Enjoy International Semantic Web Conference 2007 [Guo Tong Xie, November 23rd, 2007]

The 6th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2007, is held in Bushan, Korea. I attend the conference to present our joint work with Taikang Life insurance company on EIAW, Towards a Business-friendly Data Warehouse Using Semantic Web Technologies. There are more than 500 participants and 70 papers in ISWC 2007, which demonstrates the growing attention and interest to Semantic Web. The keynote from Powerset sounds a very disruptive approach for web search, by applying question-answering technologies. Chris Welty from IBM Watson gives an interesting talk to rethink the focus and road map of Semantic Web technologies, and the example of motivating people, kind of an extension to the current web, to take some computation tasks are really amazing. One notable phenomenon is the presence of Chinese people. There are around 15 papers from Chinese people, including authors from Chinese universities (especially APEX lab from Shanghai Jiaotong University), research labs (IBM CRL) and students studying abroad. By the way, the food in Bushan is very good, and you can find some pictures of Bushan, and its food, at my personal blog in Chinese.