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."

The two-volume set LNCS 9981 and 9982 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2016, which was held in Kobe, Japan, in October 2016. The 75 full papers presented in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 326 submissions. The International Semantic Web Conference is the premier forum for Semantic Web research, where cutting edge scientific results and technological innovations are presented, where problems and solutions are discussed, and where the future of this vision is being developed. It brings together specialists in fields such as artificial intelligence, databases, social networks, distributed computing, Web engineering, information systems, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, and the social sciences. The Research Track solicited novel and significant research contributions addressing theoretical, analytical, empirical, and practical aspects of the Semantic Web. The Applications Track solicited submissions exploring the benefits and challenges of applying semantic technologies in concrete, practical applications, in contexts ranging from industry to government and science. The newly introduced Resources Track sought submissions providing a concise and clear description of a resource and its (expected) usage. Traditional resources include ontologies, vocabularies, datasets, benchmarks and replication studies, services and software. Besides more established types of resources, the track solicited submissions of new types of resources such as ontology design patterns, crowdsourcing task designs, workflows, methodologies, and protocols and measures.

The two-volume set LNCS 9981 and 9982 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2016, which was held in Kobe, Japan, in October 2016. The 75 full papers presented in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 326 submissions. The International Semantic Web Conference is the premier forum for Semantic Web research, where cutting edge scientific results and technological innovations are presented, where problems and solutions are discussed, and where the future of this vision is being developed. It brings together specialists in fields such as artificial intelligence, databases, social networks, distributed computing, Web engineering, information systems, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, and the social sciences. The Research Track solicited novel and significant research contributions addressing theoretical, analytical, empirical, and practical aspects of the Semantic Web. The Applications Track solicited submissions exploring the benefits and challenges of applying semantic technologies in concrete, practical applications, in contexts ranging from industry to government and science. The newly introduced Resources Track sought submissions providing a concise and clear description of a resource and its (expected) usage. Traditional resources include ontologies, vocabularies, datasets, benchmarks and replication studies, services and software. Besides more established types of resources, the track solicited submissions of new types of resources such as ontology design patterns, crowdsourcing task designs, workflows, methodologies, and protocols and measures.