Call for Papers

Rule Representation, Interchange and Reasoning in Distributed, Heterogeneous Environments

Special Issue of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering

Guest Editors: N. Bassiliades, G. Governatori, A. Paschke, J. Dix

 

Motivation

In recent years rule based technologies have enjoyed remarkable adoption in two areas: (1) Business Rule Processing and (2) Web-Centered Reasoning. The first trend is caused by the software development life cycle, which needs to be accelerated at reduced cost. The second trend is related to the Semantic Web and Service-oriented technologies, which aim to turn the Web into a huge repository of cross-referenced, machine-understandable data and processes. For both trends, rules can be used to extract, derive, transform, and integrate information in a platform-independent manner. While early rule engines and environments were complex, expensive to maintain, and not very user friendly, the current generation of rule technology provides enhanced usability, scalability and performance, and is less costly. A general advantage of using rules is that they are usually represented in a platform independent manner, often using XML. This fits well into today’s distributed, heterogeneous Web-based system environments. Rules represented in standardized Web formats can be discovered, interchanged and invoked at runtime within and across Web systems, and can be interpreted and executed on any platform.

This special issue solicits state-of-the-art approaches, solutions and applications in the area of Rule Representation, Reasoning and Interchange in the context of distributed, (partially) open, heterogeneous environments, such as the Semantic Web, Intelligent Multi-Agent Systems, Event-Driven Architectures and Service-Oriented Computing. We strongly advise that solicited contributions should clearly identify the target class of applications they enable.

Topics

Original contributions, not currently under review or accepted by another journal, are solicited in relevant areas including (but not limited to) the following:

Submission Guidelines

Prospective authors should prepare manuscripts according to the Information for Authors as published in recent issues of the journal or at http://www.computer.org/tkde/. Note that mandatory over-length page charges and color charges will apply. Manuscripts should be submitted through the online IEEE manuscript submission system at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cs-ieee.

Tentative Schedule

Deadline for paper submission:
  March 15, 2009 - EXTENDED (due to numerous requests)
Completion of first review:
  June 19, 2009
Minor/Major revision due:
  August 21, 2009
Final decision notification:
  November 6, 2009
Publication materials due:
  December 4, 2009
Publication date (tentative):
  July 2010

Guest Editors

Nick Bassiliades
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
nbassili AT csd.auth.gr

Guido Governatori
NICTA, Australia
guido.governatori AT nicta.com.au

Adrian Paschke
Free University Berlin, Germany
paschke AT inf.fu-berlin.de

Jürgen Dix
Clausthal University of Technology, Germany
dix AT tu-clausthal.de