News Story

Semantic Web Reflections and Future Directions

Carlos Pedrinaci, Monday 20 Jul 2009

The last week of June saw the Dagstuhl ï¿½Semantic Web Reflections and Future Directionsï¿½ Perspectives Workshop take place in the well-known centre for informatics meetings. The seminar was organised by KMi’s John Domingue together with Dieter Fensel (Universitï¿½t Innsbruck), James A. Hendler (Rensselaer Polytechnic, USA) and Rudi Studer (Universitï¿½t Karlsruhe), and involved 50 of the worldï¿½s best Semantic Web researchers. The seminar was organised as a 10th anniversary celebration of the previous event which contributed significantly to the Semantic Web research area. In this occasion, the event focussed on reflecting on the many achievements of the Semantic Web and future directions over the next five years. During the seminar discussions tackled issues such as Provenance, Context-awareness, Large-scale Reasoning, User Interaction, Linked Data, Mobile devices and Sensors and eScience. KMi representatives, John Domingue and Carlos Pedrinaci, presented some of the outcomes and future plans related to the EU Future Internet initiative and the EU-funded SOA4All project respectively. This seminar kicked-off a number of activities around the topics listed above which will certainly impact considerably the future developments and research on the Semantic Web. Among them, perhaps of most relevance are the activities which are currently being organised to align research and development on the Semantic Web with the Future Internet initiative. In particular, there will be an invitation-based workshop aligned with the Future Internet Symposium, taking place in Berlin, September 1-3; and next yearï¿½s European Semantic Web Conference will be aligned with the core research pillars of the Future Internet.