ISWC 2008 - 7th International Semantic Web Conference

RR2008 - The Second International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems

The International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems (RR) aims to be the major forum for discussion and dissemination of new results concerning Web Reasoning and Rule Systems.RR 2008 builds on the success of The First International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems RR 2007, which received enthusiastic support from the Web Rules community. In 2008, RR will continue the excellence of the new series and aim to attract the best Web Reasoning and Rules researchers from all over the world.

OWLED 2008 - OWL: Experiences and Directions

Incentives for the Semantic Web

1st Workshop on Incentives for the Semantic Web (INSEMTIVE 2008) addresses incentives for building the Semantic Web, i.e. achieving tasks, such as ontology construction, semantic annotation, and ontology alignment. It is intended as a networking event for discussing and brainstorming ideas for motivating people to contribute to semantic content creation.

See the INSEMTIVE 2008 website for more information.

Ontology Matching

The workshop encourages participation from both academia and industry with its emphasis on theoretical and practical aspects of ontology matching. On the one side, we expect representatives from industry to present business cases and their requirements for ontology matching. On the other side, we expect academic participants to present their approaches vis-a-vis those industrial requirements.

Seem the OM-2008 web site for details.

Terra Cognita

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers in a growing field of Semantic Web research: the intersection between Semantic Web data and geospatial data and applications. This workshop follows the Terra Cognita 2006 Workshop at ISWC 2006.

See the Terra Cognita web site for more information.

Semantic Web Enabled Software Engineering

Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web

The 4th International Workshop on Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web (URSW) is an opportunity for collaboration and cross-fertilization between the uncertainty reasoning community and the Semantic Web community. Effective methods for reasoning under uncertainty are vital for realizing many aspects of the Semantic Web vision, but the ability of current-generation web technology to handle uncertainty is extremely limited. Recently, there has been a groundswell of demand for uncertainty reasoning technology among Semantic Web researchers and developers. This surge of interest creates a unique opening to bring together two communities with a clear commonality of interest but little history of interaction. By capitalizing on this opportunity, URSW could spark dramatic progress toward realizing the Semantic Web vision.

See the URSW 2008 website for more information.

Semantic Web Services Challenge

The Semantic Web Services Challenge workshop will provide a common platform for the researchers and developers of the Semantic Web Services to present and discuss the latest progress in the area, to identify the gap between the Semantic Web Services research and required methodologies, tools as well as the applications.

First, it will focus on finding out different ways, methodologies, tools and technologies for evaluation of Semantic Web Services tools and applications, continuing the work of the SWS Challenge, and the Incubator. Participants should be familiar with the previous work of these initiatives, including the Incubator Group Report above. Papers on this subject are highly welcome, and need not be accompanied by a Challenge solution to be evaluated.

See the Semantic Web Services Challenge workshop web site for more information.

Ontology Dynamics

The International Workshop on Ontology Dynamics will bring together researchers interested in the field of ontology dynamics, in order to discuss and analyze important characteristics, open research issues and recent research developments on the field. We are interested in advances in the field of ontology evolution, which is the main research area dealing with ontology dynamics, as well as in works that are directly or indirectly related to the problem. Both theoretical research works as well as works describing implemented systems or tools are welcome.

See the IWOD 2008 website for more information.

Service Matchmaking and Resource Retrieval

The The Second International Workshop on Service Matchmaking and Resource Retrieval in the Semantic Web (SMR2) workshop provides a forum for promoting, presenting, and discussing the latest scientific advances on semantic Web service and resource retrieval; and Establishing and fostering cross-disciplinary relations between relevant parties in research and/or business for the purpose of joint work on solutions to relevant problems in the domain.

Submit papers by July 25, 2008. For more information, see the SMR2 web site.

Nature inspired Reasoning for the Semantic Web

The workshop on Nature inspired Reasoning for the Semantic Web (NatuReS) will bring together researchers from the Semantic Web community with more Nature inspired communities, such as the people interested in Computational Intelligence (CI), Neural Networks and to discuss on current trends in Semantic Web. The workshop will feature invited talks from experts in the corresponding areas as well as contributed talks presenting submitted papers.

See the NatuReS Workshop website for more information.

Social Data on the Web

The First Social Data on the Web workshop (SDoW2008) co-located with the aims to bring together researchers, developers and practitioners involved in semantically-enhancing social media websites, as well as academics researching more formal aspect of these interactions between the Semantic Web and Social Media.

See the SDoW2008 website for more information.

Scalable Semantic Web knowledge Base Systems

The 2008 Scalable Semantic Web knowledge Base Systems (SSWS2008) workshop will be centered on the discussion of three major aspects: 1) foundations, methods and technologies for pushing forward the state-of-the-art; 2) performance evaluation and related principles, methodologies and tools; 3) identification of important issues and future research directions.

See the SSWS2008 website for more information.

Ontology-supported Business Intelligence

The First International Workshop on Ontology-supported Business Intelligence (OBI2008) aims to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners from both academic and commercial backgrounds in this emerging but promising application area for semantic technology. It will also serve as a facilitator for bringing BI and Data Mining research closer to the Semantic Web community.

See the OBI2008 website for more information.

Personal Identification and Collaborations

The Personal Identification and Collaborations: Knowledge Mediation and Extraction (PICKME 2008) workshop solicits new research from the Semantic Web community applying annotation, knowledge extraction, ontology engineering, reasoning and ontology mediation techniques to the task of finding people and their interactions with other people on the Web, formally representing and reusing that knowledge to support new services such as expert finding. The goal is to enable a Web-scale infrastructure for the creation, publication and use of experts’ semantic descriptions to support expert finding scenarios such as group management, disaster response, recruitment, team building, problem solving and on-the-fly consultation.

