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Semantic computing is an integral part of modern technology, an essential component of fields as diverse as artificial intelligence, data science, knowledge discovery and management, big data analytics, e-commerce, enterprise search, technical documentation, document management, business intelligence, and enterprise vocabulary management. This book presents the proceedings of SEMANTICS 2023, the 19th International Conference on Semantic Systems, held in Leipzig, Germany, from 20 to 22 September 2023. The conference is a pivotal event for those professionals and researchers actively engaged in harnessing the power of semantic computing, an opportunity to increase their understanding of the subject's transformative potential while confronting its practical limitations. Attendees include information managers, IT architects, software engineers, and researchers from a broad spectrum of organizations, including research facilities, non-profit entities, public administrations, and the world's largest corporations. For this year's conference a total of 54 submissions were received in response to a call for papers. These were subjected to a rigorous, double-blind review process, with at least three independent reviews conducted for each submission. The 16 papers included here were ultimately accepted for presentation, with an acceptance rate of 29.6%. Areas covered include novel research challenges in areas such as data science, machine learning, logic programming, content engineering, social computing, and the Semantic Web. The book provides an up-to-date overview, which will be of interest to all those wishing to stay abreast of emerging trends and themes within the vast field of semantic computing.

This book constitutes the refereed post proceedings of the 16th Research Conference onMetadata and Semantic Research, MTSR 2022, held in London, UK, during November 7–11, 2022.The 21 full papers and 4 short papers included in this book were carefully reviewed andselected from 79 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: metadata, linked data, semantics and ontologies - general session, and track on Knowledge IT Artifacts (KITA), Track on digital humanities and digital curation, and track on cultural collections and applications, track on digital libraries, information retrieval, big, linked, social & open data, and metadata, linked data, semantics and ontologies - general session, track on agriculture, food & environment, and metadata, linked Data, semantics and ontologies - general, track on open repositories, research information systems & data infrastructures, and metadata, linked data, semantics andontologies - general, metadata, linked data, semantics and ontologies - general session, and track on european and national projects.

Semantic systems lie at the heart of modern computing, interlinking with areas as diverse as AI, data science, knowledge discovery and management, big data analytics, e-commerce, enterprise search, technical documentation, document management, business intelligence, enterprise vocabulary management, machine learning, logic programming, content engineering, social computing, and the Semantic Web. This book presents the proceedings of SEMANTiCS 2022, the 18th International Conference on Semantic Systems, held as a hybrid event – live in Vienna, Austria and online – from 12 to 15 September 2022. The SEMANTiCS conference is an annual meeting place for the professionals and researchers who make semantic computing work, who understand its benefits and encounter its limitations, and is attended by information managers, IT architects, software engineers, and researchers from organizations ranging from research facilities and NPOs, through public administrations to the largest companies in the world. The theme and subtitle of the 2022 conference was Towards A Knowledge-Aware AI, and the book contains 15 papers, selected on the basis of quality, impact and scientific merit following a rigorous review process which resulted in an acceptance rate of 29%. The book is divided into four chapters: semantics in data quality, standards and protection; representation learning and reasoning for downstream AI tasks; ontology development; and learning over complementary knowledge. Providing an overview of emerging trends and topics in the wide area of semantic computing, the book will be of interest to anyone involved in the development and deployment of computer technology and AI systems.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Metadata and Semantic Research, MTSR 2021, held as a virtual event in November-December 2021. The 27 full and 7 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 92 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: metadata, linked data, semantics and ontologies - general session, and track on agriculture, food and environment; track on open repositories, research information systems and data infrastructures; track on knowledge IT artifacts (KITA) and decentralized applications, blockchains and P2P systems, and general session; track on digital humanities and digital curation, and general session; track on digital libraries, information retrieval, big, linked, social and open data; track on european and national projects, and general session; track on cultural collections and applications, and general session.

Ontologies are the corner stone of data modeling and knowledge representation, and engineering an ontology is a complex task in which domain knowledge, ontological accuracy and computational properties need to be carefully balanced. As with any engineering task, the identification and documentation of common patterns is important, and Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) provide ontology designers with a strong connection to requirements and a better communication of their semantic content and intent. This book, Advances in Pattern-Based Ontology Engineering, contains 23 extended versions of selected papers presented at the annual Workshop on Ontology Design and Patterns (WOP) between 2017 and 2020. This yearly event, which attracts a large number of researchers and professionals in the field of ontology engineering and ontology design patterns, covers issues related to quality aspects of ontology engineering and ODPs for data and knowledge representation, and is usually co-located with the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), apart from WOP 2020, which was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Topics covered by the papers collected here focus on recent advances in ontology design and patterns, and range from a method to instantiate content patterns, through a proposal on how to document a content pattern, to a number of patterns emerging in ontology modeling in various situations and applications. The book provides an overview of important advances in ontology engineering and ontology design patterns, and will be of interest to all those working in the field.

