The ISWC 2014 Doctoral Consortium will take place as part of the 13th International Semantic Web Conference in Riva del Garda, Italy. This forum will provide PhD students an opportunity to share and develop their research ideas in a critical but supportive environment, to get feedback from mentors who are senior members of the Semantic Web research community, to explore issues related to academic and research careers, and to build relationships with other Semantic Web PhD students from around the world.

The Consortium aims to broaden the perspectives and to improve the research and communication skills of these students.

The Doctoral Consortium is intended for students who have a specific research proposal and some preliminary results, but who have sufficient time prior to completing their dissertation to benefit from the consortium experience. Generally, students in their second or third year of PhD will benefit the most from the Doctoral Consortium. In the Consortium, the students will present their proposals and get specific feedback and advice on how to improve their research plan.

All proposals submitted to the Doctoral Consortium will undergo a thorough reviewing process with a view to providing detailed and constructive feedback. The international program committee will select the best submissions for presentation at the Doctoral Consortium and the best proposal will be published in the conference proceedings.

We anticipate that students with accepted submissions at the Doctoral Consortium will receive travel fellowships to offset some of the travel costs.

Submission information:

We ask the PhD students to submit an 8 page description of their PhD research proposal. All proposal have to be submitted electronically via the EasyChair conference submission System https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iswc2014dc. The proposal text must have at least 8 sections (some can be very short), addressing each of the following questions:

1. Problem Statement: What is the problem that you are addressing?
2. Relevancy: Why the problem is important? Who will benefit if you succeed? Who should care?
3. Related Work: How have others attempted to address this problem? Why is the problem difficult?
4. Research Question(s): What are the research questions that you plan to address?
5. Hypotheses: What hypotheses are related to your research questions?
6. Preliminary results: Do you have any preliminary results that demonstrate that your approach is promising?
7. Approach: How are you planning to address your research questions and test your hypotheses? What is the main idea behind your approach? The key innovation?
8. Evaluation plan: How will you measure your success - faster/more accurate/less failures/etc.? How do you plan to test your hypothesis? What will you measure? What will you compare to?
9. Reflections: Why do you think you will succeed where others failed? Provide an argument, based either on common knowledge or on evidence that you have accumulated, the your approach is likely to succeed.

Additional submission requirements:

• All submissions must be single-author submissions. Please acknowledge your PhD advisor(s) and other contributors in the Acknowledgements section
• Students accepted to present at the Doctoral Consortium must plan to attend the DC for the whole day in order to gain as much value as possible from the experience.
• Please remember that the DC submission is not the same as a research paper.
• Submissions must be in pdf and be formatted according to the Springer Publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).

Topics

The Consortium has the same scope of technical topics as the main ISWC conference.

• Management of Semantic Web data and Linked Data
• Languages, tools, and methodologies for representing and managing Semantic Web data
• Database, IR, NLP and AI technologies for the Semantic Web
• Search, query, integration, and analysis on the Semantic Web
• Robust and scalable knowledge management and reasoning on the Web
• Cleaning, assurance, and provenance of Semantic Web data, services, and processes
• Information Extraction from unstructured data
• Supporting multi-linguality in the Semantic Web
• User Interfaces and interacting with Semantic Web data and Linked Data
• Geospatial Semantic Web
• Semantic Sensor networks
• Query and inference over data streams
• Ontology-based data access
• Semantic technologies for mobile platforms
• Ontology engineering and ontology patterns for the Semantic Web
• Ontology modularity, mapping, merging, and alignment
• Social networks and processes on the Semantic Web
• Representing and reasoning about trust, privacy, and security
• Information visualization of Semantic Web data and Linked Data
• Personalized access to Semantic Web data and applications Semantic Web technologies
• Semantic Web and Linked Data for Cloud environments

Important Dates

• Paper Submission: May 30, 2014
• Notifications: July 8, 2014
• Camera-Ready Versions: August 1, 2014
• Doctoral Consortium: October 20, 2014
• Conference: October 19-23, 2014

 All deadlines are Hawaii time.

Program Chairs

Paul Groth, VU University Amsterdam
Natasha Noy, Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research

Program Committee

The program committee list can be found here.