ESWC2012

The mission of ESWC is to bring together researchers and practitioners dealing with different aspects of semantic technologies. Building on its past success, ESWC is seeking to broaden its focus to span other relevant research areas in which semantics in a Web context plays an important role. The goal of the Semantic Web is to create a Web of knowledge and services in which the semantics of content is made explicit and content is linked to both other content and services. This network of knowledge-based functionality will weave together a large network of human knowledge, and make this knowledge machine-processable to support intelligent behaviour by machines. It will support novel applications allowing to combine content from heterogeneous sites in unforeseen ways and support enhanced matching between users needs and content.

Creating such an interlinked Web of knowledge which spans unstructured, RDF as well as multimedia content and services requires the collaboration of many disciplines, including but not limited to: Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Database and Information Systems, Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, Multimedia, Distributed Systems, Social Networks, Web Engineering, and Web Science.

In addition to the research and in-use tracks, we have furthermore introduced two special tracks this year, putting particular emphasis on inter-disciplinary research topics and areas that show the potential of exciting synergies for the future.