The field of semantic computing is highly diverse, linking areas such as artificial intelligence, data science, knowledge discovery and management, big data analytics, e-commerce, enterprise search, technical documentation, document management, business intelligence, and enterprise vocabulary management. As such it forms an essential part of the computing technology that underpins all our lives today. This volume presents the proceedings of SEMANTiCS 2021, the 17th International Conference on Semantic Systems. As a result of the continuing Coronavirus restrictions, SEMANTiCS 2021 was held in a hybrid form in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, from 6 to 9 September 2021. The annual SEMANTiCS conference provides an important platform for semantic computing professionals and researchers, and attracts information managers, IT­architects, software engineers, and researchers from a wide range of organizations, such as research facilities, NPOs, public administrations and the largest companies in the world. The subtitle of the 2021 conference's was “In the Era of Knowledge Graphs”, and 66 submissions were received, from which the 19 papers included here were selected following a rigorous single-blind reviewing process; an acceptance rate of 29%. Topics covered include data science, machine learning, logic programming, content engineering, social computing, and the Semantic Web, as well as the additional sub-topics of digital humanities and cultural heritage, legal tech, and distributed and decentralized knowledge graphs. Providing an overview of current research and development, the book will be of interest to all those working in the field of semantic systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2021, held virtually in June 2021. The 41 full papers and 2 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 167 submissions. The papers were submitted to three tracks: the research track, the resource track and the in-use track. These tracks showcase research and development activities, services and applications, and innovative research outcomes making their way into industry. The research track caters to both long-standing and emerging research topics in the form of the following subtracks: ontologies and reasoning; knowledge graphs (understanding, creating, and exploiting); semantic data management, querying and distributed data; data dynamics, quality, and trust; matching, integration, and fusion; NLP and information retrieval; machine learning; science data and scholarly communication; and problems to solve before you die.

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Semantic Systems, SEMANTiCS 2020, held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in September 2020. The conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Semantic Systems, SEMANTiCS 2019, held in Karlsruhe, Germany, in September 2019. The 20 full papers and 8 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 88 submissions. They cover topics such as: web semantics and linked (open) data; machine learning and deep learning techniques; semantic information management and knowledge integration; terminology, thesaurus and ontology management; data mining and knowledge discovery; semantics in blockchain and distributed ledger technologies.

This book includes a selection of thoroughly refereed papers accepted at the Satellite Events of the 17th Internal Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2018, held in Monterey, CA in October 2018. The key areas addressed by these events include the core Semantic Web technologies such as knowledge graphs and scalable knowledge base systems, ontology design and modelling, semantic deep learning and statistics. Furthermore, several novel applications of semantic technologies to the topics of Internet of Things (IoT), healthcare, social media and social good are discussed. Finally, important topics at the interface of the Semantic Web technologies and their human users are addressed, including visualization and interaction paradigms for Web Data as well as crowdsourcing applications.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th Conference on Knowledge Engineering and the Semantic Web, KESW 2015, held in Moscow, Russia, in September/October 2015.The 17 revised full papers presented together with 6 short system descriptions were carefully reviewed andselected from 35 submissions. The papers address research issues related to semantic web, linked data, ontologies, natural language processing, knowledge representation.

CONTENTS: SESSION: WEB SERVICES AND APPLICATIONS SESSION: SEMANTIC WEB SESSION: ONTOLOGIES SESSION: POSTERS AND SHORT PAPERS SESSION: BIOINFORMATICS

This book contains revised and significantly extended versions of selected papers from three workshops on Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web (URSW), held at the International Semantic Web Conferences (ISWC) in 2011, 2012, and 2013. The 16 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers included in this volume are organized in topical sections on probabilistic and Dempster-Shafer models, fuzzy and possibilistic models, inductive reasoning and machine learning, and hybrid approaches.

This volume contains the lecture notes of the 10th Reasoning Web Summer School 2014, held in Athens, Greece, in September 2014. In 2014, the lecture program of the Reasoning Web introduces students to recent advances in big data aspects of semantic web and linked data, and the fundamentals of reasoning techniques that can be used to tackle big data applications.

