This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 8th Joint International Semantic Technology Conference, JIST 2018, held in Awaji, Japan, in November 2018. The 23 full papers and 6 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 75 submissions. They present applications of semantic technologies, theoretical results, new algorithms and tools to facilitate the adoption of semantic technologies and are organized in topical sections on knowledge graphs; data management; question answering and NLP; ontology and reasoning; government open data; and semantic web for life sciences.