This professional book provides a series of case studies which give examples of real benefits to be derived from the adoption of semantic web based ontologies in real world situations, such as telecommunication, B2B integration, tourism, education and more. The book is designed to create platforms for bringing experts together (key government representatives, industry and academia) from different countries, and to compile the most recent use of semantics and ontologies.

The Web is growing at an astounding pace surpassing the 8 billion page mark. However, most pages are still designed for human consumption and cannot be processed by machines. This book provides a well-paced introduction to the Semantic Web. It covers a wide range of topics, from new trends (ontologies, rules) to existing technologies (Web Services and software agents) to more formal aspects (logic and inference). It includes: real-world (and complete) examples of the application of Semantic Web concepts; how the technology presented and discussed throughout the book can be extended to other application areas.

Networks are everywhere: networks of friends, transportation networks and the Web. Neurons in our brains and proteins within our bodies form networks that determine our intelligence and survival. This modern, accessible textbook introduces the basics of network science for a wide range of job sectors from management to marketing, from biology to engineering, and from neuroscience to the social sciences. Students will develop important, practical skills and learn to write code for using networks in their areas of interest - even as they are just learning to program with Python. Extensive sets of tutorials and homework problems provide plenty of hands-on practice and longer programming tutorials online further enhance students' programming skills. This intuitive and direct approach makes the book ideal for a first course, aimed at a wide audience without a strong background in mathematics or computing but with a desire to learn the fundamentals and applications of network science.

Libraries have always been an inspiration for the standards and technologies developed by semantic web activities. However, except for the Dublin Core specification, semantic web and social networking technologies have not been widely adopted and further developed by major digital library initiatives and projects. Yet semantic technologies offer a new level of flexibility, interoperability, and relationships for digital repositories.

Kruk and McDaniel present semantic web-related aspects of current digital library activities, and introduce their functionality; they show examples ranging from general architectural descriptions to detailed usages of specific ontologies, and thus stimulate the awareness of researchers, engineers, and potential users of those technologies. Their presentation is completed by chapters on existing prototype systems such as JeromeDL, BRICKS, and Greenstone, as well as a look into the possible future of semantic digital libraries.

This book is aimed at researchers and graduate students in areas like digital libraries, the semantic web, social networks, and information retrieval. This audience will benefit from detailed descriptions of both today's possibilities and also the shortcomings of applying semantic web technologies to large digital repositories of often unstructured data.

With more substantial funding from research organizations and industry, numerous large-scale applications, and recently developed technologies, the Semantic Web is quickly emerging as a well-recognized and important area of computer science. While Semantic Web technologies are still rapidly evolving, Foundations of Semantic Web Technologies focuses on the established foundations in this area that have become relatively stable over time. It thoroughly covers basic introductions and intuitions, technical details, and formal foundations.

The book concentrates on Semantic Web technologies standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium: RDF and SPARQL enable data exchange and querying, RDFS and OWL provide expressive ontology modeling, and RIF supports rule-based modeling. The text also describes methods for specifying, querying, and reasoning with ontological information. In addition, it explores topics that are clearly beyond foundations, such as tools, applications, and engineering aspects.

Written by highly respected researchers with a deep understanding of the material, this text centers on the formal specifications of the subject and supplies many pointers that are useful for employing Semantic Web technologies in practice. The book has an accompanying website with supplemental information.

This highly topical text considers the construction of the next generation of the Web, called the Semantic Web. This will enable computers to automatically consume Web-based information, overcoming the human-centric focus of the Web as it stands at present, and expediting the construction of a whole new class of knowledge-based applications that will intelligently utilize Web content.
The text is structured into three main sections on knowledge representation techniques, reasoning with multi-agent systems, and knowledge services. For each of these topics, the text provides an overview of the state-of-the-art techniques and the popular standards that have been defined. Numerous small programming examples are given, which demonstrate how the benefits of the Semantic Web technologies can be realized at the present time. The main theoretical results underlying each of the technologies are presented, and the main problems and research issues which remain are summarized.
Based on a course on 'Multi-Agent Systems and the Semantic Web' taught at the University of Edinburgh, this text is ideal for final-year undergraduate and graduate students in Mathematics, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Logic and researchers interested in Multi-Agent Systems and the Semantic Web.