This volume contains the lecture notes of the 9th Reasoning Web Summer School 2013, held in Mannheim, Germany, in July/August 2013. The 2013 summer school program covered diverse aspects of Web reasoning, ranging from scalable lightweight formalisms such as RDF to more expressive ontology languages based on description logics. It also featured foundational reasoning techniques used in answer set programming and ontology-based data access as well as emerging topics like geo-spatial information handling and reasoning-driven information extraction and integration.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems, RR 2013, held in Manheim, Germany in July 2013. The 19 revised research papers and 4 technical communications presented together with 2 invited talks and 1 tutorial talk were carefully reviewed and selected from 34 submissions. The scope of conference is decision making, planning, and intelligent agents, reasoning, machine learning, knowledge extraction and IR technologies, large-scale data management and reasoning on the web of data, data integration, dataspaces and ontology-based data access, non-standard reasoning, algorithms for distributed, parallelized, and scalable reasoning, and system descriptions and experimentation.

The book will focus on exploiting state of the art research in semantic web and web science. The rapidly evolving world-wide-web has led to revolutionary changes in the whole of society. The research and development of the semantic web covers a number of global standards of the web and cutting edge technologies, such as: linked data, social semantic web, semantic web search, smart data integration, semantic web mining and web scale computing. These proceedings are from the 6th Chinese Semantics Web Symposium.

This book contains revised and significantly extended versions of selected papers from three workshops on Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web (URSW), held at the International Semantic Web Conferences (ISWC) in 2008, 2009, and 2010 or presented at the first international Workshop on Uncertainty in Description Logics (UniDL), held at the Federated Logic Conference (FLoC) in 2010. The 17 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on probabilistic and Dempster-Shafer models, fuzzy and possibilistic models, inductive reasoning and machine learning, and hybrid approaches.

The volume LNCS 7529 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Web Information Systems and Mining, WISM 2012, held in Chengdu, China, in October 2012. The 87 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 418 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on applications of Web information systems; applications of Web mining; e-government and e-commerce; information security; intelligent networked systems; management information systems; mobile computing; semantic Web and ontologies; Web information extraction; Web intelligence; Web interfaces and applications; and XML and semi-structured data.

The two-volume set LNCS 7649 + 7650 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2012, held in Boston, MA, USA, in November 2012. The International Semantic Web Conference is the premier forum for Semantic Web research, where cutting edge scientific results and technological innovations are presented, where problems and solutions are discussed, and where the future of this vision is being developed. It brings together specialists in fields such as artificial intelligence, databases, social networks, distributed computing, Web engineering, information systems, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, and the social sciences. Volume 1 contains a total of 41 papers which were presented in the research track. They were carefully reviewed and selected from 186 submissions. Volume 2 contains 17 papers from the in-use track which were accepted from 77 submissions. In addition, it presents 8 contributions to the evaluations and experiments track and 7 long papers and 8 short papers of the doctoral consortium.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th Extended Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2012, held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece, in May 2012. The 53 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 212 submissions. They are organized in tracks on linked open data, machine learning, natural language processing and information retrieval, ontologies, reasoning, semantic data management, services, processes, and cloud computing, social Web and Web science, in-use and industrial, digital libraries and cultural heritage, and e-government. The book also includes 13 PhD papers presented at the PhD Symposium.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, EKAW 2012, held in Galway City, Ireland, in October 2012. The 44 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 107 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge extraction and enrichment, natural language processing, linked data, ontology engineering and evaluation, social and cognitive aspects of knowledge representation, application of knowledge engineering, and demonstrations.

This book constitutes, together with LNCS 6987 and LNCS 6988, the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Web Information Systems and Mining, WISM 2011, held in Taiyuan, China, in September 2011. The 112 revised full papers presented in the three volumes were carefully reviewed and selected from 472 submissions. The 61 papers presented in this volume are organized in topical sections on applications of artificial intelligence; applications of computational intelligence; automated problem solving; brain models/cognitive science; data mining and knowledge discovering; expert and decision support systems; fuzzy logic and soft computing; intelligent agents and systems; intelligent control; intelligent image processing; intelligent scheduling; intelligent signal processing; natural language processing; nature computation; neural computation; pattern recognition; rough set theory.

