Every year ESWC brings together researchers and practitioners dealing with
different aspects of semantic technologies. Following a successful re-launch in
2010 as a multi-track conference, the 8th Extended Semantic Web Conference
built on the success of the ESWC conference series initiated in 2004. Through its
extended concept this series seeks to reach out to other communities and research
areas, in which Web semantics play an important role, within and outside ICT,
and in a truly international, not just ‘European’ context. This volume contains
the papers accepted for publication in key tracks of ESWC 2011: the technical
tracks including research tracks, an in-use track and two special tracks, as well
as the PhD symposium and the demo track.
Semantic technologies provide machine-understandable representations of
data, processes and resources — hardware, software and network infrastructure
— as a foundation for the provisioning of a fundamentally new level of
functionality of IT systems across application scenarios and industry sectors.
Using automated reasoning services over ontologies and metadata, semantically
enabled systems will be able to better interpret and process the information
needs of their users, and to interact with other systems in an interoperable way.
Research on semantic technologies can benefit from ideas and cross-fertilization
with many other areas, including artificial intelligence, natural language processing,
database and information systems, information retrieval, multimedia,
distributed systems, social networks, Web engineering, and Web science. These
complementarities are reflected in the outline of the technical program of ESWC
2011; in addition to the research and in-use tracks, we furthermore introduced
two special tracks this year, putting particular emphasis on inter-disciplinary
research topics and areas that show the potential of exciting synergies for the
future. In 2011, these special tracks focused on data-driven, inductive and probabilistic
approaches to managing content, and on digital libraries, respectively.
The technical program of the conference received 247 submissions, which were
reviewed by the Program Committee of the corresponding tracks. Each track was
coordinated by Track Chairs and installed a dedicated Program Committee. The
review process included paper bidding, assessment by at least three Program
Committee members, and meta-reviewing for each of the submissions that were
subject to acceptance in the conference program and proceedings. In all, 57
papers were selected as a result of this process, following comparable evaluation
criteria devised for all technical tracks.