Semantic Web surveys and applications

The primary purpose of a scientific journal is to be a service to the research community. It is up to the editors-in-chief and the editorial board to assess the needs of the community, and to tailor the journal in such a way that it addresses these needs as closely as possible. It is for this reason that the Semantic Web journal publishes more than original research papers. In the last editorial [2], we discussed why it is fruitful for the Semantic Web community to have a forum for publications on tools and systems with high impact, and the last issue of the journal contained a collection of reports on some of the finest and most well-known Semantic Web tools currently available. The present issue contains three surveys and one application paper. The surveys are responses to a special call which we issued in fall 2010, asking for abstracts first. Out of 37 submitted abstracts, we selected those which were most promising in addressing current and future needs of the Semantic Web community. It was only 6 for which we strongly encouraged the authors to write a full survey. Three of the resulting surveys are presented in this issue. The quality we expect from survey articles is indeed very high,1 We expect them to be well-written and structured, comprehensive, and with a balanced presentation and coverage. They must be accessible to readers who are not dedicated specialists on the survey’s topic. The covered material must be of timely importance to the broader Semantic Web community. Finally, a survey must provide a classification of the presented work that supports the reader in understanding the commonalities and differences between the reviewed approaches. In other words, surveys for the Se-