The two-volume set LNCS 7031 and LNCS 7032 constitutes the proceedings of the 10th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2011, held in Bonn, Germany, in October 2011. Part I, LNCS 7031, contains 50 research papers which were carefully reviewed and selected from 264 submissions. The 17 semantic Web in-use track papers contained in part II, LNCS 7032, were selected from 75 submissions. This volume also contains 15 doctoral consortium papers, selected from 31 submissions. The topics covered are: ontologies and semantics; database, IR, and AI technologies for the semantic Web; management of semantic Web data; reasoning over semantic Web data; search, query, integration, and analysis on the semantic Web; robust and scalable knowledge management and reasoning on the Web; interacting with semantic Web data; ontology modularity, mapping, merging and alignment; languages, tools, and methodologies for representing and managing semantic Web data; ontology, methodology, evaluation, reuse, extraction and evolution; evaluation of semantic Web technologies or data; specific ontologies and ontology pattern for the semantic Web; new formalisms for semantic Web; user interfaces to the semantic Web; cleaning, assurance, and provenance of semantic Web data; services, and processes; social semantic Web, evaluation of semantic Web technology; semantic Web population from the human Web.

The Semantic Web aims at enriching the existing Web with meta-data and processing methods so as to provide web-based systems with advanced capabilities, in particular with context awareness and decision support. The objective of this book is to provide a coherent introduction to semantic web methods and research issues with a particular emphasis on reasoning. The 7th reasoning web Summer School, held in August 2011, focused on the central topic of applications of reasoning for the emerging “Web of Data”. The 12 chapters in the present book provide excellent educational material as well as a number of references for further reading. The book not only addresses students working in the area, but also those seeking an entry point to various topics related to reasoning over Web data.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 28th British National Conference on Databases, BNCOD 28, held in Manchester, UK, in July 2011. The 13 revised full papers, 2 short papers, 2 demo papers and 1 poster paper presented together with the abstracts of 2 keynote talks and 1 tutorial paper were carefully reviewed and selected from 44 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics such as XML compression, XML updates, column-oriented stores, provenance, warehousing, streamed data, data mashups, dataspaces, sensor network query processing, and pattern-oriented search.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International RuleML Symposium, RuleML 2011-America, held in Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA, in November 2011 - collocated with the 22nd International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI 2011. It is the second of two RuleML events that take place in 2011. The first RuleML Symposium, RuleML 2011-Europe, has been held in Barcelona, Spain, in July 2011. The 12 full papers, 5 short papers and 5 invited track and position papers presented together with 3 keynote speeches were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The accepted papers address a wide range of rules, semantic technology, and cross-industry standards, rules and automated reasoning, rule-based event processing and reaction rules, vocabularies, ontologies and business rules, cloud computing and rules, clinical semantics and rules.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems, RR 2011, held in Galway, Ireland in August 2011. The 13 revised full papers, 12 revised short papers presented together with 2 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 36 submissions. The papers address all current topics in Semantic Web, interplay between classical reasoning approach with welll established web languages such as RDF and OWL, reasoning languages, querying and optimization and rules and ontologies.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Semantics in Data and Knowledge Bases, SDKB 2010, held in Bordeaux, France in July 2010. The 6 revised full papers presented together with an introductory survey by the volume editors were carefully reviewed and selected during two rounds of revision and improvement. The papers reflect a variety of approaches to semantics in data and knowledge bases.

The two-volume set LNAI 6922 and LNAI 6923 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence, ICCCI 2011, held in Gdynia, Poland, in September 2011. The 112 papers in this two volume set presented together with 3 keynote speeches were carefully reviewed and selected from 300 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on knowledge management, machine learning and applications, autonomous and collective decision-making, collective computations and optimization, Web services and semantic Web, social networks and computational swarm intelligence and applications.

This volume composes the proceedings of the Second International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence––Technologies and Applications (ICCCI 2010), which was hosted by National Kaohsiung University of Applied Sciences and Wroclaw University of Technology, and was held in Kaohsiung City on November 10-12, 2010. ICCCI 2010 was technically co-sponsored by Shenzhen Graduate School of Harbin Institute of Technology, the Tainan Chapter of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the Taiwan Association for Web Intelligence Consortium and the Taiwanese Association for Consumer Electronics. It aimed to bring together researchers, engineers and po- cymakers to discuss the related techniques, to exchange research ideas, and to make friends. ICCCI 2010 focused on the following themes: • Agent Theory and Application • Cognitive Modeling of Agent Systems • Computational Collective Intelligence • Computer Vision • Computational Intelligence • Hybrid Systems • Intelligent Image Processing • Information Hiding • Machine Learning • Social Networks • Web Intelligence and Interaction

