A little over a decade has passed since the release of the ?rst Netscape browser. In 1995,the World Wide Web was viewedlargelyas an academiccuriosity.Now, of course, the Web is an integral part of the fabric of modern society. It is impossible to imagine science, education, commerce, or government functioning without the Web. We take the Web for granted, and often assume that Internet connectivity is guaranteed to all of us as a birthright. Although the Web indeed has become “world wide” and has lost a bit of its original aura as a consequence of its ubiquity, a burgeoning community of researchers and practitioners continues to work toward the next generation of the Web—a Web where information will be stored in a machine-processable form and where intelligent computer-based agents will access and automatically combine myriad services on the Internet of the kind that are now available only to people interacting directly with their Web browsers.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2006, held in Athens, GA, USA in November 2006. It features more than 52 papers that address all current issues in the field of the semantic Web, ranging from theoretical aspects to various applied topics. An additional 14 papers detail applications in government, public health, public service, academic, and industry.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2006, held in Athens, GA, USA in November 2006. It features more than 52 papers that address all current issues in the field of the semantic Web, ranging from theoretical aspects to various applied topics. An additional 14 papers detail applications in government, public health, public service, academic, and industry.

As the Web continues to grow, increasing amounts of data are being made available for human and machine consumption. This emerging Semantic Web is rapidly entering the mainstream and, as a result, a variety of new solutions for searching, aggregating and the intelligent delivery of information are being produced,bothinresearchandcommercialsettings.Severalnewchallengesarise from this context, both from a technical and human–computer interaction p- spective – e.g., as issues to do with the scalability andusability of Semantic Web solutions become particularly important. The International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) is the major inter- tional forum where the latest research results and technical innovations on all aspects of the Semantic Web are presented. ISWC brings together researchers, practitioners, and users from the areas of arti?cial intelligence, databases, social networks,distributedcomputing,Webengineering,informationsystems,natural language processing, soft computing, and human–computer interaction to d- cuss the major challenges and proposed solutions, success stories and failures, as well the visions that can advance the ?eld.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2003, held at Sanibel Island, Florida, USA in October 2003. The 58 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on foundations; ontological reasoning; semantic Web services; security, trust, and privacy; agents and the semantic Web; information retrieval; multimedia; tools and methodologies; applications; and industrial perspectives.

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.