​Students should submit an 8-page description of their PhD research proposal. All proposals have to be submitted electronically via the EasyChair conference submission system.

The submission should address the following questions:

1. Problem statement: what is the problem that you are trying to solve?
2. Importance: Why is this problem important and for whom? Who will benefit and who should care? What is the impact of solving this problem (for the research community, or society in general).
3. Related work: Has a solution to this problem been attempted before and how? If not, have research efforts tried or solved similar problems? What can you learn from these efforts? If you are addressing an existing problem, what are the limitations of current solutions? What are you adding that is novel? Why?
4. Research question(s) and hypotheses: What hypotheses do you make in formulating your solution? What are the questions you need to answer in order to solve the problem? Are there boundary cases you plan to exclude or assumptions you base on?
5. Preliminary results: What research methods did you follow in your proposal? Have you produced any results so far?
6. Evaluation: How do you know you’ve answered your question(s)? What are the methods you apply to test your hypotheses? Have you identified criteria to measure the degree of success of your solution?
7. Reflection and future work: Are there any limitations in your approach? What are your planned next steps to complete your investigation?

Please aim to answer the above questions with as much detail as possible, especially questions 2 and 4. You should provide as much detail as possible to allow a knowledgeable reviewer from the Semantic Web community, but possibly not an expert in your topic, to assess the validity of your research contribution.

All submissions should include references, which will count towards the max page limit. All papers exceeding 8 pages will be desk rejected and therefore will not be reviewed.

Submissions should be authored by the student only. The supervisor(s) should be acknowledged at the end of the paper, together with a funding agency or any other party who supports or contributes to the research.

Submissions must use the Springer Publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). For details on the LNCS style, see Springer’s Author Instructions. For HTML submission guidance, please see the HTML submission guide. They must be submitted online via EasyChair, in PDF or HTML format.

Authors of accepted papers must register and present their work at the Doctoral Consortium. Students are expected to attend the DC for the whole day in order to gain as much value as possible from the experience.

Authors will have neither achieved their Ph.D. degree nor officially submitted their thesis at the time of submission to the Doctoral Consortium

DC Proceeding will be published with CEUR-WS.org.