We would like to present, with great pleasure, the first volume of a new journal, Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence (TCCI). This journal, part of the new journal subline in the Springer series Lecture Notes in Computer Science, is devoted to research in computer-based methods of computational collective intel- gence (CCI) and their applications in a wide range of fields such as the Semantic Web, social networks and multi-agent systems. TCCI strives to cover new metho- logical, theoretical and practical aspects of CCI understood as the form of intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals (artificial and/or natural). The application of multiple computational intelligence technologies such as fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation, neural systems, consensus theory, etc., aims to support human and other collective intelligence and to create new forms of CCI in natural and/or artificial systems. TCCI is a double-blind refereed and authoritative reference dealing with the wo- ing potential of CCI methodologies and applications as well as emerging issues of interest to professionals and academics. This inaugural issue contains a collection of articles selected from regular subm- sions and invited papers of substantially extended contributions based on the best papers presented at the first International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence: Semantic Web, Social Networks and Multiagent Systems (ICCCI 2009) during October 5-7, 2009 in Wroclaw (Poland). This issue introduces advances in the foundations and applications of CCI and includes 10 papers.

Knowledge Management and Knowledge Engineering is a fascinating?eld of re- 1 search these days. In the beginning of EKAW, the modeling and acquisition of knowledge was the privilege of – or rather a burden for – a few knowledge engineers familiar with knowledge engineering paradigms and knowledge rep- sentationformalisms.While the aimhasalwaysbeentomodelknowledgedecl- atively and allow for reusability, the knowledge models produced in these early days were typically used in single and very speci?c applications and rarely - changed. Moreover, these models were typically rather complex, and they could be understood only by a few expert knowledge engineers. This situation has changed radically in the last few years as clearly indicated by the following trends: – The creation of (even formal) knowledge is now becoming more and more collaborative. Collaborative ontology engineering tools and social software platforms show the potential to leverage the wisdom of the crowds (or at least of “the many”) to lead to broader consensus and thus produce shared models which qualify better for reuse. – A trend can also be observed towards developing and publishing small but 2 3 4 high-impactvocabularies(e.g.,FOAF,DublinCore,GoodRelations)rather than complex and large knowledge models.

th The 11 International Workshop on Knowledge Management and Acquisition for Smart Systems and Services (PKAW 2010) has provided a forum for the past two decades for researchers and practitioners working in the area of machine intelligence. PKAW covers a spectrum of techniques and approaches to implement smartness in IT applications. As evidenced in the papers in this volume, machine intelligence solutions incorporate many areas of AI such as ontological engineering, agent-based techn- ogy, robotics, image recognition and the Semantic Web as well as many other fields of computing such as software engineering, security, databases, the Internet, information retrieval, language technology and game technology. PKAW has evolved to embrace and foster advances in theory, practice and te- nology not only in knowledge acquisition and capture but all aspects of knowledge management including reuse, sharing, maintenance, transfer, merging, reconciliation, creation and dissemination. As many nations strive to be knowledge economies and organizations seek to maximize their knowledge assets and usage, solutions to handle the complex task of knowledge management are more important than ever. This v- ume contributes towards this goal. This volume seeks to disseminate the latest solutions from the International Wo- shop on Knowledge Management and Acquisition for Smart Systems and Services (PKAW 2010) held in Daegu, Korea during August 30–31, 2010 in conjunction with the Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI 2010).

Metadata and semantic research is a growing complex ecosystem of conceptual, theoretical, methodological, and technological frameworks, offering innovative computational solutions in the design and development of computer-based systems. Within this perspective, researchers working in the area need to further develop and integrate a broad range of methods, results, and solutions coming from different areas. MTSR has been designed as a forum allowing researchers to present and discuss specialized results as general contributions to the field. This volume collects the papers selected for presentation at the 4th International Conference on Metadata and Semantic Research (MTSR 2010), held in Alcala de Henares––a world heritage city and birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes––at the University of Alcala (October 20–22, 2010). The first MTSR conference was held online in 2005, followed by two more editions: in Corfu (2007) and in Milan (2009). The experience acquired during the past five years, and the warm welcome of MTSR by the research community, encouraged us to organize this new edition of the series, and turn it into a yearly event. According to the number and quality of the contributions submitted for revision, our 2010 effort was again a considerable success.