The World Wide Web has undergone tremendous growth since the first edition of Web Wisdom: How to Evaluate and Create Information Quality on the Web was conceived and written in the mid to late 1990s. The phenomenal global expansion of the internet, together with the increasing sophistication of online technologies and software applications, requires us to be more savvy Web users, especially given the growing complexity of Web-based information. This new edition of Web Wisdom covers key issues that users and creators of Web resources need to know regarding reliable and useful information on the Web, including social media content. Written in a straightforward and accessible format, the book also provides critical evaluation techniques and tools to enhance Web-based research and the creation of high quality content. Features Includes checklists comprised of basic questions to ask when evaluating or creating web resources Provides an expanded discussion of copyright, trademark, and other related issues with specific reference to web authoring Contains a chapter devoted exclusively to social media applications and their unique evaluation challenges Presents a new section that addresses the evaluation challenges that are related to combining traditional and social media content Offers a new section focused on computer-generated text and its allied evaluation challenges Introduces a revised and expanded companion website that provides a variety of supplemental materials related to the evaluation and creation of web content as well as links to additional examples This book demonstrates how to adapt and apply the five core traditional evaluation criteria (authority, accuracy, objectivity, currency, coverage) originally introduced in the first edition, to the modern-day Web environment.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th European Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2007, held in Innsbruck, Austria, in June 2007. Coverage includes semantic Web services, ontology learning, inference and mapping, social semantic Web, ontologies, personalization, foundations of the semantic Web, natural languages and ontologies, and querying and Web data models.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2006, held in Athens, GA, USA in November 2006. It features more than 52 papers that address all current issues in the field of the semantic Web, ranging from theoretical aspects to various applied topics. An additional 14 papers detail applications in government, public health, public service, academic, and industry.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First Asian Semantic Web Conference, ASWC 2006, held in Beijing, China, in September 2006. The 36 revised full papers and 36 revised short papers presented together with three invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 208 full paper submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 3rd European Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2006. The book presents 48 revised full papers with abstracts of 3 invited talks. The papers are organized in topical sections on ontology alignment, engineering, evaluation, evolution and learning, rules and reasoning, searching and querying, semantic annotation, semantic web mining and personalisation, semantic web services, semantic wiki and blogging, as well as trust and policies.

A little over a decade has passed since the release of the ?rst Netscape browser. In 1995, the World Wide Web was viewedlargelyas an academiccuriosity.Now, of course, the Web is an integral part of the fabric of modern society. It is impossible to imagine science, education, commerce, or government functioning without the Web. We take the Web for granted, and often assume that Internet connectivity is guaranteed to all of us as a birthright. Although the Web indeed has become world wide and has lost a bit of its original aura as a consequence of its ubiquity, a burgeoning community of researchers and practitioners continues to work toward the next generation of the Web a Web where information will be stored in a machine-processable form and where intelligent computer-based agents will access and automatically combine myriad services on the Internet of the kind that are now available only to people interacting directly with their Web browsers."

RuleML 2005 was the ?rst international conference on rules and rule markup languages for the Semantic Web, held in conjunction with the International Semantic Web C- ference (ISWC) at Galway, Ireland. With the success of the RuleML workshop series came the need for extended research and applications topics organized in a conference format. RuleML 2005 also accommodated the ?rst Workshop on OWL: Experiences and Directions. Rules are widely recognized to be a major part of the frontier of the Semantic Web, and critical to the early adoption and applications of knowledge-based techniques in- business, especially enterprise integration and B2B e-commerce. This includes kno- edge representation (KR) theory and algorithms; markup languages based on such KR; engines, translators, and other tools; relationships to standardization efforts; and, not least, applications. Interest and activity in the area of rules for the Semantic Web has grown rapidly over the last ?ve years. The RuleML 2005 Conference was aimed to be this year's premiere scienti?c conference on the topic. It continued in topic, leadership, and collaboration with the previous series of three highly successful annual inter- tional workshops (RuleML 2004, RuleML 2003 and RuleML 2002). The theme for RuleML 2005 was rule languages for reactive and proactive rules, complex event p- cessing, and event-driven rules, to support the emergence of Semantic Web applications. Special highlights of the RuleML 2005 conference included the keynote address by Sir Tim Berners- Lee, Director of W3C.

