This year’s International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2008) will host a workshop on Social Data on the Web. Submitted papers are due by July 25, 2008.

“The 1st Social Data on the Web workshop (SDoW2008) co-located with the 7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008) aims to bring together researchers, developers and practitioners involved in semantically-enhancing social media websites, as well as academics researching more formal aspect of these interactions between the Semantic Web and Social Media.”

Social media systems is all about information sharing, so its inevitable that it will have strong ties to Semantic Web technologies. Moreover, the ties will go both ways. Social media needs ways to annotate information objects with sharable data and meta data that can be understood by machines. Semantic computing systems focused on sharing data and ontologies can benefit from social computing systems that offer users easy ways to collaboratively develop, publish, comment on and link to their output.

Deadlines for submitting papers, Doctoral Consortium applications and tutorial proposals for the Seventh International Semantic Web Conference are fast approaching. ISWC ‘08 will be held 26-30 October 2008 in Karlsruhe, Germany. Key upcoming dates include:

• Research papers: due May 9 (title and abstracts), 16 May (full)
• Semantic Web in Use papers: due May 16
• Tutorial proposals: May 16
• Doctoral Consortium applications: due May 16
• Posters & Demo proposals: due July 25
• Workshops papers (13 workshops): mid-summer
• Semantic Web & Billion Triples challenge: Oct 1
• ISWC 2008 CONFERENCE: October 26-30

See the ISWC 2008 site for CFPs and other details. Inquires about specific tracks should be sent to the appropriate chairs. Send general questions and suggestions for panel topics, invited speakers, birds of a feather meetings, etc. to iswc08@gmail.com.

The call for the ISWC 2008 Sixth Semantic Web Challenge and Billion Triples tracks is out.

“We invite submissions to the sixth annual Semantic Web Challenge, the premiere event for demonstrating practical progress towards achieving the vision of the Semantic Web. The central idea of the Semantic Web is to extend the current human-readable web by encoding some of the semantics of resources in a machine-processable form. Moving beyond syntax opens the door to more advanced applications and functionality on the Web. Computers will be better able to search, process, integrate and present the content of these resources in a meaningful, intelligent manner.

As the core technological building blocks are now in place, the next challenge is to show off the benefits of semantic technologies by developing integrated, easy to use applications that can provide new levels of Web functionality for end users on the Web or within enterprise settings. Applications submitted should demonstrate clear practical value that goes above and beyond what is possible with conventional web technologies alone.

Unlike in previous years, the Semantic Web Challenge of 2008 will consist of two tracks: the Open Track and the Billion Triples Track. The key difference between the two tracks is that the Billion Triples Track requires the participants to make use of the data set –a billion triples– provided by the organizers. The Open Track has no such restrictions.

As before, the Challenge is open to everyone from academia and industry. The authors of the best applications will be awarded prizes and featured prominently at special sessions during the conference”

The following workshops will be held as part of 2008 international Semantic Web Conference. Watch the 2008 ISWC workshop page for more information, including dates and links to workshop pages.

• Service Matchmaking and Resource Retrieval in the Semantic Web
• Terra Cognita 2008
• 3rd International Workshop on Ontology Matching
• 3rd ExpertFinder Workshop: Personal Identification and Collaborations - Knowledge Mediation and Extraction (PICKME’08)
• 7th Semantic Web Services Challenge Workshop
• 4th International Workshop on Semantic Web Enabled Software Engineering (SWESE2008)
• Workshop on Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web
• International Workshop on Ontology Dynamics (IWOD2008)
• Nature inspired Reasoning for the Semantic Web (NatuReS)
• Social Data on the Web
• 4th International Workshop on Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems (SSWS2008)
• Incentives for the Semantic Web
• Ontology-supported Business Intelligence (OBI 2008)

The 2008 International Semantic Web Conference anticipate having funds from the US National Science Foundation to partially support students currently enrolled in US universities in attending ISWC 2008. Students will be required to submit application and include proof of student status and a letter of recommendation. Since the funds are limited, only partial travel support can be provided. Preference will be given to students who are participating in the doctoral consortium, are an author or co-author on a paper, or are presenting a poster or demonstration. Awards will be based on a combination of merit and need and will probably range from US$ 500-1500.

The call for ISWC 2008 research papers for the Seventh International Semantic Web Conference is online. The track is co-chaired by Amit Sheth and Steffen Staab and has nineteen distinguished vice chairs and an program committee of experienced experts. Key dates for the research track are:

• Abstracts due by 9 May 2008
• Submissions due before 16 May 2008
• Rebuttal phase during 14-16 June 2008
• Notification sent by 11 July 2008
• Camera ready due before 15 August 2008

The call for ISWC 2008 posters and demos for the the Seventh International Semantic Web Conference is out. The poster/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. Technical posters, reports on Semantic Web software systems, descriptions of completed work, and work in progress are all welcome.

I’ve always found the ISWC poster and demo session to be very stimulating and, in many ways, much more interesting than the regular paper presentation sections. Plus there is lots of food and drink available.

Submissions are due by 25 July 2008. For further information and for any questions regarding the event or submissions, contact the ISWC 2008 posters and demonstration co-chairs, Chris Bizer and Anupam Joshi.

The 2008 Intternational Semantic Web Conference 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.

ISWC 2008, the 7th International Semantic Web Conference, 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).

ISWC 2008, the 7th International Semantic Web Conference, 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. 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).

Over the years I’ve given a number of tutorials and always found it to be a very rewarding experience. You can reuse the material in tutorials for other events and, if you are an academic, in your classes. And, even if you consider yourself to be an expert, you will always learn something about the subject.

Barny Pell of Powerset gave one of the keynote talks at the (joint) 6th International Semantic Web Conference and the 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2007) held in Busan, South Korea this past week. His title was POWERSET - Natural Language and the Semantic Web“.

The talk was captured on video [1] and put online by videolectures.net, a service run by the Jozef Stefan Institute, which records, edits and publishes videos of computer science talks, lectures and tutorials

It was a good talk and was the first time that I’ve had a chance to hear some of the technical details underlying Powerset’s approach. For those who don’t follow such things, Powerset is building a Web search engine that uses NLP technology out of Xerox Parc to process both the text on Web pages and in search queries. The result is a system that should perform significantly better for many retrieval tasks.

The talk had *some* details but left lots of questions. On the whole, I was impressed by what I saw. In particular, there were no numbers on performance metrics, either for the query system or scalability issues. Of course this is not surprising given the commercial nature of the effort.

Videolectures.net was recording talks at the 6th International Semantic Web Conference and the 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2007) held in Busan, South Korea this week. They already have up two of the three keynote talks and one tutorial.

This is a great service run by the Jozef Stefan Institute. The videos of computer science talks, lectures and tutorials are professionally recorded and edited and provide a wonderful resource to the international computer science community.

The ISWC 2007 talks that have already been put online are:

• POWERSET - Natural Language and the Semantic Web, Keynote talk by Barney Pell, Powerset, Inc.
• How I was right even when I was wrong, Keynote talk by Chris Welty, IBM
• Automatic Techniques for Extracting Semantic Data (from text and media), Tutorial by Fabio Ciravegna, University of Sheffield

See Videolecture’s ISWC 2007 page for the complete set of videos. I expect to see many more from ISWC 2007 in the coming weeks.