As the Web continues to grow, increasing amounts of data are being made available for human and machine consumption. This emerging Semantic Web is rapidly entering the mainstream and, as a result, a variety of new solutions for searching, aggregating and the intelligent delivery of information are being produced,bothinresearchandcommercialsettings.Severalnewchallengesarise from this context, both from a technical and human-computer interaction p- spective - e.g., as issues to do with the scalability andusability of Semantic Web solutions become particularly important. The International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) is the major inter- tional forum where the latest research results and technical innovations on all aspects of the Semantic Web are presented. ISWC brings together researchers, practitioners, and users from the areas of arti?cial intelligence, databases, social networks,distributedcomputing,Webengineering,informationsystems,natural language processing, soft computing, and human-computer interaction to d- cuss the major challenges and proposed solutions, success stories and failures, as well the visions that can advance the ?eld.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2009, held in Chantilly, VA, USA, during October 25-29, 2009.
The volume contains 43 revised full research papers selected from a total of 250 submissions; 15 papers out of 59 submissions to the semantic Web in-use track, and 7 papers and 12 posters accepted out of 19 submissions to the doctorial consortium.
The topics covered in the research track are ontology engineering; data management; software and service engineering; non-standard reasoning with ontologies; semantic retrieval; OWL; ontology alignment; description logics; user interfaces; Web data and knowledge; semantic Web services; semantic social networks; and rules and relatedness. The semantic Web in-use track covers knowledge management; business applications; applications from home to space; and services and infrastructure.