The emergence of Web technologies for the distribution of an immense amount of data and knowledge has given rise to the need for supportive frameworks for kno- edge management. Semantic Web technologies aim at providing shared semantic spaces for Web contents, such that people, applications and communities can use a common platform to share information. Canadian Semantic Web: Technologies and Applications aims at contributing to the advancement of the Semantic Web by providing the most recent signi?cant - search on Semantic Web theory, techniques and applications in academia, industry and government in Canada and all over the world. It also enlightens possible - mantic Web research directions in future by reporting some works in-progress that presenton-goingresearchonprinciplesandapplicationsoftheSemanticWeb,while their implementation or deployment may have not been completed. This book consists of ten chapters. The chapters are extended versions of a - lected set of papers from the second Canadian Semantic Web Working Symposium (CSWWS 2009) and the twenty-?rst international Conference on Software En- neering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE 2009). CSWWS 2009 was held in Kelowna, British Columbia in May 2009. Since many of the challenging aspects of the research problems tackled in the Semantic Web area fall in the realm of Ar-?cial Intelligence or employ of AI techniques, CSWWS 2009 was organized in - nd sociation with the 22 Canadian Conference on Arti?cial Intelligence.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 2008 Pacific Rim Knowledge Acquisition Workshop, PKAW 2008, held in Hanoi, Vietnam, in December 2008 as part of 10th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, PRICAI 2008. The 20 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 submissions and went through two rounds of reviewing and improvement. The papers are organized in topical sections on machine learning and data mining, incremental knowledge acquisition, web-based techniques and applications, as well as domain specific knowledge acquisition methods and applications.

It is a great pleasure to share with you the Springer LNCS proceedings of the Second World Summit on the Knowledge Society, WSKS 2009, organized by the Open - search Society, Ngo, http://www.open-knowledge-society.org, and held in Samaria Hotel, in the beautiful city of Chania in Crete, Greece, September 16–18, 2009. The 2nd World Summit on the Knowledge Society (WSKS 2009) was an inter- tional scientific event devoted to promoting dialogue on the main aspects of the knowledge society towards a better world for all. The multidimensional economic and social crisis of the last couple of years has brought to the fore the need to discuss in depth new policies and strategies for a human centric developmental processes in the global context. This annual summit brings together key stakeholders involved in the worldwide development of the knowledge society, from academia, industry, and government, including policy makers and active citizens, to look at the impact and prospects of - formation technology, and the knowledge-based era it is creating, on key facets of l- ing, working, learning, innovating, and collaborating in today's hyper-complex world. The summit provides a distinct, unique forum for cross-disciplinary fertilization of research, favoring the dissemination of research on new scientific ideas relevant to - ternational research agendas such as the EU (FP7), OECD, or UNESCO. We focus on the key aspects of a new sustainable deal for a bold response to the multidimensional crisis of our times.

Computational collective intelligence (CCI) is most often understood as a subfield of artificial intelligence (AI) dealing with soft computing methods that enable group decisions to be made or knowledge to be processed among autonomous units acting in distributed environments. The needs for CCI techniques and tools have grown signi- cantly recently as many information systems work in distributed environments and use distributed resources. Web-based systems, social networks and multi-agent systems very often need these tools for working out consistent knowledge states, resolving conflicts and making decisions. Therefore, CCI is of great importance for today's and future distributed systems. Methodological, theoretical and practical aspects of computational collective int- ligence, such as group decision making, collective action coordination, and knowledge integration, are considered as the form of intelligence that emerges from the collabo- tion and competition of many individuals (artificial and/or natural). The application of multiple computational intelligence technologies such as fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation, neural systems, consensus theory, etc., can support human and other collective intelligence and create new forms of CCI in natural and/or artificial s- tems.

The Annual Asian Semantic Web Conference is one of the largest regional events in Asia with focused topics related to the Semantic Web. With the decade-round endeavor of Semantic Web believers, researchers and practitioners, the Semantic Web has made remarkable progress recently. It has raised significant attention from US and UK governments, as well as the European Commission who are willing to deploy Semantic Web technologies to enhance the transparency of eGovernment. The Linked Open Data initiative is on its way to convert the current document Web into a data Web and to further enabling various data and service mashups. The fast adoption of Semantic Web technologies in medical and life sciences has created impressive showcases to the world. All these efforts are a crucial step toward enabling the take-off and the success of the Semantic Web. The First Asian Semantic Web Conference was successfully held in China in 2006. With the following editions in Korea in 2007 and Thailand in 2008, it fostered a regional forum for connecting researchers and triggering innovations. This year, the 4th Asian Semantic Web Conference was held in Shanghai, China. We received 63 submissions from Asia, Europe, and North America, and 25 papers were accepted (the acceptance rate is around 40%). Each submission was reviewed by at least three members of the Program Committee. The Chairs moderated the discussion of conflict reviews or invited external reviewers to reach the final decisions.

