== Context ==
The Data revolution is a reality in our ever-evolving world. Some authors tend to say that “Data is the new oil”. This is also true in Africa which is one of the first continents with an increased number of users connected to the internet. At the same time, there are many challenges in the continent such as how to tackle some aspects of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Data-driven solutions combined with Artificial Intelligence techniques, as well as Semantic Web technologies can foster the development of emergent and intelligent solutions and applications.
In this special issue, we hence welcome articles with a focus on solving real-world issues in the African context or that can be reproducible to Africa and that (1) deal with data intelligibility (2) Artificial intelligence and Business Intelligence, and (3) Semantic Web applications and use cases. A focus of the special issue will be on using data-driven solutions applied to solve African problems or at least demonstrate reproducibility in the African context.
The target topics of this issue include (but are not limited to):
● Data privacy and regulation
● Data acquisition and conversion
● Big data integration and alignments
● Data Storage and Validation
● Ontology Engineering
● Data Management Lifecycle
● Knowledge Representation
● Graph structures
● Business intelligence
● Visualization
● Applied Artificial Intelligence
● NLP, Deep Learning and Machine Learning
● Real-life applications and use-cases (IoT, Bioinformatics, healthcare, Statistics, agriculture, logistics and manufacturing, Social Network Analysis, etc.)

== Deadline ==
● Submission deadline: October 30, 2021.
Papers submitted before the deadline will be reviewed upon receipt and any paper will be published online as soon as it is accepted.

== Author Guidelines ==
Submissions shall be made through the ARIMA journal website at https://arima.episciences.org/. Prospective authors must take notice of the general submission guidelines with special emphasis that a preliminary deposit on the HAL archive is required. Details are available at https://arima.episciences.org/page/instructions.
The special issue reference in the ARIMA journal corresponds to volume 35 with access code: 6011a5016b8a1. Note that you need to request an account on the ARIMA journal website for submitting a paper. Papers can be submitted either in French or in English.
While there is no upper limit, paper length must be justified by content. We allow papers with only major revisions to go through the second round of evaluation for a final decision by the editors.
The ARIMA journal is indexed by MathSciNet and DBLP.


== Guest editors ==
The guest editors can be reached at arima.editors-vol35@inria.fr
Ghislain Atemezing, MONDECA, France
Gaoussou Camara, University of Alioune Diop, Sénégal
Idrissa Sarr, University of Cheikh Anta Diop, Sénégal
Bruce Watson, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa