The Web is a globalinformationspace consistingoflinked documents andlinked data. As the Web continues to grow and new technologies, modes of interaction, and applications are being developed, the task of the Semantic Web is to unlock the power of information available on the Web into a common semantic inf- mation space and to make it available for sharing and processing by automated tools as well as by people. Right now, the publication of large datasets on the Web, the opening of data access interfaces, and the encoding of the semantics of the data extend the current human-centric Web. Now, the Semantic Web c- munity is tackling the challenges of how to create and manage Semantic Web content, how to make Semantic Web applications robust and scalable, and how to organize and integrate information from di?erent sources for novel uses. To foster the exchange of ideas and collaboration, the International Semantic Web Conference brings together researchers and practitioners in relevant disciplines such as arti?cial intelligence, databases, social networks, distributed computing, Web engineering, information systems, natural language processing, soft c- puting, and human–computer interaction. This volume contains the main proceedings of ISWC 2008, which we are - cited to o?er to the growing community of researchers and practitioners of the Semantic Web. We got a tremendous response to our call for research papers from a truly international community of researchers and practitioners from 41 countries submitting 261 papers. Each paper receivedan averageof 3.
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 and 12 posters accepted out of 39 submissions to the doctorial 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.