The 2009 International Conference on Web Information Systems and Mining (WISM 2009) was held in Shanghai, China 7–8 November 2009. WISM 2009 received 598 submissions from 20 countries and regions. After rigorous reviews, 61 high-quality papers were selected for publication in this volume. The acceptance rate was 10.2%. The aim of WISM 2009 was to bring together researchers working in many diff- ent areas of Web information systems and Web mining to foster exchange of new ideas and promote international collaborations. In addition to the large number of submitted papers and invited sessions, there were several internationally well-known keynote speeches. On behalf of the Organizing Committee, we thank the Shanghai University of El- tric Power for its sponsorship and logistics support. We also thank the members of the Organizing Committee and the Program Committee for their hard work. We are very grateful to the keynote speakers, invited session organizers, session chairs, reviewers, and student helpers. Last but not least, we thank all the authors and participants for their great contributions that made this conference possible. November 2009 Wenyin Liu Xiangfeng Luo Fu Lee Wang Jingsheng Lei Organization Organizing Committee General Co-chairs Jialin Cao Shanghai University of Electric Power, China Jingsheng Lei Hainan University, China Program Committee Co-chairs Wenyin Liu City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Xiangfeng Luo Shanghai University, China Local Arrangements Chair Hao Zhang Shanghai University of Electric Power, China

As the Web continues to grow, increasing amounts of data are being made available for human and machine consumption. This emerging Semantic Web is rapidly entering the mainstream and, as a result, a variety of new solutions for searching, aggregating and the intelligent delivery of information are being produced,bothinresearchandcommercialsettings.Severalnewchallengesarise from this context, both from a technical and human–computer interaction p- spective – e.g., as issues to do with the scalability andusability of Semantic Web solutions become particularly important. The International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) is the major inter- tional forum where the latest research results and technical innovations on all aspects of the Semantic Web are presented. ISWC brings together researchers, practitioners, and users from the areas of arti?cial intelligence, databases, social networks,distributedcomputing,Webengineering,informationsystems,natural language processing, soft computing, and human–computer interaction to d- cuss the major challenges and proposed solutions, success stories and failures, as well the visions that can advance the?eld.

Description based on print version record.

The emergence of content- and context-aware search engines, which not only personalize searching and delivery but also the content, has caused the emergence of new infrastructures capable of end-to-end ubiquitous transmission of personalized multimedia content to any device on any network at any time. Personalizing and adapting content requires pro

ThepromiseoftheSemanticWeb,atits most expansive, is to allow knowledge to be freely accessed and exchanged by software. It is now recognized that if the SemanticWebis to containdeepknowledge,theneedfornewrepresentationand reasoning techniques is going to be critical. These techniques need to?nd the righttrade-o?betweenexpressiveness,scalabilityandrobustnesstodealwiththe inherently incomplete, contradictory and uncertain nature of knowledge on the Web. The International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems (RR) was founded to address these needs and has grown into a major international forum in this area. The third RR conference was held during October 25–26, 2009 in Chantilly, Virginia, co-located with the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009). This year 41 papers were submitted from authors in 21 countries. The P- gram Committee performed outstandingly to ensure that each paper submitted to RR 2009 was thoroughly reviewed by at least three referees in a short - riod of time. The resulting conference presented papers of high quality on many of the key issues for reasoning on the Semantic Web. RR 2009 was fortunate to have two distinguished invited speakers. Robert Kowalski, in his talk “- tegrating Logic Programming and Production Systems with Abductive Logic Programming Agents” addressed some of the fundamental considerations - hind reasoning about evolving systems. Benjamin Grossof's talk “SILK: Higher Level Rules with Defaults and Semantic Scalability” described the design of a major next-generation rule system. The invited tutorial “Uncertainty Reas- ing for the Semantic Web” by Thomas Lukasiewicz provided perspectives on a central issue in this area.

