by Charlotte Finkbeiner

                       

The program began with 6 workshops and 8 tutorials, where the expected number of participants doubled through on-site registrations and it turned out as a very successful event. The program continued with the main conference which consisted of research paper and 8 in-use-track paper presentations as well as a poster and demonstration session with over 60 participants. The PhD Symposium took place as a one day workshop with 16 presentations, in which each PhD student was assigned a mentor who gave detailed comments on the presented work. The scientific program concluded in the awarding of the best contributions, namely:
✦ Best Research Paper Award: “Querying Trust in RDF Data with tSPARQL“, Olaf Hartig
✦ Best In-Use-Track Paper Award: “Media meets Semantic Web - How the BBC uses DBpedia and Linked Data to make Connection”, Georgi Kobilarov, Tom Scott, Yves Raimond, Silver Oliver, Chris Sizemore, Michael Smethurst, Christian Bizer and Robert Lee
✦ Best Poster Award: “BioNav: A System to Discover Semantic Web Associations in the Life Sciences”, Maria-Esther Vidal, Edna Ruckhaus and Natalia Marquez
✦ Best Demo Award: “KiWi - A Platform for Semantic Social Software”, Sebastian Schaffert, Julia Eder, Szaby Grünwald, Thomas Kurz and Mihai Radulescu
✦ Best PhD Student Paper Award awarded by NeOn: “The Relevance of Reasoning and Alignment Incoherence in Ontology Matching”, Christian Meilicke
✦ Best PhD-Poster Award awarded by NeOn: “Lightweight Rule Extended Ontology Languages”, Stuart Taylor

Each day invited speakers, experienced in different areas, motivated, explained and outlined the importance of technologies which are propelled forward by the ESWC conference.

Dr. Matthias Wagner, Senior Manager of the Smart and Secure Services Research Group at DOCOMO Euro-Labs, the European research laboratories of the leading Japanese mobile operator NTT DOCOMO, lectured about the mobile phone as one of the most essential objects in people's everyday life. In this talk, he went through evidence on how, next to money and keys, the mobile phone is in fact the thing to be carried around by almost everybody, nearly all the time. By looking at the demands and needs of today's mobile users, he then discuss how semantic technologies can add value to the phone as well as to mobile services.

Dr. Craig Knoblock, Senior Project Leader at the Information Sciences Institute and a Research Professor in Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC) and also the Chief Scientist for both Fetch Technologies and Geosemble Technologies, which are spinoff companies from USC, talked about discovering and building semantic models of web sources. In this talk he described an integrated end-to-end approach that automatically discovers information-producing web sources, invokes and extracts the data from these sources, builds semantic models of the sources, and validates the results by comparing the data produced by the source with the model of the source.

Alan Smeaton, Professor of Computing and Deputy Director of CLARITY: Centre for Sensor Web Technologies, at Dublin City University, Ireland, talked about the most widespread way in which content-based access to video information is supported is through using a combination of video metadata (date, time, format, etc.) and user-generated description (user tags, ratings, reviews, etc.). This has had widespread usage and is the basis for navigation through video archives in systems such as YouTube, Open Video and the Internet Archive. However, there are limitations with this such as vocabulary issues, and authentication across the users who annotate content. His work has concentrated on addressing content-based video retrieval, the kind of direct retrieval we routinely perform on text, retrieving web pages or blog posts based primarily on actual content.

Later, a panel discussion took place focusing on the question "Science 2.0: What do we have to offer to its development?" Fausto Guinchiglia, from the University of Trento, moderated a lively discussion between Andrei Voronkov (EasyChair), Maurizio Marchese (LiquidPublications project), Anita DeWaard (Elsevier, Disruptive technologies group), and David De Roure (eScience and Science 2.0).

Additionally to the regular program of tutorials, workshops and scientific presentations, the ESWC hosted diverse EU and other events, such as the 3rd STI International Roadmapping Workshop and an EU project matchmaking event which drew 15 projects to present themselves and network.

Apart from the Mediterranean atmosphere and the scientifically profound program, the ESWC 2009 culminated in a conference dinner at the pool, with typical Cretan food, an entertaining talk from the general chair Fabio Ciravegna (University of Sheffield) and a live performance of folk music and dance. At the end, the organizing committee of the conference found themselves together with many of the other participants on the dance floor which was on a platform in the middle of the pool.

The success of ESWC 2009 has established its place not only as Europe's principal conference on semantic technologies but also as a major research event for semantics on a global scale. Hence, it has been decided to broaden and globalize the focus of ESWC for next year, with a programme aligned more widely to Future Internet issues. These are truly interesting times for the ESWC as it goes from strength to strength, and STI International is proud to be a main driver for this event. More details to ESWC 2010 will be disseminated very soon!