The promise of the Semantic Web is to move from a Web of data to a Web of meaning and distributed services. This vision of the Web has attracted - searchersfromdi?erent horizonswith the aims of de?ning newarchitecturesand languages necessary to make it possible, and of developing the ?rst applications of these concepts. This book contains the articles selected for publication and presentation at the workshop "Principles and Practice of Semantic Web Reasoning" PPSWR 2005, together with three invited talks. Three major aspects of Semantic Web research are represented in this selection: architecture issues, language issues, and reasoning methods. These advances are investigated in the context of new design principles and challenging applications. ThePPSWR2005workshopwaspartoftheDagstuhlseminarontheSem- tic Web organizedby F. Bry (Univ. Munchen, Germany),F. Fages (INRIA Roc- .. quencourt, France), M. Marchiori (MIT, Cambridge, USA) and H.-J. Ohlbach (Univ. Munchen, Germany),held in Dagstuhl, Germany,11-16September 2005...It was supported by the European Network of Excellence REWERSE (Reas- ing on the Web with Rules and Semantics, http://rewerse.net). This four-year project includes 27 European research and development organizations, and is intended to bolster Europe's expertise in Web reasoning systems and appli- tions.Itconsistsofeightmainworkinggroups:"RuleMarkupLanguage","Policy Language, Enforcement, Composition","Composition and Typing","Reasoning- Aware Querying","Evolution","Time and Location","Adding Semantics to the Bioinformatics Web", and "Personalized Information Systems". The papers in this volume re?ect most of the topics investigated in REWERSE; one third of them come from outside REWERSE.

This volume contains the papers presented at the 2nd European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2005) held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece, from 29th May to 1st June, 2005. The vision of the Semantic Web is to enhance today's Web via the exploi- tion of machine-processable metadata. The explicit representation of the sem- tics of data, accompanied with domain theories (ontologies), will enable a web that provides a qualitatively new level of service. It will weave together an - crediblylargenetworkofhumanknowledgeandwillcomplementitwithmachine processability. Various automated services will help the user to achieve goals by accessing and providing information in a machine-understandable form. This process may ultimately create extremely knowledgeable systems with various specialized reasoning services systems. Many technologies and methodologies are being developed within arti?cial intelligence, human language technology, machine learning, databases, software engineering and information systems that can contribute to the realization of this vision. The 2nd Annual European Semantic Web Conference presented the latest results in research and applications of Semantic Web technologies. Following the success of the ?rst edition, ESWC showed a signi?cant increase in participation. With148submissions, thenumberofpapersdoubledthatofthepreviousedition. Each submission was evaluated by at least three reviewers. The selection process resulted in the acceptance of 48 papers for publication and presentation at the conference (an acceptance rate of 32%). Papers did not come only from Europe but also from other continents.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the Second International Workshop on Semantic Web and Databases, SWDB 2004, held in Toronto, Canada in August 2004 as a satellite workshop of VLDB 2004.

The 14 revised full papers presented together with 2 papers by the invited keynote speakers were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from 47 submissions. Among the topics addressed are data semantics, semantic Web services, service-oriented computing, workflow composition, XML semantics, relational tables, ontologies, semantic Web algebra, heterogeneous data sources, context mediation, OWL, ontology engineering, data integration, semantic Web queries, database queries, and peer-to-peer warehouses.

Thisbookconstitutestherefereedproceedingsofthe1stInternationalWorkshop on Semantic Web Services and Web Process Composition, SWSWPC 2004, held at the Westin Horton Plaza Hotel, San Diego, California, USA, July 6, 2004, in conjunction with the IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2004). Theworkshopintendedtobringresearchers, scientistsfrombothindustryand academics, andrepresentativesfromdi?erentcommunitiestogethertostudy, - derstand, and explore the phases that compose the lifecycle of Semantic Web processes. The workshop presented what can be achieved by the symbiotic s- thesis of two of the hottest R&D and technology application areas, Web services and the Semantic Web, as recognized at the 12th International World Wide Web conference (WWW 2003) and in the industry press. The emphasis of the workshop was mainly on Web services, Web processes and semantics which are important movements emerging in the World Wide Web. Web services and Web processes promise to ease several current infr- tructure challenges, such as data, application, and process integration. Web s- vices are truly platform-independent and allow the development of distributed, loosely coupled applications, a key characteristic for the success of dynamic Web processes.

