The 7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2008)

View Videos of ISWC2008 on Videolectures

lewen — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 05:16:25 +0000

Please see the ISWC 2008 section on videolectures for videos of the talks and events.

ISWC 2008 awards

finin — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:22:39 +0000

Here is a list of the awards made to papers, posters and demonstration and semantic web challenge entries for the Seventh International Semantic Web Conference.

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

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Schedule Thursday, 30.10

lewen — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:47:11 +0000

Thursday Oct 30

9.00-10.00	*Keynote 3: Message in a Bottle or:* How can the Semantic Web Community be more convincing?** (Johannes Brahms hall) Stefan Decker, DERI
10.00-10.30	Coffee Break
10.30-12.30	Research 1: Web Data and Knowledge (Johannes Brahms hall) Chair: Luciano Serafini RDFS Reasoning and Query Answering on top of DHTs Zoi Kaoudi, Iris Miliaraki, and Manolis Koubarakis An Interface-based Ontology Modularization Framework for Knowledge Encapsulation Faezeh Ensan and Weichang Du On the Semantics of Trust and Caching in the Semantic Web Simon Schenk
10.30-12.30	Research 2: Semantic Web Services (Johann Peter Hebel hall) Chair: Vasant Honavar Semantic Web Service Choreography: Contracting and Enactment Dumitru Roman and Michael Kifer Formal Model for Semantic-Driven Service Execution Tomas Vitvar, Maciej Zaremba, and Adrian Mocan Efficient Semantic Web Service Discovery in Centralized and P2P Environments Dimitrios Skoutas, Dimitris Sacharidis, Verena Kantere, and Timos Sellis
10.30-12.30	In Use: Knowledge Management (Alfred Mombert hall) Chair: Mike Dean Thesaurus-based search in large heterogeneous collections Jan Wielemaker, Michiel Hildebrand, Jacco van Ossenbruggen, and Guus Schreiber Deploying semantic web technologies for work integrated learning in industry. A comparison: SME vs. large sized company Conny Christl, Chiara Ghidini, Joanna Guss, Viktoria Pammer, Stefanie Lindstaedt, Peter Scheir, Luciano Serafini, and Marco Rospocher Creating and Using Organisational Semantic Webs in Large Networked Organisations Ravish Bhagdev, Ajay Chakravarthy, Sam Chapman, Fabio Ciravegna, and Vitaveska Lanfranchi An architecture for semantic navigation and reasoning with patient data - experiences of the Health-e-Child project Tamás Hauer, Dmitry Rogulin, Sonja Zillner, Andrew Branson, Jetendr Shamdasani, Alexey Tsymbal, Martin Huber, Tony Solomonides and Richard McClatchey
12.30-14.00	Lunch break
14.00-15.30	Research 1: Semantic Social Networks (Johannes Brahms hall) Chair: Fausto Giunchiglia Exploring Semantic Social Networks using Virtual Reality Harry Halpin, David Zielinski, Rachael Brady, and Glenda Kelly Semantic Grounding of Tag Relatedness in Social Bookmarking Systems Ciro Cattuto, Dominik Benz, Andreas Hotho, and Gerd Stumme Semantic Modelling of User Interests based on Cross-Folksonomy Analysis Martin Szomszor, Harith Alani, Ivan Cantador, Kieron O’Hara and Nigel Shadbolt
14.00-15.30	Research 2: Rules and Relatedness (Johann Peter Hebel hall) Chair: Michael Kifer ELP: Tractable Rules for OWL 2 Markus Krötzsch, Sebastian Rudolph, and Pascal Hitzler Term Dependence on the Semantic Web Gong Cheng and Yuzhong Qu Semantic relatedness measure using object properties in an ontology Laurent Mazuel and Nicolas Sabouret
14:00	Lightning Talks (Alfred Mombert hall)
15.30-16.00	Coffee break
16.00-17.30	Closing Ceremony and Best Paper Awards (Johannes Brahms hall) Outlook on ISWC2009

You Are a Brilliant Knowledge Engineer?

lewen — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 23:03:55 +0000

Challenge your knowledge engineering skills and
solve three challenging tasks!

