ISWC is a major international forum where visionary and state-of-the-art research of all aspects of the Semantic Web are presented.

ISWC News-Weblog

February 3, 2009

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

November 7, 2008

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:

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

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

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

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

Honorable mention awards for Doctoral Consortium papers were given to

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

The best student poster and demonstration award was given to

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

October 30, 2008

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

October 29, 2008

Ontoprise ISWC contest





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.

October 28, 2008

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“

October 28, 2008

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.

October 27, 2008

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.

October 26, 2008

lISWC 2008 lightning talks

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.

October 26, 2008

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.