The Journal of Web Semantics invites submissions for a special issue on Ontology Engineering to be edited by Valentina Tamma, Matthew Horridge, and Bijan Parsia. Submissions are due by 13 November, 2017.

https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-web-semantics/call-for-papers/special-issue-on-ontology-engineering

The Web Ontology Language (OWL) became a World Wide Web Consortium standard in 2004. It has since been used in many diverse domains from geography to medicine where many people, groups, and consortia build, maintain and regularly publish high-quality, production-level ontologies. In this time ontology engineering has evolved considerably with the development of new methodologies, techniques, tools, and processes for ontology creation and maintenance. The actual process of creating ontologies has begun to shift from being a small scale, completely manual process to a combination of manual, semi-automated, and programmatic techniques and from single-person or small-group efforts to large-scale collaborative efforts. Concurrently, ontology engineering research, often drawing inspiration from the increasing empirical rigor of the software engineering community, has grown more sophisticated.

The goal for this special issue is to provide a venue to showcase the breadth and depth of ontology engineering and ontology engineering research. We are particularly interested in empirical papers which aim to explore or demonstrate the benefits of ontologies to larger efforts or of some technique or tooling on the development of ontologies. We encourage principled methodological diversity and welcome papers with significant methodological interest even if the results are null or negative. In addition to standard research papers, we welcome submission of short case studies or system/ontology/method/application descriptions, though we would encourage more general reviews where possible, reserving short papers for cases with some special focus, novelty, or clear interest. We recommend consulting with the Guest Editors before submission of such papers.

We are happy to receive pre-submission of an experimental plan especially if the risk of null results is high and will provide feedback.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

Ontology Engineering Research Methodology
Ontology Engineering Methodologies
Ontology Learning (from text, data, or other sources)
Ontology Visualisation
Quality Assurance
Ontology Debugging
Collaborative Ontology Engineering practices
Ontology Engineering workflows
Document based ontology engineering
Continuous Integration for Ontology Engineering
Ontology Testing
Explanation of Entailments in Ontologies
Ontology Comprehension
Ontology Design Patterns
Ontology Versioning, Change, and Evolution
Ontology Engineering Case Studies
Agile Practices in Ontology Engineering
User Studies on Ontology Engineering
Ontology Modularisation
Programmatic Approaches to Ontology Engineering
Problems and Challenges of Reusing Ontologies
Ontology Publishing Strategies
Application of Software Engineering Techniques to Ontology Engineering
Metrics for Ontology Engineering


Guest Editors

Valentina Tamma, University of Liverpool, v.tamma@liverpool.ac.uk
Matthew Horridge, Stanford University, matthew.horridge@stanford.edu
Bijan Parsia, University of Manchester, bijan.parsia@manchester.ac.uk


Important Dates

Submission deadline: 13 November 2017
Author notification: 5 February 2017
Final version: 16 April 2018
Final notification: 14 May 2018
Publication: 3rd Quarter 2018