JIST 2014 organizes two Special Tracks. The philosophy behind Special Tracks is to introduce a "bottom-up way" to discover and implement special topics that extend the scope of JIST or to connect with other fields or communities. By doing this, we intend to facilitate the proactive participation of researchers from various fields or communities who have linked the semantic technology with their research fields.

Each accepted Special track is organized in the following way:
(a) Six-page short papers will be submitted and reviewed in the same way as the main technical papers and will be included in the Proceedings if accepted.
(b) Presentations of these papers are done in the same way as the main technical sessions.

The JIST 2014 accepted submissions for the special tracks as follows: 

Special Track on Personal Ontologies as Rich User Models

The problem of defining user models has been a research issue since a long time; user models are employed in a variety of applications, including Information Filtering and Information Retrieval, and their usage is finalised at the personalization of algorithmic solutions to several problems. If considering the Information Retrieval task, user profiles are functional to the definition of approaches to personalized search, which is aimed at tailoring the search outcome to users. The quality of a user model is clearly related to the effectiveness of the personalized algorithms that make use of it. A user model represents the user interests and preferences; these can be captured either explicitly or implicitly. User profiles may be formally represented as bags of words, as vectors of words or concepts, or still as conceptual taxonomies. More recent approaches are aimed at formally representing user models as ontologies, thus allowing a richer, more structured and semantically coherent representation of the knowledge about the user. This special track solicitates contributions that address:

  1. the issue of the automatic definition of personal ontologies, i.e. user-related ontologies,
  2. the issue of the evaluation of the quality of personal ontologies,
  3. the issue of exploiting the knowledge represented in personal ontologies in real applications.

Special Track on Design Principles of Linked Data

Recently, Linked Data attract a great deal of attention as one of important Semantic Technology. In many domains, various data are published as Linked Data and many kinds of semantic applications using them have been developed. In order to enhance the value of Linked Data, it is very important to consider design principles to construct and publish Linked Data so that many datasets are efficiently linked. Design principles of Linked Data are discussed from many aspects such as common schema/ vocabulary, accessibility, knowledge representation, efficiency for processing, and so on. This special track focuses on researches which discuss how to design, construct and publish Linked Data with concrete examples in various domains. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  1. Design issue of data schema and ontology for publishing Linked Data.
  2. Methods and tools to design, construct and publish Linked Data.
  3. Best practices of design principle of Linked Data.

Special track papers must be submitted via Easychair system (by choosing the paper category of Special Track).