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

March 6, 2008

You can now download the printable conference call here as PDF (updated 26. March 2008).

Introduction

The Web continues to grow and new technologies, modes of interactions, and applications are being developed. Building on this growth, Semantic Web technologies aim at providing a shared semantic information space, changing qualitatively our experiences on the Web. As Semantic Web technologies mature and permeate more and more application areas, new research challenges are coming to the fore and some unsolved ones are becoming more acute. These issues include creating and managing Semantic Web content, making Semantic Web applications robust and scalable, organizing and integrating information from different sources for novel uses, making semantics explicit in order to improve our overall experience with information technologies, and thus enabling us to use the wealth of information that is currently available in digital form for addressing our everyday tasks. To foster the exchange of ideas and collaboration, ISWC brings together researchers in relevant disciplines such as artificial intelligence, databases, social networks, distributed computing, web engineering, information systems, natural language processing, soft computing, and human-computer interaction.

ISWC 2008 calls for papers to its research track. The research track solicits the submission of original, principled research papers dealing with both analytical theoretical and practical aspects of Semantic Web research. Papers of the latter type are encouraged to present repeatability of their experiments, and share with the community their data and test harnesses.

Topics

Topics include, but are not limited to, the following.

  • Applications of the Semantic Web
    • Applications with clear lessons learned or evaluations
    • Semantic Web for large scale applications, desktops or personal information management
    • Semantic Web technologies for multimedia, sensors, and situational awareness
    • Semantic Web technologies for P2P, services, grids and middleware
  • Management of Semantic Web Data
    • Languages, tools and methodologies for representing and managing Semantic Web data
    • Database, IR and AI technologies for the Semantic Web
    • Search, query, integration, analysis of the Semantic Web
    • Robust and scalable knowledge management and reasoning on the Web
    • Machine learning and information extraction for the Semantic Web
    • Cleaning, assurance, trust, provenance of Semantic Web data, services and processes
  • Ontologies
    • Ontology modeling, reuse, extraction, and evolution
    • Ontology mapping, merging, and alignment
    • Searching and ranking ontologies
    • Ontology evaluation
  • Social Semantic Web
    • Social networks and processes on the Semantic Web
    • Semantic Web technology for collaboration and cooperation
    • Representing and reasoning about trust, privacy, and security
  • User Interfaces
    • Visualization of and interacting with Semantic Web data
    • Semantic Web content creation and annotation
    • Mashing up Semantic Web data and processes

Dates

  • Abstracts due: May 9
  • Submissions: May 16
  • Rebuttal phase: June 14-16
  • Notification: July 11
  • Camera ready: August 15

Evaluation of Submitted Research Papers

ISWC is a highly attractive conference series. From all previous ISWC conferences,
we have seen researchers and practitioners making best use of the methods and technologies reported at the event for their own research and practice. We are very eager to maintain this high level of impact achieved by ISWC papers in the future. For this purpose, all papers will be critically reviewed by 3 reviewers and one vice chair.

To assess papers, reviewers will judge originality of papers, significance for further research and/or practice related to the Semantic Web, technical soundness of the proposed approaches and readability of the submitted papers.

Specific weight will be given to the evaluation of the approaches described in the papers. We strongly encourage evaluations that are repeatable. Depending on the type of the paper and the proposed approach indications for repeatability may vary. For instance, theoretical papers may want to offer links to full proofs of theorems, empirical work may want to offer download of training and test data and experimental results, case study work may link to case study journals for deeper insights, system papers may provide download of the software or a Web client together with full assessments in user studies, approaches that describe algorithms may want to
provide the algorithm in source code and in an easy-to-install manner.

Submission of Abstracts and Papers

Submissions and reviewing will be handled using the EasyChair reviewing system. Presubmission of abstracts will be a strict requirement. Final papers can be submitted until May 16, 23:59 hrs, Hawaiian time. The submission platform will be opened from beginning of April.

Formatting

Paper submissions must be formatted in the style of the Springer Publications format for Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS). For complete details, see Springer’s Author Instructions. Formatted papers must be no longer than 16 pages. Papers that exceed this limit will be rejected without review. ISWC 2008 will not accept research papers that, at the time of submission, are under review for or have already been published in or accepted for publication in a journal or another conference. Authors of accepted papers will be required to provide semantic annotations for the abstract of their submission for the Semantic Web (help will be provided for this task). Details will be provided on the conference Web page at the time of acceptance. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for the conference.

