Call for papers for a special issue on

Fusion of Symbolic and Sensory Information

in

Information Fusion

An International Journal on Multi-Sensor, Multi-Source Information Fusion

An Elsevier Science Publication

Editor-in-Chief: Dr. Belur V. Dasarathy

belur.d@dynetics.com; ifjournal@yahoo.com

Symbolic information may come into the fusion process from two directions, or at two different levels. It is most likely that the requirements for a fusion system are first stated in natural language. These requirements guide the development of the fusion system and, ultimately, are translated into code in a programming language. In such a case, the linguistic information is transformed and encoded into the fusion program. On the other hand, one of the information sources may be represented in textual format. The symbolic information can be structured (like in databases), semi-structured (e.g., annotated using XML, RDF, DAML, or other annotation languages), formal (e.g., sentences in predicate calculus), or unstructured (text documents). This special issue is devoted to research related to information fusion where symbolic information is processed by the fusion system.

Authors are encouraged to submit original, unpublished research papers in the areas related to the topic of symbolic fusion. Papers on both theory and applications of fusion of symbolic information and other non-symbolic data sources will be welcome. Specific areas of interest include (but are not limited to):

Theoretical aspects (linguistics and fusion, symbolic fusion)

Design methodologies for symbolic fusion systems

Formal methods approaches and reasoning in information fusion

Case studies of designs from symbolic specifications

Design of fusion systems using formal methods

Fusion of information in text documents with other sources (imagery, radar data, acoustic, IR and other)

Fusion of annotated data sources

Fusion of ontologies used for annotation of data sources

Prospective authors should follow the regular paper preparation guidelines found at http://www.elsevier.com/inca/publications/store/6/2/0/8/6/2/index.htt. Both regular and correspondence items will be considered. Submit: a hard copy to the

Guest Co-Editor and an electronic copy in PDF or Postscript format to the Guest Co-Editor: Kokar@coe.neu.edu and to Editor-in-Chief: belur.d@dynetics.com.

Guest Co-Editor

Mieczyslaw M. Kokar

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Northeastern University

360 Huntington Avenue

Boston, MA 02115, USA.

Tel: 1-617-373-4849; Fax: 1-617-373-8970

Email: kokar@coe.neu.edu

Deadline for Submission: October 31, 2001