See the PICKME 2008 web site for more information.

A Semantic Multimedia Web: Create, Annotate, Present and Share your Media

The success of content-centered (social) Web 2.0 services contributes to an ever growing amount of digital multimedia content available on the Web. Video advertisement is becoming more and more popular and films, music and videoclips are largely consumed from legacy commercial databases. Re-using such multimedia material is, however, still a hard problem. Why is it so difficult to find appropriate multimedia content, to reuse and repurpose content previously published and to adapt interfaces to these content according to different user needs?

This tutorial proposes to cover these questions. Based on established media workflow practices, we describe a small number of fundamental processes of media production. We explain how multimedia metadata can be represented, attached to the content it describes, and benefits from the web that contains more and more formalized knowledge (the Web of linked data). We show how web applications can benefit from semantic metadata for creating, searching and presenting multimedia content.

Formal Concept Analysis for the Semantic Web

Invited Tutorial : Introduction to the Semantic Web

Knowledge Representation and Extraction for Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) requires the acquisition and aggregation of key pieces of knowledge from multiple sources in order to provide
business analysts with valuable information or feed statistical BI models and tools. The massive amount of textual and multimedia information available to business analysts makes information extraction and semantic-based digital tools key enablers for the acquisition and management of semantic information. The role of Ontologies is important here, since they promote interoperability and uniform and standardized access to heterogeneous sources and software components. In addition they encode rules for deduction of new knowledge from extracted data.

The tutorial will give an overview of approaches to identify, extract, and consolidate semantic information for business intelligence, also stressing the role of temporal information. The tutorial will take a practical hands-on approach in which theoretical concepts and approaches are presented together with case studies on semantic-based tools in the context of the 6th Framework Programme Musing Integrated Project which is targeting three different vertical domains: Financial Risk Management; Internationalisation; and IT Operational Risk Management.

RDFa - Bridging the Web of Documents and the Web of Data

Working Modularly with OWL

As more and more large, complex OWL ontologies become available on the Web, the need for mechanisms and methodologies for managing them becomes more urgent. Description logics, such as those underlying OWL, traditionally have not had many features for “development in the large” much less for topic analysis and extraction services so valuable for large scale development or for cross-organizational, uncoordinated reuse. Fortunately, there have been a number of impressive advances in our understanding of how to analyze the modular structure of ontologies.

This tutorial provides a practical introduction to module oriented development of OWL ontologies. First, we introduce the concept of a module along with various essential properties of modules. Then we explain various modularity sensitive services for OWL, and describe various methodological stratagems for their effective use. Participants will gain hands on experience in using a Protégé 4 plugin for module based ontology development.

How to Publish Linked Data on the Web

RSWA 2008 - Realizing a Semantic Web Application

You are aware of the Semantic Web, but you haven’t got time to develop a Semantic Web application yourself? During this tutorial we challenge the Semantic Web technologies on the Web 2.0 ground of realizing a mash-up that reuses, transforms and combines existing data taken from the open Web.

RSWA tutorial explains how to develop step-by-step a Semantic Web application that expects a music style as an input; retrieves data from online music archives and event databases; merges them and let the users explore events related to artists that practice the required style. The result is a Semantic Web Application we named Music Event Explorer or shortly meex; try it out at http://swa.cefriel.it/meex!

This is not all, advance Semantic Web topics are covered in the latter HCLS tutorial. Don’t miss it!

Reasoning for Ontology Engineering and Usage

Engineering and using OWL ontologies is a complex task for which impressive tool support has recently been developed. Since OWL ontologies are based on logic and involve entailments, this tool support may involve reasoning, e.g., for query answering, inference explanation, etc. Our tutorial provides a comprehensive overview over such tool support from a user perspective, and explains the benefits of automated reasoning for the user. We start with a brief overview of the various aspects of ontology engineering and deployment and explain the reasons why we need to take an ontology’s semantics into account from an early stage, and the advantages of doing so. Next, we concentrate on four tasks in ontology engineering. For each of these, we provide an example user scenario, explain its challenges, present novel tools to support the ontology engineer in this task, and use this tool on the example.

This tutorial is targeted at participants with a basic understanding of OWL possibly having a little experience in designing or using ontologies. It will provide them with a good understanding of the challenges and benefits of reasoning for ontology engineering and some experience of using state-of-the-art tool support.

Free Semantic Content: Using OpenCyc in Semantic Web Applications

Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences

The W3C Semantic Web in Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group (HCLSIG) has used RDF tools to integrate several large biological and clinical databases. This has simplified access to relational and hierarchical data and enabled third party additions to the database. HCLSIG demonstrates the use of Semantic Web technologies to access data on a web scale, taking advantage of OWL and rules to allow queries to re-purpose data without the need to coordinate with the data custodian.

This tutorial will introduce OWL and rule mappings of databases, as well as introduce good practices for data modeling and publication. The use of SKOS for terminologies will also be described. Attendees will learn possible applications of Semantic Web tools to share data between and within organizations and solve large scale data integration problems.

This tutorial will discuss how publishers of biological and clinical data can use OWL and rules to model their data and how users of Semantic Web tools can access this more diverse data. Attendees should be familiar with the Semantic Web languages RDF, Turtle, SPARQL and be introduced to OWL. These materials will be covered in the earlier RSWA tutorial.

Additional Conference Dinner (ISWC)

Every ISWC registration includes the conference dinner on wednesday night for the person registering.

In case you want to purchase additional conference dinners (e.g. for your wife or husband) you can do that using this item.

The additional conference dinner also includes the reception before the dinner.