The Grand Prize is an iPod Nano!

Discover more about Ontoprise’s contest
in the SMW User Forum.

Best Paper Nominees

lewen — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:08:24 +0000

D. Roman and M. Kifer „Semantic Web Service Choreography: Contracting and Enactment“

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“

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Join the Semantic Web Community!

lewen — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 23:30:43 +0000

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.

22 submissions presented at the Semantic Web Challenge 2008

finin — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 11:32:44 +0000

The Semantic Web Challenge 2008 has received 24 submissions out of which 22 have been accepted for presentation at the poster and demo session at ISWC 2008, which takes place Tuesday between 6.30pm-9pm,. Please visit the list of accepted submissions at challenge.semanticweb.org. The top five systems of each track will be presented during the Semantic Web Challenge session on Wednesday between 4pm-6pm.

Sign up for an ISWC lightning talk

finin — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 11:36:49 +0000

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.

Tag ISWC 2008 items with iswc2008

finin — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 07:55:25 +0000

You can use iswc2008 to tag items on services like Flickr and delicious and the hashtag #iswc2008 for your twitter messages. Here are some results.

Videos of ISWC 2008 on VideoLectures.net

finin — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 19:53:57 +0000

All of the ISWC2008 presentations and most of the tutorials will be recorded on video by the Center for Knowledge Transfer in Information Technology of the Jozef Stefan Institute. After editing, they will be available at VideoLectures.net, which provides free and open access to high quality video lectures by distinguished scholars and scientists from around the world.

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.

Opening Time Registration

lewen — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:14:23 +0000

The staff at the conference registration desk is happy to assist you in all matters of registration. The opening hours of the registration desk are as follows:

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.

ISWC 2008 Proceedings now available as Springer LNCS 5318

finin — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:54:47 +0000

Springer has released the ISWC2008 Proceedings on their site.

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.

ISWC 2008 Metadata Available

finin — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 01:57:30 +0000

We would like to announce that the RDF metadata for ISWC2008 is now available on the revamped Semantic Web Dog Food site at http://data.semanticweb.org, as well as the data for most of the conference’s workshops. Every paper, author and organisation, as well as a large number of other resources can be accessed as linked data through your Web browser or a linked data browser. The data is also available through a SPARQL endpoint or as plain rdf/xml dumps. The site has been an ongoing effort for the past years, so the metadata for previous ISWCs, ESWCs, WWW2008 and many workshops are also available.

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

ISWC 2008 Poster and Demo Proceedings

finin — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:47:34 +0000

The ISWC2008 Poster and Demo proceedings is now available as

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.

“Onsite”-Registration also possible online

lewen — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 23:37:14 +0000

The late registration deadline has passed and prices have reached their final high, namely on-site. As a special service, we do offer you to register from now on online, but to onsite prices. Why would you want to do that:

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.

Late registration deadline 9th of October

lewen — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:56:39 +0000

Please note that for all conferences (ISWC, OWL-ED and RR) the late registration deadline is 09.10 23:59 CEST. This will be your last chance to register and avoid the 100 Euro penalty for onsite-registration. So please register quickly, in case you did not already.

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!

ISWC 2008 social network

finin — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 04:55:54 +0000

Attending conferences is very much of a social activity. They provide opportunities to meet and interact with a large group of people that share an interest in a topic. More over, you probably know or at least know of, many of them. One reason to attend conferences is to extend and strengthen your professional social network through these interactions and shared experiences.

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.

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Last call for participation

ding — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 13:33:24 +0000

You are invited to ISWC 2008, the major international forum for the Semantic Web. The conference serves introductory tutorials, cutting-edge research presentation, exhibitions of the latest business products, and many social activities. It also offers great social networking opportunities for meeting academic leaders, industrial practitioners, researchers, developers, and students.

==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.

Program Book online for download

lewen — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:39:08 +0000

Our Program Book has been finished and can been downloaded here. In it you can find the schedule, information on accepted papers and keynotes as well as other useful information. It will also be distributed in the conference bag.

Guided tours: programme and registration

mak — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 20:25:19 +0000

Update: Due to very limited interest, no guided tours will specifically be organised for ISWC.

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!