European Semantic Web Conference 2006: Paving the way to the next Internet revolution

It would be easier if we didn’t have to rely on trial and error to filter out irrelevant pages. It would be even more rewarding if we could get machines to locate information, manipulate data and compile reports for us … and how about scheduling meetings and updating our diaries – or comparing features, costs and reviews of goods and services, picking the most appropriate vendors and placing orders on our behalf, leaving us to get on with our work, spend quality time with our families and devote more energy to leisure pursuits?

We will soon develop the ability to do all this and more thanks to the Semantic Web (SW), an initiative led by the creator of the World Wide Web (WWW), Tim Berners-Lee. This could marginalise the billions of web pages published on the WWW, but Liverpool University’s Semantic Web Technologies Lab has developed one of the first prototype tools to help people upgrade existing web pages to take advantage of the SW, even if they are dynamically generated.

At present, web pages are designed with human readers in mind, not machines. Most are written in ‘HTML’ – short for HyperText Markup Language – which controls the look of the page … the colours of the background and text, the position of paragraph breaks and images, the line spacing, the size of the fonts, the use of bold, italics and so on.

HTML enables an organisation to position ‘Cheap as Chips Gizmo’, ‘item X2245a’ and ‘£24.95’ on a web page in a way which suggests that there is a relationship between them – and HTML can guide you to order or purchase this gizmo on-line, but that’s as far as it goes.

There is no way, using HTML, to define the true nature of this relationship … to indicate unambiguously that X2245a is a Cheap as Chips Gizmo with a retail price of £24.95. It’s impossible to tell from a string of HTML whether Cheap as Chips is a manufacturer – like Unilever, or a brand – like Knorr or Pond’s; whether this particular gizmo is a consumer or a business-to-business product; whether X2245a is one of a range of models of this type of product. Nor can HTML encode the fact that this information forms part of a catalogue; that the catalogue contains some/all of the business offerings of company X; and that it performs the same kind of service as other company catalogues.

Humans may intuit such relationships, but machines cannot. To overcome this problem, computer scientists have created a richer version of HTML – ‘Extensible Markup Language’ (XML) – which allows machine-interpretable semantic information to be embedded in web pages by means of ‘Uniform Resource Identifiers’ (URIs). They have also developed general purpose-languages for describing such resources – for instance ‘RDF’ (Resource Description Framework) and, more recently, ‘OWL’ (Web Ontology Language), which offers greater machine interpretability.

In information science, an ‘ontology’ is a rigorous scheme for conceptualising reality in terms of context, resources and relationships. It may relate to a particular field or domain – for instance, libraries, biomedicine or Mars exploration,
or it may be more generic. Languages like OWL enable information scientists to implement ontologies.

The 3rd European Semantic Web Conference
The success of the Semantic Web will depend on organisations and individuals creating SW-enabled content, and research efforts all over the world have aimed at providing technological solutions to this problem, as well as tackling the underlining theoretical questions. European Universities and Research institutes have been a driving force in this effort. The European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) was established in order to provide a lively forum for fostering stimulating collaboration among international researchers, representative from industry and academics working on Semantic Web Technologies.

The third edition of the series will take place from June 11th until June 14th on the costal town of Budva, Montenegro, one of the gems of the Adriatic coastline. It follows the 2nd European Semantic Web Conference and First European Semantic Web Symposium, which were both held in Crete, Greece from May 29-31, 2005 and May 10-12th, 2004 respectively.

This year’s conference is overseen by John Domingue from Open University as general chair and York Sure from University of Karlsruhe as programme chair. According to John and York the ultimate goal “is to create an event which is rich as possible from an intellectual and social point of view. ESWC is a focus for researchers and developers from Europe and around the world and acts as a catalyst to promote Semantic Web research results and their application in industrial settings.”

The program, that has recently been unveiled, covers the whole research spectrum and focus on innovative research areas such as Ontology Management, Semantic Web Services, and Semantic Desktop; it includes eight workshops, seven tutorials, demonstration and poster sessions, and three invited talks from distinguished academics known as Frank van Harmelen
from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Eduard Hovy from Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California and Anthony Jameson from DFKI and International University in Germany.

In addition, the conference promotes the early industrial uptake of Semantic Web research by devoting a full day to an Industry forum organised by Alain Leger from France Telecom, where the current and foreseen needs in Business, Industry and Services will be discussed . The forum will feature two visionary keynote presentations from Research and Industry, a selection of key business Use Cases from invited industrial leaders in diverse economic sectors, a presentation on the latest Semantic Web developments in the W3C arena and technology showcases from industry.

A full program of the conference events, together with the invited papers can be found at the conference web site www.eswc.org, as well as details for registering online. The cut-off for online registration, and participant who register before April 15th can benefit from special early registration fees.

The ESWC conference series is organised by the European Semantic Systems Initiative (ESSI), which is a group of four European Commission 6th Framework Programme projects known as ASG, DIP, Knowledge Web and SEKT, who collectively aim to improve world-wide research and standardisation in the areas of the Semantic Web and Semantic Web Systems.

FURTHER INFO: Learn more about the European Semantic Web Conference, and its program, together with registration fees at http://www.eswc2006.org. For further information contact :

Christen Ensor
Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI)
Phone Number: +353-91-495151
email: christen.ensor@deri.org.