2nd Call for Papers
Semantic Web Journal
Special Issue on Semantics for Geochange

http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/blog/special-issue-semantics-geochange

Description

Geochange refers to changes in the environment resulting from human and natural factors. These often large-scale changes range from land cover changes such as desertification, land degradation and deforestation to extreme events such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, or tsunamis. Moreover, changes have had and will have a considerable impact on economic and social sustainability. Environmental changes can now be observed by various technical sensors, simulation environments; recently, information about natural cataclysms has been produced through crowd-sourcing. For example, The Group of Earth Observations has proposed critical Earth observations for various societal benefit areas; to date, several global motoring initiatives have been established. Recently, the notion of Linked Open Data has started to expand the amount of geochange related data on the Web massively.

Huge collections of observing systems or data sources for environmental research, together with the interdisciplinary nature of geochange research lead to the following challenges:
- How to achieve integrated use of environmental data, especially when information from different sources is heavily heterogeneous and even contradicting?
- How to semantically link public observations to scientific measurements produced by technical sensors or forecasting models?
- How to derive from low-level sensor measurements a high-level understanding of environmental changes and their impacts?

The idea of semantic interoperability for geochange potentially requires interdisciplinary solutions from a wide range of related fields such as knowledge engineering, environmental science, geospatial statistics, sensor web and so on. Another crucial question is how to incorporate insights from these fields into general solutions for representing and understanding environmental change.

Topics

This special issue solicits contributions to tackle challenges in Semantics for Geochange. Interdisciplinary solutions in terms of tools, techniques, theoretical inputs, exploration and implementation of use cases related to geochange semantics are welcome. We encourage submissions dealing with the following scientific and technical issues in geochange:

- Formal representation of environmental change
- Spatio-temporal Ontologies
- Multi-scale spatio-temporal data representation
- Contextual, cultural and linguistic variations in environmental vocabularies
- Geospatial Semantic Web
- Semantic Sensor Web
- Semantic-based reasoning and information retrieval
- Crowdsourcing in monitoring and managing environmental change
- Linked Geo-Data for environmental data discovery and exploitation
- Semantic similarity measurement of spatio-temporal information
- Semantic provenance for spatio-temporal information
- Semantic-based visualization for communicating environmental change
- Case studies on semantics in environmental changes.

Submissions

High-quality papers containing original research results on the above and related topics are solicited. Extended versions of papers previously published in conferences and workshops are also welcome, provided that they are substantially expanded and improved. Authors should submit a manuscript through the Semantic Web Journal on-line system, following the guidelines available at:http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/authors. Manuscripts should have a length of 15-25 pages in IOS Press format. All submissions will undergo an open review process, according to the standards of the Semantic Web Journal.

Important Dates

20th May 2011: Submission Deadline
20th July 2011: Author Notification
30th August 2011: Final Revisions
Winter 2011: Special Issue Publication

Guest Editors

Tomi Kauppinen
The Muenster Semantic Interoperability Lab (MUSIL)
Institute for Geoinformatics
University of Münster
Germany

Brandon Bennett
Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Biological Systems
School of Computing
University of Leeds
UK

Lúbia Vinhas
National Institute for Space Research (INPE)
Brazil

Anusuriya Devaraju
The Muenster Semantic Interoperability Lab (MUSIL)
Institute for Geoinformatics
University of Münster
Germany

Guest Editorial Board

Thomas Bittner, State University of New York at Buffalo
Gilberto Câmara, National Institute for Space Research (INPE), Brazil
Michael Compton, CSIRO ICT Centre, Australia
Oscar Corcho, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Andrew Frank, Technical University of Vienna
Antony Galton, University of Exeter
Raúl García-Castro, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM)
Michael F. Goodchild, UC Santa Barbara
Joaquín Huerta, University Jaume I of Castellon
Krzysztof Janowicz, Pennsylvania State University
Marinos Kavouras, National Technical University of Athens
Werner Kuhn, University of Münster
Laurent Lefort, CSIRO ICT Centre, Australia
Steve Liang, University of Calgary
Eetu Mäkelä, Aalto University
Josiane Xavier Parreira, DERI Galway
Edzer Pebesma, University of Münster
Femke Reitsma, University of Canterbury
Chris S Renschler, State University of New York at Buffalo
Sven Schade, European Commission, Joint Research Centre
May Yuan, University of Oklahoma