Special Issue on Semantic Web for Cultural Heritage

• The Semantic Web Journal has accepted our application for a special issue on Semantic Web solutions for Cultural Heritage (CFP Special Issue)
• Paper submission deadline: 21 June 2019

Call for papers

Cultural Heritage (CH) is gaining a lot of attention from academic and industry perspectives. Scientific researchers, organisations, associations, and schools are looking for appropriate technologies for annotating, integrating, sharing, accessing, analysing and visualising the mine of cultural collections and, more generally, cultural data, taking also into account the profiles and preferences of end users. Several national and European research and innovation project have been launched to these directions. A fundamental challenge that many of these projects deal with is how to make Cultural Heritage data, which is typically made available in diverse languages and formats, mutually interoperable, so that it can be searched, linked, and presented in a harmonised way across the boundaries of a Cultural Heritage institution. Early solutions were based on the syntactic or structural level of data, without leveraging the rich semantic structures underlying the content. During the last decades, solutions based on the principles and technologies of the Semantic Web have been proposed to explicitly represent the semantics of data sources and make both their content and their semantics machine operable and interoperable. In parallel, resources such as the CIDOC-CRM ecosystem have matured. As institutions bring their data to the Semantic Web level, the tasks of integrating, sharing, analysing and visualising data are now to be conceived in this new and very rich framework.

The aim of the SW4CH workshop is to bring together Computer Scientists, Data Scientists and Digital Humanities researchers and practitioners involved in the development or deployment of Semantic Web solutions for Cultural Heritage. The goal is to provide a forum, where people from these fields will have the opportunity to exchange ideas and experiences, present state of the art of realisations and outcomes of relevant projects, and discuss related challenges and solutions.

Topics

We seek original and high quality submissions related (but not limited) to one or more of the following topics areas:

SW vocabularies and ontologies for CH

• User Requirements life cycle for Cultural Heritage
• Vocabularies, thesauri, metadata schemas, and ontologies
• Semantic Web content creation, annotation, and extraction
• Ontology creation, extraction, and evolution
• Ontology mapping, merging, and alignment
• Use and development of standards, such as SKOS, etc.
• Developments and applications of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM)
• Virtual Cultural Heritage collections
• Integration of virtual and physical collections
• Ontology design patterns for Cultural Heritage

SW-based interaction with CH data

• Search, query, and visualization of the Cultural Heritage on the Semantic Web
• Search of virtual and integrated Cultural Heritage collections
• Personalized access of Cultural Heritage collections
• Contex-aware information presentation
• Navigation and browsing
• Facet browsers
• Interactive user interfaces
• Social aspects in Cultural Heritage access and presentation
• Trust and provenance issues in mixed collection and mixed vocabulary applications

SW applications for CH

• Creative industries
• Tourist services
• Museums
• Digital Libraries
• Integration of virtual and physical collections
• Ambient Cultural Heritage
• Mobile museum guides
• Web-based museum guides
• Applications with clear lessons learned

SW techniques, services and architectures of CH

• Reasoning strategies (e.g. context, temporal, spatial)
• Machine learning and NLP techniques
• Cultural Heritage services
• Peer-to-peer Cultural Heritage architectures
• E-infrastructures for Cultural Heritage

Submission Information

A volume with workshop papers will be published by CEUR Workshop Proceedings, for distribution among workshop participants during the workshop. The best papers may be included in the supplementary proceedings of ESWC 2018, which will appear in the Springer LNCS series.

The Semantic Web Journal has accepted our application for a special issue on Semantic Web solutions for Cultural Heritage. Selected papers from SW4CH will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers to the special issue, for which there will be a separate review process.

Camera-ready papers are to be prepared in LaTeX (detailed instructions will be provided).

Papers will be refereed and accepted on the basis of their scientific merit and relevance to the workshop. Each paper will be reviewed by at least two Program Committee members. Duplicate submissions are not allowed, i.e. submitted papers must not overlap substantially with any other papers of the same author(s) submitted elsewhere (i.e. journal, conference, workshop etc.).

Workshop papers must not exceed 10 pages in the LNCS format and must comply with the LNCS formatting guidelines available at http://www.springer.com/series/7899 (see the link "Instructions for Authors" in the right hand side).

Papers must be submitted electronically in PDF, using this link: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sw4ch2018

Important Dates

• March 2, 2018 March 16, 2018 - Paper submission
• April 13, 2018 - Paper notification
• April 27, 2018 - Camera-ready papers
• June 3, 2018 - SW4CH 2018 Workshop