Perspectives Workshop: Semantic Web Reflections and Future Directions

Summary

With an ever increasing amount of data being stored and processed on computers, and the ubiquitous use of the Web for communication and dissemination of content, the world contains a vast amount of digital data that is growing ever faster. The available data is increasingly used to gain insights for science and research, to create commercial value, and to hold governments accountable. Semantic Web technologies for supporting machine-readable content aim at facilitating the processing and integration of data from the open Web environment where large portions of the publicly available data is being published. Since the first Dagstuhl seminar “Semantics for the Web” in 2000 the amount of machine-readable data on the Web has exploded, and Semantic Web technologies have matured and made their way from research labs and universities into commercial applications.

In this Perspectives Workshop participants from academia, industry, and government presented and discussed further directions for Semantic Web research. In general, the field of Semantic Web research has matured in the last decade. One indication for that, among others, is the discussion of advanced issues such as scalablity. More data is becoming available and vocabulary managment is being operationalised, and research on provenance tracking and technologies and methods addressing privacy concerns has commenced. How users can appropriately interact with the flood of data and leverage the data to satisfy information needs or gain insight is still an open question. Some prominent areas for applications of Semantic Web technologies discussed at the workshop are e-Science and mobile and sensor networks.