Call for Book Chapter: "Towards the Multilingual Semantic Web" (to be published by Springer, autumn 2013)

Call for Book Chapters

"Towards the Multilingual Semantic Web" (to be published by Springer, autumn 2013)

Editors: Paul Buitelaar (DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland) and Philipp Cimiano (CITEC, University of Bielefeld, Germany)

We invite submissions of book chapter abstracts for a new book "Towards the Multilingual Semantic Web" to be published by Springer.

Motivation

The amount of Internet users with native languages other than English has seen a substantial growth in recent years. As a consequence, the Web is turning more and more into a truly multilingual platform in which individuals and organizations with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds collaborate, consuming and producing information at a scale without precedent. In such a multilingual web, differences in language should not become a barrier for information access, but contribute to plurality and diversity of opinion and culture. The creation of a level playing field in which users from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds have access to the same body of information and have comparable opportunities to contribute to that information, is a crucial goal to achieve. Such a level playing field would also reduce information hegemonies and biases, allowing to access various opinions and perspectives. In the traditional Web, language represents an important barrier for information access as it is not straightforward to access information produced in a foreign language. Towards this end, new principles, methods and architectures need to be developed that foster the access to information across the boundaries of languages and countries, allowing to aggregate and compare content and opinions originating in different cultural contexts and languages.

Originally conceived by Tim Berners-Lee et al. as an extension to the traditional Web, the Semantic Web is "an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation". The Semantic Web has seen an impressive growth in recent years in terms of the amount of data published on the Web using the RDF and OWL data models. The kind of data published nowadays on the Semantic Web or Linked Open Data cloud is mainly of a factual nature and thus represents a basic body of knowledge that is accessible to mankind as a basis for informed decision-making. The Semantic Web vision bears an excellent potential to create a level playing field for users with different cultural backgrounds, native languages and originating from different geo-political environments. Such potential exists, as information available on the Semantic Web is expressed in a language-independent fashion and is thus accessible to speakers of different languages if the right mechanisms are in place. However, so far the relation between multilingualism and the Semantic Web has not received enough attention in the research community. Exploring and advancing the state-of-the-art in information access to the Semantic Web across languages is the goal of the edited book proposed here.

Structure of the book

The planned book will consist of around 15 chapters of about 20 pages, divided in three sections: Principles, Methods and Applications.

Principles: The section on principles will be concerned with models, architectures, and methodologies that enrich the current Semantic Web Architecture with features necessary to handle different languages. Examples are:

• models for the integration of linguistic information with ontologies, i.e., models for multilingualism in knowledge representation, in particular OWL and RDF(S)
• extensions of state-of-the-art querying languages (SPARQL) to account for multilinguality
• web architecture to support multilinguality

Methods: The methods section will contain papers describing particular methods and approaches to solving some of the key issues in the area of the Multilingual Semantic Web, including but not limited to:

• multilingual and cross-lingual ontology alignment
• ontology translation and localization
• multilingual and cross-lingual aspects of semantic search and querying of knowledge repositories
• cross-lingual information retrieval
• cross-lingual question answering over Linked Data
• automatic integration and adaptation of (multilingual) lexicons with ontologies
• multi- and cross-lingual ontology-based information extraction and ontology population
• multilingualism and linked data (generation, querying, browsing, visualization and presentation)
• multilingual aspects of ontology verbalization
• ontology learning across languages
• collaborative ontology design across languages and cultures
• NLP methods to construct the multilingual Semantic Web

Applications: The applications section will describe innovative and relevant applications and solutions for use cases in the area of the Multilingual Semantic Web.

Submission

Submission will be in two stages. At the first stage, an abstract of 5 pages (incl. References) should be submitted, describing the main topic and table of contents for the proposed chapter. Each abstract should mention explicitly which of the above topics are addressed, and stating also whether the chapter is concerned primarily with principles, methods or applications. At the second stage, authors of selected abstracts will be invited to submit a full chapter.

Timeline

• December 2, 2012 Deadline for abstract submission
• December 10, 2012 Notification of acceptance / rejection
• March 31, 2013 Submission of chapter (20 pages maximum)
• Mai 31, 2013 Review of chapter to authors
• June 30, 2013 Submission of pre-final version
• July 31, 2013 Review of pre-final version to authors
• August 31, 2013 Camera-ready version
• September 2013 Book publication