February 25, 2008

ISWC 2008 will hold combined poster and demonstration sessions. The Poster and Demo Session is an opportunity for presenting late-breaking results, ongoing research projects, and speculative or innovative work in progress. Posters and demos are intended to provide authors and participants with the ability to connect with each other and to engage in discussions about the work. Poster and demo abstracts must be submitted by July 25, 2008. The Poster and Demo Session is chaired by Chris Bizer (Freie Universität Berlin) and Anupam Joshi (UMBC).

February 20, 2008

The ISWC 2008 Doctoral Consortium (DC) allows PhD students to present their work and obtain guidance from mentors as well as interact with other postgraduate students. Students who submit papers to the main conference are also invited to apply to the DC. All papers submitted to the DC track will undergo a thorough reviewing process with a view to providing detailed and constructive feedback. The best submissions will be selected for presentation at the ISWC 2008 DC sessions. Five page papers will be published in the main ISWC proceedings. The deadline for submissions is May 16. The ISWC 2008 DC is chaired by Diana Maynard.

February 19, 2008

ISWC 2008 will have a special track on the Semantic Web in Use for papers that highlight applications in business, government, science, education or society. The ISWC 2007 in use track had twelve full papers and the ISWC 2006 had nine industry track papers. Papers for the 2008 In Use track must be submitted by 16 May, 2008. The ISWC 2008 Semantic Web in Use track is chaired by Mike Dean (BBN) and Massimo Paolucci (DoCoMo).

February 18, 2008

ISWC 2008 seeks proposals for tutorials that present the state of the art of a Semantic Web area enabling attendees to fully appreciate the current issues, main schools of thought, and possible application areas. Although tutorials may focus entirely on theoretical aspects, we encourage organizers to incorporate hands-on sessions where appropriate. The half- or full-day tutorials will be given on 26-27 October, just before the main conference begins. Email proposals to David Martin (martin@ai.sri.com) by 16 May 2008. The ISWC 2008 tutorial program is chaired by Lalana Kagal (MIT) and David Martin (SRI).

February 17, 2008

The call for ISWC 2008 workshop proposals is out. Three-page proposals for half- or full-day workshops are due by 28 March. The selected workshops will be held 26-27 October during the two days before the start of the main conference. The ISWC-08 workshop program is co-chaired by Melliyal Annamalai (Oracle) and Daniel Olmedilla (L3S & Univ. of Hannover).

January 18, 2008

The sponsoring details for this year’s ISWC2008 have been finalized. Companies interested in sponsoring should please visit our sponsoring section. You can also find the sponsoring opportunities here (updated as of 02/04/08).

December 6, 2007

The International Semantic Web Conference has held a Semantic Web Challenge since 2003. Each year, a special challenge theme is defined and groups are invited to submit papers describing applications or systems built to address the challenge. The entries are evaluated and a short list is invited to present demonstrations at the conference. Finally, a panel of judges selects he best ones which receive awards — both honorary and financial. It has become very popular and successful part of ISWC.

Jim Hendler and Peter Mika, the Semantic Web Challenge organizers for ISWC 2008, have a new theme focused on scalability.

“This is the first public pre-announcement of the Open Web, Billion Triples Challenge, which will be organized as a special track of next year’s Semantic Web Challenge. This track will be in addition to the traditional SWC competition and it will focus on pushing the limits in tool design on the fronts of scalability in size and robustness in the face of data typically found on the Web. The goal of the competition is also to generate new application ideas, i.e. to show what is possible with Web metadata today.
     The details of this Challenge are yet to be determined and we are calling on the Semantic Web community to help us in its formation. For this purpose we have set up a mailing list and would like to invite everyone interested in this new Challenge to join this list. The mailing list will serve to discuss the data sets and rules of competition, and later to disseminate all other information regarding the new Challenge.”

November 20, 2007

In case you have not been at the ISWC/ASWC 07 closing ceremony, here is your chance to see the presentation. It can be watched in Quicktime Format. Please note that you can control the presentation by clicking just as you would do with a normal presentation.