Semantic Web Company

A new journal was launched yesterday, called “Semantic Web – Interoperability, Usability, Applicability.” The publisher is IOS Press, who is already active in the Semantic Web area, e.g. by means of their journal “Applied Ontology,” their book series “Studies on the Semantic Web,” and a considerable number of Semantic Web publications in their series “Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications” (and, not to forget, a frequent physical presence at major Semantic Web conferences).

Since I am one of the editors-in-chief (the other one is Krzysztof Janowicz), I prefer to refrain from discussing the rationale behind launching (yet another) Semantic Web journal. Let’s just say that a growing community requires a growing communication infrastructure, and let history deal with the rest …

But I’d like to point out that we have made a very conscious decision to run the journal under an open and transparent review process: with non-anomyous reviews which are made publicly available on the journal homepage.  And any researcher – not only those explicitly asked to review – can add reviews to submitted papers and thus influence the transparent decision process. We’ve already received a lot of positive feedback about this set-up, and we’re looking forward to seeing it in motion.

Besides the types of papers one usually finds in journals, such as traditional research papers and surveys, the journal will also sport short papers on ontologies, tools, and applications.

We’re looking forward to your contributions to this new and exciting endeavour!

Pascal Hitzler

Jordan S. Hatcher is, among other things, a lawyer, academic, and entrepreneur working on Intellectual Property and Internet law issues in the UK and worldwide. He is heavily involved in the Open Data Commons initiative. Last month he gave me an interview on IPR issues associated with data licensing. His brief answer to the question why data needs a seperate licensing framework:

The answer to me is that database and data are different.  They’re different legally and different practically in what consumers and producers of open data want to do with it.  They’re also different in what the future looks like in terms of things like linked data.

Read the details in the full interview.

Found this survey on an O’Reilly blogpost. Some questions are quite trivial but PEW also asks about the impact of the Semantic Web in 2020.

Take your chance: If you’d like to take the survey, you can currently visit http://www.facebook.com/l/c6596;survey.confirmit.com/wix2/p1075078513.aspx and enter PIN 2000.

From September 1 – 3, 2010 I-SEMANTICS, the 6th international conference on semantic systems, will take place in Graz / Austria. This year’s focus is „Towards a Web of Linked Data”. As a conference aiming to bring together science and industry, I-SEMANTICS encourages both, scientific (research/application) and industrial contributions.

Additionally I-SEMANTICS will host the 2nd Pragmatic Web Track and the 3rd Triplification Challenge.

The combined CfP for I-SEMANTICS, Pragmatic Web Track & Triplification Challenge is available here.