Call for Papers - Research Track

The International Semantic Web Conference is the premier venue for presenting fundamental research, innovative technology, and applications concerning semantics, data, and the Web.

In this track of ISWC 2021, we are looking for novel and significant research contributions addressing theoretical, analytical and empirical aspects of the Semantic Web. While we welcome work that relates to the W3C Semantic Web recommendations (e.g., RDF, OWL, SPARQL, etc.), we also encourage contributions to research at the intersection of the Semantic Web and other scientific disciplines. Submissions to the research track should describe original, significant, and replicable research on the Semantic Web. All papers must include method evaluations that are rigorous, repeatable and reproducible. This will be one of the key reviewing criteria. We also strongly encourage papers that provide links to the data sets, source code and queries used to evaluate their approach, and/or live deployments.

All papers will be assessed by the track program committee. Each paper will be reviewed by at least three committee members, including one senior member. The review criteria used are outlined below.

Before submitting to the research track, authors are asked to consult the calls of the other tracks featured at ISWC 2021 and to choose the track that best suits their contribution. The submission of the same work to multiple tracks is not allowed and may result in a rejection of the work across all tracks without a review.

Topics of Interest

We encourage papers that directly contribute to the advancement of the Semantic Web area. The relationship to the core area of the conference needs to be clearly described in the submitted work. Topics in this area include, but are not limited to:

●Databases and ontology based data access, integration and exchange on the Web

●Information retrieval and semantic analysis

●Semantic approaches in and for Information Extraction

● Knowledge driven NLP

● Artificial intelligence techniques (e.g. planning, game theory) for the Semantic Web

● Multi-agent and autonomous systems

● Knowledge representation and reasoning

● Knowledge graphs (e.g. construction, maintenance, reasoning) and virtual knowledge graphs

● Machine learning and data mining methods for Semantic Web data, ontology induction and discovery in Linked data

● Knowledge driven ML and Data Mining

● Ontology based neural symbolic reasoning and learning

● Robust and scalable management of semantics and data

● Processing and storage of semantic data on the blockchain

● Methods to investigate and catalogue semantic primitives used in ontology definitions

● Multi-modal and multi-lingual access

● Multi-modal semantic reasoning

● Programming the Semantic Web

● Architectures and algorithms for extreme volume, heterogeneity, dynamicity, and decentralization

● Cleaning, quality assurance, and provenance of Semantic Web data, services, and processes

● Ontology engineering and ontology patterns

● Ontology modularity, mapping, merging, and alignment

● Search, query, integration and analysis on the Semantic Web and Knowledge Graphs

● Question answering and dialogues over Linked Data, ontologies and Knowledge Graphs

● Information visualization and exploratory analysis methods

● Semantic social network mining, analysis, representation, and management

● Crowdsourcing semantics; methods, dynamics, and challenges

● Geospatial semantics and data

● Data streams, complex event processing and stream reasoning

● Internet of Things, mobile platforms, cloud environment

● Trust, privacy, and security

● Social and human aspects of the Semantic Web

● Science and Semantic Web

Review Criteria

Papers in this track will be reviewed according to the following criteria:

● Originality & novelty

● Relevance and impact of the research contributions

● Technical soundness

● Rigour and reproducibility of the work

● Clarity and quality of presentation

● Grounding in the literature

Authors will have the opportunity to submit a rebuttal to clarify misunderstandings and questions raised by program committee members. For judging the reproducibility, we will provide a checklist at submission time where the author(s) can claim a certain set of reproducibility criteria, which will be evaluated by the reviewers. This allows for an easier and more fair evaluation of the submitted work.

Reproducibility Checklist

This year we have decided to raise the bar on reproducibility for *all* research papers at ISWC, as we think this is an important part of our research. Special consideration will be taken regarding this aspect during the whole reviewing process. Although all papers should in principle be reproducible to be accepted for the conference, we clearly understand that this is not always possible. To make the current situation more transparent to authors and reviewers, we introduced a checklist with a set of criteria and we want each and every paper to be evaluated against these criteria by the reviewers. To assist both authors and reviewers in this evaluation, we have therefore followed the path that many other related conferences (such as AAAI, ICML, EMNLP and others) have taken, namely to introduce a reproducibility checklist.

As an author you will be presented with the checklist at submission time, where you will check all the boxes that apply to your paper. However, the checklist is not only intended as a report on what you have included in the paper – please use it already when writing the paper, as a guide to make sure that you cover as many of the aspects as possible!

Reviewers will see the checklist for each paper when reviewing it, and will be expected to verify if they agree with the statements of the authors or not. Reviewers will also be asked to assess the overall level of reproducibility of the paper, as part of their scientific quality assessment, based on the criteria in the checklist. The checklist has several sections, depending on the content and topic of the paper, and we acknowledge that every paper is different, hence, it is not possible to express the acceptable level of reproducibility of a paper in terms of the number of boxes ticked. As in the past years, reviewers are responsible to decide on that. However, the checklist will help the reviewers to assess the overall level of reproducibility, which will be taken into account in their reviews, and subsequently in the acceptance decision process.

