Cash prizes totalling 4850 € were generously provided by Elsevier, publisher of the Journal of Web Semantics, and the Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA), the sponsor of the ISWC series of conferences.

Research track

ISWC 2008 research track included 43 papers selected from the 261 submissions. A panel of judges selected a short list of three papers and attended the presentation of each one.

The Best Research Paper award and a prize of 1000 € provided by Elsevier was given to:

• Matthew Horridge, Bijan Parsia and Ulrike Sattler for Laconic and Precise Justifications in OWL

The other two best paper nominees were given honorable mention awards:

• Dumitru Roman and Michael Kifer for Semantic Web Service Choreography: Contracting and Enactment
• Ciro Cattuto, Dominik Benz, Andreas Hotho and Gerd Stumme, Semantic Grounding of Tag Relatedness in Social Bookmarking Systems

In Use track

ISWC 2008 included fourteen papers in the Semantic Web In Use track. SWSA provided a 500 € prize for the best paper in this track, which was given to

• Kunal Verma and Alex Kass for Requirements Critic: A Tool for Automatically Analyzing Software Requirements Documents

Two papers in the In Use track were recognized with honorable mention awards:

• Jan Wielemaker, Michiel Hildebrand, Jacco van Ossenbruggen and Guus Schreiber for Thesaurus-based search in large heterogeneous collections
• Conny Christl, Chiara Ghidini, Joanna Guss, Viktoria Pammer, Stefanie Lindstaedt, Peter Scheir, Luciano Serafini and Marco Rospocher for Deploying semantic web technologies for work integrated learning in industry. A comparison: SME vs. large sized company

Semantic Web Challenge

This year the Semantic Web Challenge had two tracks with different criteria: the Open Track and the Billion Triples Track. After an initial review, thirteen submissions were accepted and evaluated for the Open track and nine for the Billion triples track. A panel of eleven experts judged the submissions in two rounds. In the first, five finalists were selected based on their submitted descriptions and a poster and demonstration on Tuesday evening. The panel then ranked the finalists based on a presentation the next day.

Elsevier provided three generous cash prizes for each track: 1000 € for first place, 500 € for second and 250 € for third place.

Semantic Web Challenge Open Track

The winners of the Semantic Web Challenge Open track were

• First place: paggr by Benjamin Nowack (Semsol)
• Second place: DBpedia Mobile by Christian Becker, Christian Bizer (Freie Universität Berlin)
• Third place: HealthFinland by Osma Suominen, Eero Hyvönen, Kim Viljanen, (Helsinki University of Technology and University of Helsinki) and Eija Hukka (National Public Health Institute)

The judges also noted three other applications:

• IYOUIT by DOCOMO Euro-Labs, Telematica Instituut
• xOperator by the University of Leipzig

Semantic Web Challenge Billion Triples Track

The winners of the 2008 Semantic Web Challenge Billion Triples Track were:

• First place: SemaPlorer by Simon Schenk, Carsten Saatho, Anton Baumesberger, Frederik Jochum, Alexander Kleinen, Steen Staab, and Ansgar Scherp (University of Koblenz-Landau)
• Second place: SearchWebDB by Haofen Wang, Thomas Penin, Qiaoling Liu, Linyun Fu, and Yong Yu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University), Thanh Tran, Peter Haase (University of Karlsruhe)
• Third place: MaRVIN by George Anadiotis, Spyros Kotoulas, Eyal Oren, Ronny Siebes, Frank van Harmelen, Niels Drost, Roelof Kemp, Jason Maassen, Frank J. Seinstra, and Henri E. Bal (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam)

The judges also noted three other applications:

• Runner up: i-MoCo by the University of Zurich
• Runner up: SAOR by DERI, NUI Galway
• Honorable mention: Virtuoso by OpenLink Software

Doctoral Consortium

SWSA provided a 100 € prize for the best paper in the ISWC doctoral consortium which was given to

• Michiel Hildebrand for Interactive exploration of heterogeneous cultural heritage collections

Honorable mention awards for Doctoral Consortium papers were given to

• Sofia Angeletou, for Semantic Enrichment of Folksonomy Tagspaces
• Jürgen Bock for Parallel Computation Techniques for Ontology Reasoning

Posters and Demonstrations

ISWC 2008 accepted 54 posters and 31 demonstrations which were presented on Tuesday evening during which conference participants voted for the best overall and best student poster and demonstration and best. SWSA provided a cash prize of 350 € for these awards

The best poster award was won by

• Sebastian Boehm, Johan Koolwaaij, Marko Luther, Bertrand Souville, Matthias Wagner, Martin Wibbels (DOCOMO Communications Laboratories Europe) for their poster IYOUIT – Share, Life, Blog, Play.

