The US National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) plan to contribute funds to support participation by full-time students in 2009 International Semantic Web Conference. SWSA and NSF anticipate providing 10,000€ and $20,000 respectively, with NSF funds being earmarked to support students enrolled at U.S. Universities. We anticipate that the SWSA funds will support 15 awards of 600-800€, and that the NSF funds will support 13 awards of approximately $1500.

Confirmation of the funding, as well as details on how to apply will be available on the ISWC 2009 Web site.

Last year’s student fellows made significant contributions to the conference, and we look forward to this year’s fellows being similarly engaged. In selecting applications for travel support, preference will be given to students selected to participate in the doctoral consortium, followed by students who are first author on a paper accepted at the conference, followed by students who have other authorship on a conference or workshop paper.

Applications are due August 21, with notification of success by September 7.

Direct questions to iswc09_fellowships@cs.umbc.edu.

The 7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) has an exciting program of thirteen one-day workshops that will be held on October 26 and 27. The deadlines for submitting papers vary. See the individual workshop pages for detailed information on their scope and structure and for information on submitting papers and participating.

• Service Matchmaking and Resource Retrieval in the Semantic Web
• Terra Cognita 2008
• Ontology Matching
• 3rd ExpertFinder Workshop: Personal Identification and Collaborations
• Semantic Web Services Challenge
• Semantic Web Enabled Software Engineering
• Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web
• Ontology Dynamics
• Nature inspired Reasoning for the Semantic Web
• Social Data on the Web
• Scalable Semantic Web Knowledge Base Systems
• Incentives for the Semantic Web
• Ontology-supported Business Intelligence

The final scheduling of the workshops, assigning them to the 26th or 27th, has not yet been done.

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.