The reproducibility checklist can be found in the submission form in EasyChair, but for your convenience is also provided here and below.

Submission Details ​

● Pre-submission of abstracts is a strict requirement. All papers and abstracts have to be submitted electronically via EasyChair.

● All research submissions must be in English, and no longer than 16 pages (including references).

● Submissions must be either in PDF or HTML, 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. For HTML submission guidance, please see the HTML submission guide.

● Submission has to be original. Authors need to authorise the organizer to perform a plagiarism check of the paper.

● Papers that exceed the page limit, violate the style or show any kind of plagiarism will be rejected without review.

● ISWC 2021 papers submitted to the research track will be subject to double blind peer review and must conform to the instructions (detailed below) for double-blind review.

● We encourage embedding metadata in the PDF/HTML to provide machine readable links from the paper to resources.

● 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.

● For accepted papers a major change of the title is not allowed. In general, the list of authors of a paper cannot be changed after the reviewing process has started.

● 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.

Blind Review Instructions

Reviewing for ISWC 2021 is blind to the identities of the authors. Both authors and reviewers are expected to make every effort to honour the double-blind reviewing process. Authors should ensure that the submission can be evaluated without it being obvious who wrote the paper, and reviewers should not undertake any investigation that might lead to the revealing of authors’ identity.

To help with the double-blind reviewing process please ensure the following when submitting to ISWC 2021:

● The first page, on which the paper body begins, should include the title and abstract but not names or affiliations of the authors.

● Remove any identifying information, including author names, from file names and ensure document properties are also anonymised.

● The references should include all published literature relevant to the paper. When referring to one’s own work, use the third person, rather than the first person. For example, say “Previously, Foo (2006) showed that…,” rather than “In our previous work (Foo 2006) we showed that…”

● Try to avoid including any information that would identify the authors or their affiliations. Such information may be added to the final camera-ready version for publication.

● Remove references to funding sources and/or acknowledgments. Such information may be added to the final camera-ready version for publication.

Supplemental Material

The length of the main submission is strictly limited as indicated in the call for papers. However, authors may choose to also submit supplemental material as indicated below:

1. OPTION 1. As a second zipped folder uploaded via the Easychair system; note that the total size of the submission (paper+supplemental materials) must not exceed 100MB.
2. OPTION 2. As an anonymised link to supplemental material included in the paper. This option may be used, in particular, in case the total size of the submission (paper+supplemental materials) exceeds 100MB.

Examples of supplemental material are proofs of theorems that are stated in the main paper, video demonstrations, data concerning experimental evaluations, source code, and so on. Note that submissions may reference the supplemental material, but should be self-contained. Indeed, while providing supplemental material can help the reviewers to evaluate your paper, reviewers are instructed to make their evaluations based on the main submission, and are not obligated to consult the supplemental material. Therefore, make sure that your submission stands on its own without them. If proofs or other supplement matter are an important part of the contribution, their essential elements should be included in the main paper. Please be very careful not to violate the blind review requirements in the supplemental material.

Supplemental material submitted at the time of submission for review will not be published or posted if the paper is accepted for publication. Adequate references to the supplemental material may be added to the final camera-ready version for publication. Prior Publication and Multiple Submissions ISWC 2021 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 or another conference. Submissions to workshops are fine as long as there is no formal publication involved. The conference organisers may share information on submissions with other venues to ensure that this rule is not violated.

The International Semantic Web Conference is the premier venue for presenting fundamental research, innovative technology, and applications concerning semantics, data, and the Web. In this track of ISWC 2021, we are looking for novel and significant research contributions addressing theoretical, analytical and empirical aspects of the Semantic Web. While we welcome work that relates to the W3C Semantic Web recommendations (e.g., RDF, OWL, SPARQL, etc.), we also encourage contributions to research at the intersection of the Semantic Web and other scientific disciplines. Submissions to the research track should describe original, significant, and replicable research on the Semantic Web. All papers must include method evaluations that are rigorous, repeatable and reproducible. This will be one of the key reviewing criteria. We also strongly encourage papers that provide links to the data sets, source code and queries used to evaluate their approach, and/or live deployments.

All papers will be assessed by the track program committee. Each paper will be reviewed by at least three committee members, including one senior member. The review criteria used are outlined below. Before submitting to the research track, authors are asked to consult the calls of the other tracks featured at ISWC 2021 and to choose the track that best suits their contribution. The submission of the same work to multiple tracks is not allowed and may result in a rejection of the work across all tracks without a review.

