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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.

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 3rd European Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2006. The book presents 48 revised full papers with abstracts of 3 invited talks. The papers are organized in topical sections on ontology alignment, engineering, evaluation, evolution and learning, rules and reasoning, searching and querying, semantic annotation, semantic web mining and personalisation, semantic web services, semantic wiki and blogging, as well as trust and policies.

This volume contains the papers presented at the 2nd European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2005) held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece, from 29th May to 1st June, 2005. The vision of the Semantic Web is to enhance today's Web via the exploi- tion of machine-processable metadata. The explicit representation of the sem- tics of data, accompanied with domain theories (ontologies), will enable a web that provides a qualitatively new level of service. It will weave together an - crediblylargenetworkofhumanknowledgeandwillcomplementitwithmachine processability. Various automated services will help the user to achieve goals by accessing and providing information in a machine-understandable form. This process may ultimately create extremely knowledgeable systems with various specialized reasoning services systems. Many technologies and methodologies are being developed within arti?cial intelligence, human language technology, machine learning, databases, software engineering and information systems that can contribute to the realization of this vision. The 2nd Annual European Semantic Web Conference presented the latest results in research and applications of Semantic Web technologies. Following the success of the?rst edition, ESWC showed a signi?cant increase in participation. With148submissions,thenumberofpapersdoubledthatofthepreviousedition. Each submission was evaluated by at least three reviewers. The selection process resulted in the acceptance of 48 papers for publication and presentation at the conference (an acceptance rate of 32%). Papers did not come only from Europe but also from other continents.

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.