Honorable mention awards for posters and demonstrations were given to

• Bella Manoim, Robert W. McGrail (ASC Laboratory) for the poster Toward an Ontology for Finite Algebras.
• Deborah McGuinness, Peter Fox, AK Sinha, Robert Raskin, Abdelmounaam Rezgui and Patrick West (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)for Semantic Data Integration and Registration: Application to heterogeneous atmosphere and volcanic data sources.

The best student poster and demonstration award was given to

• Sebastian Faubel, Christian Kuschel (Georg-Simon-Ohm Hochschule, Nuremberg) for their poster Towards Semantic File System Interfaces

Honorable mention awards for best student poster or demonstration were given to

• Medha Atre, Jagannathan Srinivasan, James Hendler (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) for their poster on BitMat: A Main-memory Bit Matrix of RDF Triples for Conjunctive Triple Pattern Queries
• Milan Stankovic (Université Paris-Sud) for his poster on Modeling Online Presence

C. Cattuto, D. Benz, A. Hotho, G. Stumme „Semantic Grounding of Tag Relatedness in Social Bookmarking Systems“

M. Horridge, B. Parsia, U. Sattler „Laconic and Precise Justifications in OWL“

Join the STI Community and stay up to date on the activities of the semantic web community! Know who knows what in the Semantic Web and be among the first to experience the innoraise social Semantic application platform at work.
Innoraise combines search and social networks to keep you up-to-date on your peers of interest and allows you to discover new interesting peers based on their contributions in the Web and in published work.

The Seventh International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2008) will have a special ad hoc session of “Lightning Talks” at 14:00 on Thursday. This will provide an opportunity for conference participants to present ideas, comments, calls for collaboration, scathing polemic criticisms, etc. Controversy and discussion are positively encouraged! We particularly welcome observations or comments arising from material presented during the conference. Talks must last less than two minutes and can include just one PDF slide. There is no review process -— if you are interested in presenting a lightning talk, please send email to Steffen Staab (staab[at]uni-koblenz.de) with the subject “Lightning Talk” with your name, affiliation and a one sentence description of your talk. You have until 12:00 on Thursday October 30 to register your interest.

• Flikr photos tagged with iswc2008
• Delicious bookmarks tagged with iswc2008
• Twitter tweets tagged with #iswc2008
• Blog posts mentioning iswc2008

If you are a speaker and want your talk published, you must fill out a release form. This form will be available at the ISWC registration desk and from the session chairs. You can also download the form and send a signed, scanned copy to Monika Kropej. If you do not wish your talk to be filmed or published please inform Ms. Kropej.

Before your talk, you will be given a small lapel microphone and asked for a copy of your slides in either Powerpoint or PDF. After editing, the videos will be synchronized with the presentation and published on the portal. Additional information is available here.

• Saturday, October 25: 16.00-18.00
• Sunday, October 26: 8.00-18.00
• Monday, October 27: 8.00-18.00
• Tuesday:, October 28: 8.00-20.30
• Wednesday, October 29: 8.00-20.00
• Thursday, October 30: 8.00-18.00

So if you want to avoid long queues and are in town Saturday afternoon, feel free to drop by to pick up your registration package.

The Semantic Web - ISWC 2008, Proceedings of the Seventh International Semantic Web Conference, A.P. Sheth, S. Staab, M. Dean, M. Paolucci, D. Maynard, T. Finin, and K. Thirunarayan (Eds.), Karlsruhe, Germany, 26-30 October 2008, LNCS Volume 5318, Springer Berlin/Heidelberg.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2008, held in Karlsruhe, Germany, during October 26-30, 2008.

The volume contains 43 revised full research papers selected from a total of 261 submissions, of which an additional 3 papers were referred to the semantic Web in-use track; 11 papers out of 26 submissions to the semantic Web in-use track, and 7 papers accepted out of 39 submissions to the doctoral consortium.

The topics covered in the research track are ontology engineering; data management; software and service engineering; non-standard reasoning with ontologies; semantic retrieval; OWL; ontology alignment; description logics; user interfaces; Web data and knowledge; semantic Web services; semantic social networks; and rules and relatedness. The semantic Web in-use track covers knowledge management; business applications; applications from home to space; and services and infrastructure.

We now also supports comments on papers, which will be exposed to the Semantic Web as SIOC RDF!

Proceedings of the Poster and Demonstration Session of the Seventh International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008), Christian Bizer and Anupam Joshi (Eds.), CEUR volume 401, Karlsruhe, Germany, October 28, 2008.

The ISWC 2008 poster and demonstration page has also been updated to link to the two page papers for each poster and demo.

