ISWC 2008@Karlsruhe

The 7th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2008 , is held in Karlsruhe, a beautiful city in the south west of Germany. I attend the conference to present our joint work with IBM Software group on MDS++, Supporting ontology-based dynamic property and classification in Websphere Metadata Server. There are more than 600 participants and 70 papers in ISWC 2008, which demonstrates the growing attentions and interests to Semantic Web.

One observeration is that robust and scalable RDF/RDFS storage systems are being deployed, based on the demos at the billion triples challenge. The first place went to the SemaPlore which allows users to explore and visualize a very large volume of heterogeneous data; the second place went to the SearchWebDB by the joint work of SJTU and AIFB, which allows to translate keyword-based search to structured query and perform distributed query processing. The third place went to MaRVIN (Massive RDF Versatile Inference Network), which is a parallel and distributed platform for performing RDF(S) inference on a network of loosely coupled machines using a peer-to-peer model.

Another observation is that Semantic Web needs to be more "Web-oriented" with light-weight semantics and scalabity in nature, rather than "Semantic-oriented" that uses powerful DL languages and reasoning. The interesting panel discussion on "is OWL 2 Far" and the industry talk on semantic wiki are evidences on this trend.

A good news is that Shanghai JiaoTong University and IBM China Research Lab will host the ISWC 2010 in Shanghai. Haofeng Wang and I have made the presentation to the SWSA members on Oct. 27 evening. Finally, we have won the final defence with the score of 12 : 0. All memebers from Semantic Web Science Association select us as the right host to organize ISWC 2010.

As usual, there are many Chinese participants. We took a picture for most of the attendees.