The 2009 International Symposium on Rule Interchange and Applications (RuleML 2009), collocated in Las Vegas, Nevada, with the 12th International Business Rules Forum, was the premier place to meet and to exchange ideas from all?elds of rules technologies. The aims of RuleML 2009 were both to present new and interesting research results and to show successfully deployed rule-basedapplications.This annualsymposium is the?agshipevent of the Rule Markup and Modeling Initiative (RuleML). The RuleML Initiative (www.ruleml.org) is a non-pro?t umbrella organi- tion of several technical groups organized by representatives from academia, industry and public sectors working on rule technologies and applications. Its aim is to promote the study, research and application of rules in heterogeneous distributed environments such as the Web. RuleML maintains e?ective links with other major international societies and acts as intermediary between v- ious ‘specialized'rule vendors, applications, industrial and academic research groups, as well as standardization e?orts from, for example, W3C, OMG, and OASIS. To emphasize the importance of rule standards RuleML 2009 featured, besides a number of tutorials on various rule aspects, a tutorial and a workshop dedicated to the newly released W3C Rule Interchange Format (RIF).

This book about legal ontologies and Semantic Web applications has its roots in workshops and conferences on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Law. The domain of law belongs to the early adopters of ontologies and semantic web technology to support its enormous and fast growing demand for effective information management; it is probably only surpassed in this respect by the bio-sciences. Having easy access to relevant legal information among the rising flood of legal documentation is not only the concern of legal practitioners. The life and work of citizens becomes more and more entangled with legal issues as well. This volume reflects the wisdom abstracted from experiences accumulated over more than a decade of research and development in this area. It contains a representative overview of the state-of-the-art, covering both theoretical aspects and practical systems. The latter has been an important driver of research in this area, which can be observed from the geographical origins: the work discussed is mainly European, due to R&D initiatives of the European Commission in the various Framework programs. The Semantic Web is not only an area of research, but also a worldwide project where easy-to-construct applications can directly find their communities of users. However, the semantics that are the engines for these applications are still the bottleneck in the development. Therefore one finds a large range of technologies and tricks to populate ontologies with machine understandable meaning of terms in this volume. This varies from the use of top-ontologies via design patterns to extraction of terms from text and alignment of existing terminologies. In fact, one may see this book not so much as the report of results of research, but rather as a specification of the elements of an emerging methodology for developing legal ontologies.

WearepleasedtowelcomeyoutotheproceedingsoftheThirdInternationalC- ference onSemantic andDigital Media Technologiesheld inKoblenz,Germany. The SAMT agenda brings together researchers at extreme ends of the - mantic multimedia spectrum. At one end, the Semantic Web and its supporting technologies are becoming established in both the open data environment and within specialist domains, such as corporate intranet search, e-Science (parti- larly life sciences), and cultural heritage. To facilitate the world-wide sharing of media, W3C is developing standard ways of denoting fragments of audio/visual content and of specifying and associating semantics with these. At the other end of the spectrum, media analysis tools continue to grow in sophistication, identifying features that can then be associated with explicit semantics, be they expressed formally or informally, using proprietary formats or open standards. Recent progress at these two fronts of the SAMT spectrum means that research spanningthesemanticgapisnowofvitalimportancetofeedtherealapplications that are emerging. This conference also represents a step towards bridging the gap between the research cultures and their respective approaches at both ends of the spectrum. The papers selected show that SAMT is able to attract researchers from media analysis, who see the bene?ts that more explicit semantics can provide, as well as researchers from knowledge engineering who realize that, while a picture can be expressed as a thousand concepts, a million morearewaiting to be extracted.

It is a great pleasure to share with you the Springer LNCS proceedings of the First World Summit on the Knowledge Society - WSKS 2008 that was organized by the Open Research Society, NGO, http://www.open-knowledge-society.org, and took place in the American College of Greece, http://www.acg.gr, during September 24–27, 2008, in Athens, Greece. The World Summit on the Knowledge Society Series is an international attempt to promote a dialogue on the main aspects of a knowledge society toward a better world for all based on knowledge and learning. The WSKS Series brings together academics, people from industry, policy makers, politicians, government officers and active citizens to look at the impact of infor- tion technology, and the knowledge-based era it is creating, on key facets of today's world: the state, business, society and culture. Six general pillars provide the constitutional elements of the WSKS series: • Social and Humanistic Computing for the Knowledge Society––Emerging Te- nologies and Systems for the Society and Humanity • Knowledge, Learning, Education, Learning Technologies and E-learning for the Knowledge Society • Information Technologies––Knowledge Management Systems––E-business and Enterprise Information Systems for the Knowledge Society • Culture and Cultural Heritage––Technology for Culture Management––Management of Tourism and Entertainment––Tourism Networks in the Knowledge Society • Government and Democracy for the Knowledge Society • Research and Sustainable Development in the Knowledge Society The summit provides a distinct, unique forum for cross-disciplinary fertilization of research, favoring the dissemination of research that is relevant to international re-