Perspectives Workshop: Semantic Web Reflections and Future Directions

Motivation

The objectives for the workshop on Semantic Technology will be to reflect on the original vision for the Semantic Web, and to create a roadmap for future research on Semantic technology. When developing the roadmap we will also consider new Web technologies that have emerged in the last few years and also explore the needs of the business community for Semantic technologies. Accordingly, this seminar will bring together distinct groups such as:

• The original inventors and drivers of the Semantic Web,
• The leaders of emerging Web technologies such as Web 2.0, Web services and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), and the GRID,
• Industrialists who have an interest in using semantic Web technology,
• Decision makers in public funding activities.

Background

In March 2000 Dagstuhl hosted the “Semantics for the Web” seminar which brought together a variety researchers interested in creating technologies for supporting machine-readable Web content sustaining autonomous interactive agents. The seminar was a huge success with very high impact including:

• W3C standards - under the direction of Jim Hendler and Guus Schreiber, participants of the workshop, the W3C, the major industrial consortium supporting Web standards, created a committee that formalized OWL, a Web language for sharing ontologies.
• Funding - combined US and EU government funding in excess of $250,000,000 has supported a number of large projects in the Semantic Web area based in part on the results of the earlier workshop (US); DIP, Knowledge Web, SEKT, ASG, NeOn, Nepomuk, SUPER, TripCom in Europe; and SemanticGRID in China.
• Conference series - the first International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) took place in Sardinia, Italy in 2002. This year the 6th ISWC was held in Korea with over 500 participants. A European semantic Web conference series started in 2004 in Crete, and the first Asian semantic Web conference took place in Beijing this past summer.
• Education - this year saw the 5th Summer School on Ontological Engineering and the Semantic Web which each year trains the 50 top Ph.D. students from around the world.
• Workshop book - The workshop papers from 2000 were collected into a book entitled Spinning the Semantic Web (Eds: Fensel, D., Hendler, J., Lieberman, H., and Wahlster, W) which was published by MIT press in English, and later republished in Japanese.
• Other publications - papers from this workshop were expanded into a number of the most highly cited papers in the Semantic Web field. An article in Scientific American on the Semantic Web (March, 2001) has been cited over 3500 times - two of the coauthors were conference participants. Of the top ten most-cited papers about the Semantic Web (Google scholar), seven were authored or co-authored by workshop participants on work presented at the meeting

At the time of the workshop, the term “Semantic Web” was not yet well-known, and the Dagstuhl meeting is widely acknowledged as the first major meeting for the emerging field. Now, there is a thriving research community including a number of conferences, three active journals, a wide-range of funding activities, and a number of research laboratories at major universities and companies.