The ESWC 2024 Ph.D. Symposium is a forum for Ph.D. students working in all areas of Semantic Web and Knowledge Graph research to present their work, meet with peers and experienced researchers, receive feedback, and learn from each other’s experiences. It aims at supporting Ph.D. students to develop the skills required to conduct and promote their research, and providing them with an opportunity to attend one of the most important conferences in the Semantic Web area.
The ESWC Ph.D. Symposium is designed to give students the opportunity to:
- Receive feedback: Established researchers will provide constructive feedback on the submitted papers by means of a review process.
- Learn from a mentor: Each student will be assigned a mentor, who will help them revise their papers, and prepare their presentations.
- Present their work: Accepted contributions will be presented at the Ph.D. Symposium, included in the proceedings of ESWC Satellite events and presented during the ESWC poster session.
- Ask questions: Besides the presentations, discussions and a Ph.D. mentoring lunch will be used to exchange ideas and ask questions about all aspects of the Ph.D. and research career in general.
Submissions will be divided into two different categories depending on the advancement into the Ph.D.:
- Early Stage Ph.D.: Students who have identified the main research problem they want to address, surveyed the relevant literature, and obtained preliminary results.
- Middle and Late Stage Ph.D.: Students who have fully defined their research methodology approach and obtained significant results.
These categories do not affect the chances of being selected. However, they will be taken into account by the reviewers in their feedback, and in the length and format of the presentation. The organisers might decide to move a submission from one category to the other if they think it is justified.
Topics
We encourage the submission of papers covering, but not limited to, one or more of the topics foreseen by the research track of the conference.
Submission Information
Ph.D. students in all areas of Semantic Web research are invited to submit papers of 8 to 10 pages (including references) describing their Ph.D. research, in PDF or HTML format, following the LNCS template (see here for the HTML submission guide). Submissions must be uploaded to EasyChair at (choose the “PhD Symposium” track when submitting). They will be evaluated in a closed reviewing process.
Submissions should clearly indicate the category of the submission (Early Stage Ph.D. or Middle/Late Stage Ph.D.) and should adopt the following template of sections:
- Introduction/Motivation: Give a general introduction to the domain/area/topic and indication of its importance/impact in Semantic Web research or other domains.
- State of the Art: Describe existing work in the area, work focusing on the same/similar problems or that might be useful to tackling your research question.
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Problem Statement and Contributions: Formulate the problem you intend to solve, and how you intend to contribute to Semantic Web research. This section should include a clear formulation of
- one (or very few) research hypothesis (what statement you want to validate through your methodology, approach and evaluation), and/or
- the research questions that need to be answered.
- Research Methodology and Approach: Describe the research methodology you will apply in your research, including the different steps from the formulation of your research questions to answering them. Also describe the approach you are taking (or you intend to take for Early Stage Ph.D. submissions) to instantiate the research methodology, hence contributing to solve the problem described in Section 3 and confirm or reject your hypothesis. Discuss how this approach is innovative and novel, and how it is (might be) implemented.
- Evaluation/Evaluation Plan: Describe your evaluation or evaluation plan, which is the way you (intend to) validate your hypothesis, your results, and the value of your approach.
- Results: Report the results achieved up to now in applying your approach in this section. Preliminary results are fine.
- Conclusions/Lessons Learned: Present your conclusions and lessons learned. Describe how your results will or might impact research or the world at large.
We do neither expect you to have solved all issues nor expect you to have finished your Ph.D. However, we expect you to show an understanding of your research area in general and to have a clear plan towards addressing your research questions. This symposium is the best place to discuss these issues and plans with experienced researchers and fellow students to get informed feedback.
Additional Submission Requirements
- All submissions must be single-author submissions. The Ph.D. advisor(s) and other contributors should be included only in the acknowledgements section.
- Authors of the accepted papers must register and present their work at the Ph.D. Symposium. The author can also present a poster at the ESWC poster session.
- Authors will have neither achieved their Ph.D. degree nor officially submitted their thesis at the time of submission to the Ph.D. Symposium.
- Ph.D. Symposium submissions are not regular research papers; please follow the outline above.
Important Dates (subject to change)
| Submission deadline | February 15 2024 |
| Notification of acceptance | March 14th, 2024 |
| Revised version to mentor | March 28th , 2024 |
| Mentor’s feedback on paper | April 11th, 2024 |
| Final version | April 25th, 2024 |
| Draft presentation slides to mentor | May 2nd, 2024 |
| Mentor’s feedback on presentation | May 23rd, 2024 |
| Ph.D. Symposium | May 27th, 2024 |
All deadlines are 23:59 anywhere on earth (UTC-12).
Ph.D. Symposium Chairs
Valentina Presutti, University of Bologna, Italy valentina.presutti@unibo.it
Marta Sabou, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria marta.sabou@wu.ac.at