The 3rd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2004) was held Nov- ber 7-11, 2004 in Hiroshima, Japan. If it is true what the proverb says: "Once by accident, twice by habit, three times by tradition," then this third ISWC did indeed ?rmly establish a tradition. After the overwhelming interest in last year's conference at Sanibel Island, Florida, this year's conference showed that the Semantic Web is not just a one-day wonder, but has established itself ?rmly on the research agenda. At a time when special interest meetings with a Sem- tic Web theme are springing up at major conferences in numerous areas (ACL, VLDB, ECAI, AAAI, ECML, WWW, to name but a few), the ISWC series has established itself as the primary venue for Semantic Web research. Response to the call for papers for the conference continued to be strong. We solicited submissions to three tracks of the conference: the research track, the industrial track, and the poster track. The research track, the premier venue for basic research on the Semantic Web, received 205 submissions, of which 48 were accepted for publication. Each submission was evaluated by three p- gram committee members whose reviews were coordinated by members of the senior program committee. Final decisions were made by the program co-chairs in consultation with the conference chair and the senior program committee. The industrial track, soliciting papers describing industrial research on the - mantic Web, received 22 submissions, of which 7 were accepted for publication.

The Semantic Web is a worldwide endeavor to advance the Web by enriching its content with semantic metainformation that can be processed by inferen- enabled Web applications. Taxonomies and rules, along with their automated reasoning techniques, are the main components of Semantic Web ontologies. Rule systems are considered to be a major area in the further development of the Semantic Web. On one hand, rules can specify declarative knowledge in ontology languages, expressing constraints or transformations, either in conju- tionwith, orasanalternativeto, descriptionlogics.Ontheotherhand, rulescan specify behavioral knowledge, enforcing policies or reacting to events/changes. Finally, rule markup languages such as RuleML allow us to publish rules on the Web, to process rules in general XML environments as well as special rule engines, to exchange rules between di?erent applications and tools via XSLT translators, as well as to embed rules into other XML content and vice versa. This workshop was dedicated to all aspects of rules and rule markup l- guages for the Semantic Web. RuleML 2004 was the third in a series of wo- shops that was initiated with the International Semantic Web Conference. The previous workshops were held on Sardinia, Italy (2002), and on Sanibel Island, USA (2003). Thisyearwehad25submissions, ofwhich11wereacceptedasregularpapers and another ?ve as short papers describing tools. Wearegratefultoourtwoinvitedspeakers, MikeDeanfromBBNandChr- tine Golbreich from the University of Rennes. Our thanks also go to all subm- ters and reviewers without whom the workshop and these proceedings could not have succe

The best informal de?nition of the Semantic Web is maybe found in the May 2001Scienti?cAmericanarticle"TheSemanticWeb"(Berners-Leeetal. ),which says"TheSemanticWebisanextensionofthecurrentWebinwhichinformation is given well-de?ned meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. " People who work on the Semantic Web quite often base their work on the famous "semantic web tower", a product of Tim Berners-Lee's inspiring drawing on whiteboards. The lowest level is the level of character representation (Unicode) and the identi?cation of resources on the Web (URIs). The highest level concerns the problem of trusting information on the Web. Somewhere in the middle of the tower is the logic level. It addresses the problem of represe- ing information on the Web in a way so that inference rules can derive implicit information from explicitly stated information. The workshop "Principles and Practices of Semantic Web Reasoning" (PPSWR 2004) addressed problems on this level. It took place in September 2004 as a satellite event of the 20th Int- national Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP) in St. Malo, France. After PPSWR 2003 in Mumbai, India, it was the second workshop in this series. This book contains the articles presented at the workshop.

