Call for papers - "The Semantic Web"

[Terry Brooks]

Please distribute widely.  Thank you.

Call for papers - "The Semantic Web" - a special issue of Information
Research: an international electronic journal (http://informationr.net/ir/)

Increasing the intelligibility of the Web is a compelling vision.
Imagine how the utility of local data could be enhanced if they were
Meaningfully linked to data posted by strangers far away. The Web could
evolve into a comprehensive meaning system, a universal encyclopedia or
"world
brain," as prophesized by H.G. Wells.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is actively promoting the Semantic
Web as an extension of the current Web, but one in which information will
Be given well-defined meaning thus facilitating the cooperation between
computers and people.  The crucial first step is to increase the
functionality of Web machines to "understand" the data that they
merely display at present.

This call is for papers that discuss the challenges of transforming
the current Web into a meaning space.  The scope of discussion extends
from technical challenges, such as affixing meaning to an XML (Extensible
Markup Language) source, to linguistic and cultural barriers, such as the
development of semantic tags that will be widely accepted and validly
used.

Questions and proposals for papers should be sent to the editor of the
special issue:

Dr. Terrence A. Brooks
The Information School
University of Washington
Box 352840
Seattle, WA 98195-2840
voice: 206 543-2646
fax: 206 616-3152
e-mail: tabrooks at u.washington.edu
web: http://faculty.washington.edu/tabrooks/

Completed papers should be received by 31st May 2002, but questions
about the suitability of proposed papers may be sent to the Issue
Editor at any time.  The style guide for Information Research is
found at http://informationr.net/ir/author1.html  A link to a template
file can be found on that page.