Conference review: Semantic Web Workshop:: models, architectures and management

i n t e l l i g e n c e • S u m m e r 2 0 0 1 39 Introduction In 1998 the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) inaugurated a research initiative centered on the idea of providing semantics for and facilitating the extraction of knowledge from the World-Wide Web. The Semantic Web is a vision of the creator of the WWW, Tim Berners-Lee, who describes it as “a Web of data, documents, or portions of documents, that can be processed directly or indirectly by machines” not just for display purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse across various applications. The primary goal of the Semantic Web is to define infrastructure, standards, and policies facilitating an explicit description of the meaning of Web resources that can be processed both by automated tools and people. This effort towards the next evolution step of the Web has given rise to a large number of research problems that relate to models, architectures, applications, and services for the Semantic Web. The following is a list of research issues that were put forth as themes for soliciting workshop submissions. ✦ Formal Foundations of Web Metadata Standards ✦ Semantic Interoperability Frameworks ✦ Information and Services Brokering Architectures ✦ Metadata Creation, Extraction, and Storage ✦ Query Languages for the Semantic Web ✦ Distributed Inference Services ✦ Digital Signatures and Web of Trust ✦ Advanced Resource Discovery Interfaces ✦ Automated Classification of Web Resources ✦ Superimposed Web Resource Annotation & RecommendationTools ✦ Personalization and Intellectual Property Rights ✦ Semantic Web Applications: Knowledge Portals, Electronic Commerce The objective of the workshop was the creation of a forum for presenting research results in developing infrastructure for the Semantic Web and for enabling and fostering interaction among international researchers. The collocation of the workshop with the European Conference on Digital Libraries broadened the intended scope of the workshop and attracted participation and interaction from industry in addition to the academic and research communities. The workshop’s audience comprised researchers and practitioners in the areas of databases, intelligent information integration, knowledge representation, knowledge management, information retrieval, metadata, Web standards, digital libraries, and others. The workshop was organized as a post-conference one-day workshop at ECDL 2000 in Lisbon, Portugal. Panos Constantopoulos chaired the workshop committee with Vassilis Christophides and Dimitris Plexousakis as Program Committee Co-Chairs. A total of 29 papers were submitted to the workshop. Each paper was peer-reviewed by at least two referees. Despite the overall high quality of the submissions, only nine papers were accepted by the program committee for presentation at the single-day event. Overall, the workshop drew considerable attention at ECDL 2000: 63 registered participants from 22 countries. The workshop was sponsored by ERCIM (the European Research Consortium on Informatics and Mathematics) and the Panos Constantopoulos, Vassilis Christophides, Dimitris Plexousakis University of Crete, Heraklion, Crete, Greece and Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology–Hellas {panos, christop, dp } @ics.forth.gr Semantic Web Workshop: Models, Architectures and Management