Workshop on Managing Changes in the Semantic Web

Workshop in conjunction with the 16th International Semantic Web Conference
Vienna, Austria, 21th October, 2017

Workshop Description

The Web is primary a communication platform where knowledge is produced, shared, and consumed by a diversity of stakeholders. As communication is a dynamic process, the data on Web is subject to changes. These dynamics evoke the need for versatile methods and algorithms to represent data changes and provide Web agents with a suitable world view at any time.

Changing data on the Web has a great impact on the way we live and do business as we rely on insights from such information to make (future) decisions. Managing changing datasets is important for many purposes and applications involving Web Data, and it raises a variety of research challenges, such as (1) how to facilitate integration of dynamic sources and ontologies, (2) when to notify changes and perform updates on local caches or indexes, and thus ensure the delivery of up-to-date and valid information, (3) how to validate and evaluate the impact of the changes, (4) how to keep track of changes in distributed data sources, and (5) how to represent and query for change. When keeping track of the evolution of data, knowledge representation methods have to deal with the evolution of knowledge at both schema and data level i.e. schema information need to be updated due to changes in the world or the acquisition of new knowledge whereas data sets need to take into account the evolution of the data and links from the different Web sources e.g. from sensor data streams, financial transactions, news feeds, etc. There is a plethora of work on different aspects of managing changes of semantic web data: keeping track of certain aspects of the performed modifications like trustworthiness or timestamps became an important line of research. For this task provenance management frameworks have proven to be very helpful. Likewise, different methods in the field of belief revision and uniform interpolation have become very active fields of research addressing the problem of performing changes to description logic knowledge bases. In the field of Semantic Web, recent research studies the development of different SPARQL Update semantics dealing with dynamic RDF data at both instance-level and schema-level; addressing the issue of inconsistencies introduced by updates, and capturing RDFS entailments within updates.

The MaCSeW workshop aims to bring together researchers addressing the problem of managing changes in Semantic Web data from different areas like linked data, Semantic Web, knowledge and belief change and description logic in order provide an overview of the existing approaches as well as to advance cooperation of the different areas. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Integration of dynamic sources
Handling changes in Linked Open Data Cloud
Concept drift in the Semantic Web
Tracking provenance of Web data
Evolution of description logic TBoxes and/or ABoxes
Dealing with inconsistencies in ontologies
Uniform interpolation
Different aspects of forgetting
Foundations of belief change in ontologies
Maintaining Links on the Web of Data
SPARQL Update

The workshop will be held in conjunction with ISWC 2017.

Important Dates

Full Paper submission deadline: August 6th, 2017
Notification: August 24th, 2017
Final submission: September 7th, 2017
Workshop: October 21st or 22nd, 2017

Submissions Details

Papers, including the description of work in progress are welcome and should be formatted according to the Springer LNCS guidelines. The length should not exceed 15 pages. All papers must be submitted in PDF. Formatting instructions and the LNCS style files can be obtained at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.htm.

The EasyChair submission site is available at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=macsew2017.