CALL FOR PAPERS Second International Workshop on Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems (SSWS 2006) November 5 or 6, 2006 during 5th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2006) This workshop aims at creating a forum for discussing a critical issue for the Semantic Web, that is, scalability. As the Semantic Web evolves, scalability becomes increasingly important. This workshop will focus on addressing of the scalability issue with respect to the development and deployment of knowledge base systems on the Semantic Web. Typically, such systems deal with information described in Semantic Web languages like OWL and RDF(S), and provide services such as storing, reasoning, querying and debugging. There are two basic requirements for these systems. First, they have to satisfy the applicationÚs semantic requirements by providing sufficient reasoning support. Second, they must scale well in order to be of practical use. Given the sheer size and distributed nature of the Semantic Web, these requirements impose additional challenges beyond those addressed by earlier knowledge base systems. This has been well recognized by the community. We expect that the above issue is going to challenge the Semantic Web for a long time of period and significant effort is needed in order to tackle the problem. This workshop seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners to share their recent ideas and progresses towards building scalable knowledge base systems for the Semantic Web. The workshop will be centered on the discussion of three major aspects: * foundations, methods and technologies for pushing forward the state-of-the-art; * performance evaluation and related principles, methodologies and tools; * identification of important issues and future research directions. This workshop is a follow-on event of the SSWS2005 workshop. Workshop Topics ---------------- Topics of interests for the workshop include, but are not limited to: * Reasoning mechanisms, techniques and systems * Query evaluation and optimization * Performance evaluation and benchmarks * Large Semantic Web repositories * Distributed and concurrent knowledge base systems and P2P systems * Large scale knowledge base management * Semantic Web-based information integration In addition, the workshop will include a working session on benchmarking. In order to be able to evaluate scalability, the existence of agreed benchmarking datasets is of crucial importance. In many related domains such as databases and theorem proving, standard benchmarks exist and are ready to guide research on optimization techniques. In the Semantic Web area, such benchmarking shave only just started to emerge and there is no commonly agreed benchmark dataset for RDF and OWL reasoning and querying. The workshop will address this issue in a special working session on benchmarking. In this session, existing benchmarking initiatives will be presented and discussed by organizers and participants of the workshop. The aim is to come up with a set of requirements and a list of candidate datasets. Paper Submissions ------------------ We invite papers that report on completed or work in progress on relevant topic areas including use-cases and descriptions of demonstrations. All papers will be peer-reviewed by members of the program committee. The contributions should be prepared in PDF format according to the formatting guidelines for Springer-Verlag (LNCS). Submissions should be limited to a maximum of 14 pages for full papers Submissions in PDF form should be emailed to ssws06@few.vu.nl, no later than July 28, 2006. Important Dates ---------------- Submissions Due: July 28, 2006 Notification of Acceptance: August 25, 2006 Camera-ready versions due: September 15, 2006 Workshop: November 5 or 6, 2006 Organizers ----------- Holger Wache, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands Heiner Stuckenschmidt, University of Mannheim, Germany Bijan Parsia, University of Manchester, UK Yuanbo Guo, Lehigh University, USA Tim Finin, University of Maryland, USA Dave Beckett, Yahoo, USA Program committee ------------------ (to be completed) Karl Aberer (EPFL, Switzerland) Grigoris Antoniou (University of Crete &ICS FORTH, Greece) Pierre-Antoine Champin (Lyon 1 University, France) Jeen Broekstra (Aduna, The Netherlands) Raul Garcia Castro (Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain) Oscar Corcho (University of Manchester, UK) Ying Ding (University of Innsbruck, Austria) Volker Haarslev (Concordia University, Canada) Steve Harris (Garlik, UK) Andreas Harth (Deri, Ireland) Jeff Heflin (Lehigh University, USA) Pascal Hitzler (University of Karlsruhe, Germany) Atanas Kiryakov (Ontotext Lab, Sirma Group, Bulgaria) Boris Motik (University of Manchester, UK) Dennis Quan (IBM Watson Research Center, USA) York Sure (University of Karlsruhe, Germany) Danille Turi (University of Manchester, UK) Jan Wielemaker (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) Takahira Yamaguchi (Keio University, Japan)