The 2nd Workshop on Web Services, E-Business, and the Semantic Web (WES) was held during June 16-17, 2003 in conjunction with CAiSE 2003, the 15th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering. The Internet is changing the way businesses operate. Organizations are using the Web to deliver their goods and services, to find trading partners, and to link their existing (maybe legacy) applications to other applications. Web services are rapidly becoming the enabling technology of today's e-business and e-commerce systems, and will soon transform the Web as it is now into a distributed computation and application fra- work. On the other hand, e-business as an emerging concept is also impacting software - plications, the everyday services landscape, and the way we do things in almost each domain of our life. There is already a body of experience accumulated to demonstrate the difference between just having an online presence and using the Web as a stra- gic and functional medium in e-business-to-business interaction (B2B) as well as marketplaces. Finally, the emerging Semantic Web paradigm promises to annotate Web artifacts to enable automated reasoning about them. When applied to e-services, the paradigm hopes to provide substantial automation for activities such as discovery, invocation, assembly, and monitoring of e-services. But much work remains to be done before realizing this vision.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First European Semantic Web Symposium, ESWS 2004, held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece in May 2004.

The 33 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on ontology engineering, ontology matching and mapping, ontology-based querying, ontology merging and population, infrastructure, semantic web services, service discovery and composition, data from the semantic web, knowledge presentation, applications, content management, and information management and integration.

The Semantic Web is a major endeavor aimed at enriching the existing Web withmetadataandprocessingmethodssoastoprovideWeb-basedsystemswith advanced(so-calledintelligent)capabilities, inparticularwithcontext-awareness and decision support. The advanced capabilities striven for in most Semantic Web application s- narios primarily call for reasoning. Reasoning capabilities are o?ered by exi- ing Semantic Web languages, such as BPEL4WS, BPML, ConsVISor, DAML-S, JTP, TRIPLE, and others. These languages, however, were developed mostly from functionality-centered (e.g., ontology reasoning or access validation) or application-centered (e.g., Web service retrieval and composition) perspectives. A perspective centered on the reasoning techniques (e.g., forward or backward chaining, tableau-like methods, constraint reasoning, etc.) complementing the above-mentioned activities appears desirable for Semantic Web systems and - plications. The workshop on Principles and Practice of Semantic Web Reas- ing, which took place on December 8, 2003, in Mumbai, India, was the ?rst of a series of scienti?c meetings devoted to such a perspective. JustasthecurrentWebisinherentlyheterogeneousindataformatsanddata semantics, the Semantic Web will be inherently heterogeneous in its reasoning forms.Indeed, anysingleformof reasoningturnsouttobeirrealin theSemantic Web. For example, ontology reasoning in general relies on monotonic negation (for the metadata often can be fully speci?ed), while databases, Web databases, and Web-based information systems call for non-monotonic reasoning (for one would not specify non-existing trains in a railway timetable); constraint reas- ing is needed when dealing with time (for time intervals have to be dealt with), while(forwardand/orbackward)chainingisthereasoningofchoicewhencoping with database-like views (for views, i.e., virtual data, can be derived from actual data using operations such as join and projections)."

These proceedings contain the papers accepted for presentation at the Second International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2003) held on Sanibel Island, Florida, U. S. A., October 20-23, 2003. Following the success of ISWC 2002 that washeldinSardiniainJune2002, ISWC2003enjoyedagreatlyincreasedinterest in the conference themes. The number of submitted papers more than doubled compared with ISWC 2002 to 283. Of those, 262 were submitted to the research track and 21 to the industrial track. With rare exceptions, each submission was evaluated by three program committee members whose reviews were coordinated by members of the senior program committee. This year 49 papers in the research track and 9 papers in the industrial track were accepted. The high quality of ISWC 2003 was the result of the joint e?ort of many people. First of all we would like to thank the authors for their high-quality submissions and the members of the program committee for their reviewing and review coordination e?orts. We would like to extend special thanks to Christoph Bussler for chairing the industrial track, to Mike Dean for his help with the conference management software, the web site, and conference publicity, and to Massimo Paolucci for helping with the organization of the proceedings and arranging sponsorships.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2002, held in Sardinia, Italy, in June 2002.The 27 revised full research papers, 6 position papers, and 7 system descriptions presented were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 133 submissions. All current issues in this exciting new field are addressed, ranging from theoretical aspects to applications in various fields.