Reminder: Special Issue of Information Systems

Call for Papers: Special Issue of Information Systems "Semantic Integration of Data, Multimedia, and Services" Guest Editors: Carlo Batini (U. of Milan "Bicocca") Domenico Beneventano (U. of Modena and Reggio Emilia) Sonia Bergamaschi (U. of Modena and Reggio Emilia) Tiziana Catarci (Sapienza - U. of Rome) Research on structured data, multimedia, and services has involved non-overlapping communities. However, from a user perspective, the three kinds of information should behave and be accessed similarly. This has not been the case, leading to a situation in which a user has to deal with different tools in order to gain a complete knowledge about a domain. There is no integrated view comprising data, multimedia and services retrieved by the specific tools that is automatically computed. Techniques for managing data, multimedia, and services with a unified approach could benefit large communities of users. As a notable example, let us consider the Internet, where searching for a certain topic piecemeal returns heterogeneous results comprising unstructured text, deep web data sources, web services, images and other multimedia files. In this scenario, a unified approach for dealing with different kinds of information may allow cross searches and different starting points / results in the searching processes. Multiple and challenging research issues have to be addressed to achieve this goal, including: mediating among different models for representing information, developing new techniques for extracting and mapping relevant information from heterogeneous kinds of data, devising innovative paradigms for formulating and processing queries ranging over both (multimedia) data and services, investigating new models for visualizing the results and allowing the user to easily manipulate them. Papers of interest for this special issue should discuss different models, techniques and tools addressing the above issues, as well as highlight relevant practical experience in which techniques for integrating structured data, multimedia data, and services have been developed and applied to support significant business processes. Topics of interest for this special issue include, but are not limited to, the following: - Unified modelling of data, multimedia, and services - Mapping and integration of data, multimedia, and services - Retrieving of data, multimedia, and services - Service integration in multimedia - Light and flexible approaches to integration - Real cases and application scenarios of integration of data and services in business environments - Data and service mashups - Unified query language concepts Important Dates: Manuscripts due: September 30 2009 Notification of acceptance: December 15 2009 Final revised manuscript: March 15 2010 Authors that are planning to submit a proposal to this special issue are kindly required to send to the guest editor Domenico Beneventano (domenico.beneventano@unimore.it, laura.po@unimore.it) a brief description of the article by September 27th 2009. Guidelines for submission: We are quite serious about the vision for this special issue, so we would like each submitted manuscript to be accompanied by a short cover letter showing how the research embodied in the paper advances the vision of unifying data, multimedia, and services. All manuscripts and any supplementary material should be submitted via the journal's online submission and peer-review systems at http://ees.elsevier.com/is/ A prospective author should 1.Register in EES (Elsevier Editorial System) 2.Select: Submit Manuscript from Main Menu 3.Choose Article Type: "Special issue: DMS Semantic Integration" The call for paper can be also downloaded at DBGroup - University of Modena and Reggio Emilia web site: www.dbgroup.unimo.it/InformationSystems/ You can contact Domenico Beneventano (domenico.beneventano@unimore.it) for further information.