heterogeneity of the data. Clear foundations are required to solve problems such as data integration and real-time analytics, added to the need for better understanding the meaning and the value of streaming data on the web. Several attempts have been made to approach some of these challenges using the theoretical foundations and the tools of Semantic Web research. These works have resulted in systems that tackle different issues, including continuous query processing, stream reasoning, event detection, ontology maintenance or ontology-based data access.
The goal of this special issue is to provide a grounding for research on recent advances in stream processing and their underlying semantic technologies. Traditional challenges of scalability, information quality, and data integration are of interest, but also are specific projects that publish, study, or use data streams in innovative ways. More specifically, we expect submissions on (but not restricted to) the following topics.
- Processing RDF Data Streams
- Producing and consuming streams of RDF graphs
- Modelling streams of structured data
- Theoretical modelling of RDF streams
- Automatic annotation of raw data streams
- Processing noisy data, uncertainty, incomplete information
- Semantic mining of RDF data streams
- Mechanisms for integrating historical data with streaming data
- Publishing Linked Stream Data
- Querying semantic streams of data
- Extensions to SPARQL for data streams
- Complex event processing on semantic data
- Ontology-based data access to data streams
- Data dynamics, update, and synchronization
- Optimisation of stream query processing
- Correctness of stream query processing
- Synthetic RDF streams and benchmarking
- Reasoning with data streams
- New stream reasoning algorithms
- Incremental reasoning on dynamic ontologies
- Temporal logics for reasoning over Semantic streams
- Multicore scalable stream reasoning
- Applications of stream processing
- Semantic sensor networks
- Social network streams and microposts
- Stream processing in the Internet of Things
- Smart cities
- Activity streams
- Gamification
Guest Editors
Important Dates
We will aim at an efficient publication cycle in order to guarantee prompt availability of the published results. We will review papers on a rolling basis as they are submitted and explicitly encourage submissions well before the submission deadline. Submit papers online at the journal's Elsevier Web site.
- Submission deadline: 1st July 2015
- Author notification: 30th September 2015
- Final version: 15th December 2015
- Final notification: 15th January 2016
- Publication: 30th January 2016
Submission guidelines
The Journal of Web Semantics solicits original scientific contributions of high quality. Following the overall mission of the journal, we emphasize the publication of papers that combine theories, methods and experiments from different subject areas in order to deliver innovative semantic methods and applications. The publication of large-scale experiments and their analysis is also encouraged to clearly illustrate scenarios and methods that introduce semantics into existing Web interfaces, contents and services.
Submission of your manuscript is welcome provided that it, or any translation of it, has not been copyrighted or published and is not being submitted for publication elsewhere. Manuscripts should be prepared for publication in accordance with instructions given in the
JWS guide for authors. The submission and review process will be carried out using Elsevier's Web-based
EES system. To ensure that all manuscripts are correctly identified for inclusion into the special issue, it is important that authors select "S.I.: Stream Processing" at the "Article Type" step in the submission process.
Upon acceptance of an article, the author(s) will be asked to transfer copyright of the article to the publisher. This transfer will ensure the widest possible dissemination of information. Elsevier's liberal
preprint policypermits authors and their institutions to host preprints on their web sites. Preprints of the articles will be made freely accessible on the
JWS preprint server. Final copies of accepted publications will appear in print and at Elsevier's archival online server.
