Dear Colleagues,

Our times may be described by the massive exploitation of social information and semantics in our everyday life. Social data mining could be described as one of the most important and challenging tasks of our era. As this observation applies both to the research community, which is faced with enormous challenges deriving from big data management, as well as new emerging disciplines in terms, for instance, of social information handling and related social tools and applications, it is becoming evident that new approaches have to be introduced and invented in order to efficiently handle the huge amounts of such data.

The aim of the SMAP workshop series, and by association of the proposed Special Issue, is formed around two main axes. The first axis focuses on the data, information and knowledge extraction, pre-processing, manipulation, and analysis, whereas the second axis focuses on the utilization of the aforementioned outcomes towards efficient tools and application production—the ultimate task being, of course, the facilitation of respective human actions associated to the associated computational tasks in order to make the everyday life of the involved individuals easier.

This Special Issue aims to bring together interdisciplinary approaches that focus on the application of innovative, as well as existing social and semantics methodologies. Since typical computational data are typically dominated by semantic heterogeneity and are quite dynamic in nature, computer science researchers are obliged and encouraged to develop new suitable algorithms, tools, and applications to efficiently tackle them, whereas existing ones need to be adapted to the individual special characteristics using traditional methodologies derived from the fields of Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning. Thus, the current Special Issue is fully open to all who want to contribute by submitting a relevant research manuscript.

In addition to the Open Call, selected papers presented at SMAP 2020 are invited to be submitted as extended versions to this Special Issue of the journal Information. The workshop paper should be cited and noted on the first page of the paper; authors are asked to disclose that it is a workshop paper in their cover letter and include a statement on what has been changed compared to the original conference paper. Each submission to this journal issue should contain at least 50% of new material, e.g., in the form of technical extensions, more in-depth evaluations, or additional use cases.

All submitted papers will undergo our standard peer-review procedure. Accepted papers will be published in open access format in Information and collected together on this Special Issue website.

Dr. Evaggelos Spyrou
Dr. Phivos Mylonas
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Information is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.