This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the First International Conference on Semantics of a Networked World: Semantics for Grid Databases, ICSNW 2004, held in Paris, France in June 2004. The 16 revised full papers presented togehter with 2 invited papers and 7 posters were carefully reviewed and selected from close to 50 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on semantic data integration, peer-to-peer systems, semantics for scientific applications, interoperability and mediation, and global services and schemas.

Semantic Network Analysis in Social Sciences introduces the fundamentals of semantic network analysis and its applications in the social sciences. Readers learn how to easily transform any given text into a visual network of words co-occurring together, a process that allows mapping the main themes appearing in the text and revealing its main narratives and biases. Semantic network analysis is particularly useful today with the increasing volumes of text-based information available. It is one of the developing, cutting-edge methods to organize, identify patterns and structures, and understand the meanings of our information society. The first chapters in this book offer step-by-step guidelines for conducting semantic network analysis, including choosing and preparing the text, selecting desired words, constructing the networks, and interpreting their meanings. Free software tools and code are also presented. The rest of the book displays state-of-the-art studies from around the world that apply this method to explore news, political speeches, social media content, and even to organize interview transcripts and literature reviews. Aimed at scholars with no previous knowledge in the field, this book can be used as a main or a supplementary textbook for general courses on research methods or network analysis courses, as well as a starting point to conduct your own content analysis of large texts.

The 3rd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2004) was held Nov- ber 7–11, 2004 in Hiroshima, Japan. If it is true what the proverb says: “Once by accident, twice by habit, three times by tradition,” then this third ISWC did indeed ?rmly establish a tradition. After the overwhelming interest in last year’s conference at Sanibel Island, Florida, this year’s conference showed that the Semantic Web is not just a one-day wonder, but has established itself ?rmly on the research agenda. At a time when special interest meetings with a Sem- tic Web theme are springing up at major conferences in numerous areas (ACL, VLDB, ECAI, AAAI, ECML, WWW, to name but a few), the ISWC series has established itself as the primary venue for Semantic Web research. Response to the call for papers for the conference continued to be strong. We solicited submissions to three tracks of the conference: the research track, the industrial track, and the poster track. The research track, the premier venue for basic research on the Semantic Web, received 205 submissions, of which 48 were accepted for publication. Each submission was evaluated by three p- gram committee members whose reviews were coordinated by members of the senior program committee. Final decisions were made by the program co-chairs in consultation with the conference chair and the senior program committee. The industrial track, soliciting papers describing industrial research on the - mantic Web, received 22 submissions, of which 7 were accepted for publication.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the 3rd and 4th International Workshop on Databases, Information Systems and Peer-to-Peer Computing, DBISP2P 2005 and DBISP2P 2006, held in Trondheim, Norway, in August 2005 and in Seoul, Korea, in September 2006, as satellite events of VLDB, the International Conference on Very Large Data Bases.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th European Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2007, held in Innsbruck, Austria, in June 2007. Coverage includes semantic Web services, ontology learning, inference and mapping, social semantic Web, ontologies, personalization, foundations of the semantic Web, natural languages and ontologies, and querying and Web data models.