• If you register up front, you will not have to waste time onsite at the registration desk (for everyone registering until 23.10, we will prepare badges and receipts, after that we will already have your data in the system and can speed up onsite registration)
• Preferred access to rest of tutorial / workshop places: The rest of the tutorial, workshop places will be given based on a first come, first serve basis. By registering online up front, you will have priority over all participants just showing up at the registration desk
• Additional Payment Methods: While we only accept cash / Paypal by credit card / personal check as payment onsite, you can still pay for your onsite registration by bank transfer, if you register online and your money reaches us by 24.10. After that, due to the weekend, we cannot receive payments until the conference is running).

—
Important notes for people planning to register on location (not online):

• Please note that we can only accept cash, Paypal and personal check as forms of payment when you register at the desk on location.
• If you wish to pay by credit card, this is only possible via Paypal. For that reason you might check ahead, if you have a verified Paypal Account available and linked to your credit card. Not having this might lead to problems due to Paypal limits for unverified accounts. Since verification takes some time, we strongly advise that you register and verify an account now, if you plan to pay onsite by credit card.
• Additional Tutorial and Workshop spaces will be awarded on a first come, first serve basis. Online “onsite” registrations will have priority.

Please note that 23:59 CEST equals to 2:59 p.m. PDT, for those registering from America. PDT is basically PST but during summer (Pacific Daylight Time), same goes for CEST and CET.

For the late registration deadline it is really important that you do not exceed your 7 days grace period for bank transfers. If you plan to pay by bank transfer and have to run it through your administration / financial department, you should rather register now and ensure that your money reaches us before 16.10. For every payment that reaches us after 16.10, we will have to charge an extra (difference to on-site registration) onsite.

For those planning to pay by Paypal: If you do not have a validated account yet, it might take some time to create an account, so please also create a Paypal account now to avoid delays.

Looking forward to seeing you all in Karlsruhe!

We’ve set up a ISWC 2008 social networking site for participants of the Seventh International Semantic Web Conference. Conference attendees can register for free and use the site to connect with other participants, coordinate meeting plans, share comments on events and talks, figure out who is who at the conference, etc.

We are using CrowdVine for this site. Our package allows us to define a calendar where we can list talks and other events, which we’ve only just begun populating. Users can rate, comment on or discuss these calendar items.

If you plan on attending ISWC 2008, please check out our ISWC social networking site and register.

While you are at it, if you tag any ISWC 2008 related pictures, web posts, URLs or resources, we suggest you use the tag ISWC2008.

==Attending the Conference==

ISWC 2008 will be held in Karlsruhe Germany, October 26-30, 2008.
conference website

Please register online by October 9 to save 100 eu and take advantage of special hotel offers which are good if made four weeks in advance.
online registration

==Highlights of the Conference Program==

• 11 tutorials on, e.g., Introduction to Semantic Web, Ontology, RDFa, Multimedia, Business Intelligence, Health Care, Applications, Linked Data.
• 13 workshops on, e.g., e-science, reasoning, software engineering, web service, information extraction, scalability, and social network.
• the ISWC doctoral consortium
• 10 keynotes and invited industrial talks
• Multimedia Semantic Web, Ramesh Jain (UCI)
• Freebase: An Open, Writable, John Giannandre (Metaweb Technologies)
• How can the Semantic Web Community be more convincing, Stefan Decker, (DERI Galway, Ireland)
• Semantic Wikis: Fusing the two strands of the Semantic Web, Mark Greaves (Vulcan Inc.)
• Internet of Services, York Sure (SAP Research)
• Semantic Web @ BBN, Mike Dean (BBN)
• Data Intelligence, Evelyne Viegas (Microsoft Research)
• Semantic Web in Asia: Example Use Cases, Tony Lee (SaltLux)
• Making the Web searchable, Peter Mika (Yahoo Inc)
• Semantic Web from an industry perspective, Jürgen Angele (Ontoprise)
• 57 paper presentations, including 14 in Semantic Web in-use track, 87 posters and demonstrations, a panel on OWL2, and lightning talks
• social events , social networking, reception, banquet and dancing.
• co-located events: RR2008 and OWLED2008

The complete conference program is available at this link.

View at Heidelberg

In order to make your stay in Karlsruhe an exciting experience not just in a professional sense, ISWC 2008 offers a selection of guided tours in and around Karlsruhe. Enjoy organised trips to famous places such as Heidelberg or Strasbourg, and learn more about historic Karlsruhe. Tours will only take place if a sufficient number of participants pre-registers, and places and limited – so have a look at the ISWC guided tours programme now to make your ISWC experience even more memorable!