Topics of Interest

We encourage papers that directly contribute to the advancement of the Semantic Web area. The relationship to the core area of the conference needs to be clearly described in the submitted work. Topics in this area include, but are not limited to:

● Databases and ontology-based data access, integration and exchange on the Web

● Information retrieval and semantic analysis

● Semantic approaches in and for Information Extraction

● Knowledge driven NLP

● Artificial intelligence techniques (e.g. planning, game theory) for the Semantic Web

● Multi-agent and autonomous systems

● Knowledge representation and reasoning

● Knowledge graphs (e.g. construction, maintenance, reasoning) and virtual knowledge graphs

● Machine learning and data mining methods for Semantic Web data, ontology induction and discovery in Linked data

● Knowledge driven ML and Data Mining

● Ontology based neural symbolic reasoning and learning

● Robust and scalable management of semantics and data

● Processing and storage of semantic data on the blockchain

● Methods to investigate and catalogue semantic primitives used in ontology definitions

● Multi-modal and multi-lingual access

● Multi-modal semantic reasoning

● Programming the Semantic Web

● Architectures and algorithms for extreme volume, heterogeneity, dynamicity, and decentralization

● Cleaning, quality assurance, and provenance of Semantic Web data, services, and processes

● Ontology engineering and ontology patterns

● Ontology modularity, mapping, merging, and alignment

● Search, query, integration and analysis on the Semantic Web and Knowledge Graphs

● Question answering and dialogues over Linked Data, ontologies and Knowledge Graphs

● Information visualization and exploratory analysis methods

● Semantic social network mining, analysis, representation, and management

● Crowdsourcing semantics; methods, dynamics, and challenges

● Geospatial semantics and data

● Data streams, complex event processing and stream reasoning

● Internet of Things, mobile platforms, cloud environment

● Trust, privacy, and security

● Social and human aspects of the Semantic Web

● Science and Semantic Web

Review Criteria

Papers in this track will be reviewed according to the following criteria:

● Originality & novelty

● Relevance and impact of the research contributions

● Technical soundness

● Rigour and reproducibility of the work

● Clarity and quality of presentation

● Grounding in the literature Authors will have the opportunity to submit a rebuttal to clarify misunderstandings and questions raised by program committee members.

For judging the reproducibility, we will provide a checklist at submission time where the author(s) can claim a certain set of reproducibility criteria, which will be evaluated by the reviewers. This allows for an easier and more fair evaluation of the submitted work.

Reproducibility Checklist

This year we have decided to raise the bar on reproducibility for *all* research papers at ISWC, as we think this is an important part of our research. Special consideration will be taken regarding this aspect during the whole reviewing process. Although all papers should in principle be reproducible to be accepted for the conference, we clearly understand that this is not always possible.

To make the current situation more transparent to authors and reviewers, we introduced a checklist with a set of criteria and we want each and every paper to be evaluated against these criteria by the reviewers. To assist both authors and reviewers in this evaluation, we have therefore followed the path that many other related conferences (such as AAAI, ICML, EMNLP and others) have taken, namely to introduce a reproducibility checklist.

As an author you will be presented with the checklist at submission time, where you will check all the boxes that apply to your paper. However, the checklist is not only intended as a report on what you have included in the paper – please use it already when writing the paper, as a guide to make sure that you cover as many of the aspects as possible!

Reviewers will see the checklist for each paper when reviewing it, and will be expected to verify if they agree with the statements of the authors or not. Reviewers will also be asked to assess the overall level of reproducibility of the paper, as part of their scientific quality assessment, based on the criteria in the checklist. The checklist has several sections, depending on the content and topic of the paper, and we acknowledge that every paper is different, hence, it is not possible to express the acceptable level of reproducibility of a paper in terms of the number of boxes ticked. As in the past years, reviewers are responsible to decide on that. However, the checklist will help the reviewers to assess the overall level of reproducibility, which will be taken into account in their reviews, and subsequently in the acceptance decision process.

The reproducibility checklist can be found in the submission form in EasyChair, but for your convenience is also provided here and below.

Submission Details ​

● Pre-submission of abstracts is a strict requirement. All papers and abstracts have to be submitted electronically via EasyChair.

● All research submissions must be in English, and no longer than 16 pages (including references).

● Submissions must be either in PDF or HTML, 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. For HTML submission guidance, please see the HTML submission guide.

● Submission has to be original. Authors need to authorise the organizer to perform a plagiarism check of the paper.

● Papers that exceed the page limit, violate the style or show any kind of plagiarism will be rejected without review.

● ISWC 2021 papers submitted to the research track will be subject to double blind peer review and must conform to the instructions (detailed below) for double-blind review.

● We encourage embedding metadata in the PDF/HTML to provide machine readable links from the paper to resources.

● 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.

● For accepted papers a major change of the title is not allowed. In general, the list of authors of a paper cannot be changed after the reviewing process has started.

● 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.