PD Dr. Steffen Staab is a senior lecturer in applied computer science at the University of Karlsruhe. He has earned a M.S.E. from University of Pennsylvania, a Dr. rer. nat. from University of Freiburg and his habilitation from University of Karlsruhe. He has done research in the fields of computational linguistics, text mining, ontology engineering, knowledge management, and peer-to-peer.

Research Track.- Involving Domain Experts in Authoring OWL Ontologies.- Supporting Collaborative Ontology Development in Protégé.- Identifying Potentially Important Concepts and Relations in an Ontology.- RoundTrip Ontology Authoring.- nSPARQL: A Navigational Language for RDF.- An Experimental Comparison of RDF Data Management Approaches in a SPARQL Benchmark Scenario.- Anytime Query Answering in RDF through Evolutionary Algorithms.- The Expressive Power of SPARQL.- Integrating Object-Oriented and Ontological Representations: A Case Study in Java and OWL.- Extracting Semantic Constraint from Description Text for Semantic Web Service Discovery.- Enhancing Semantic Web Services with Inheritance.- Using Semantic Distances for Reasoning with Inconsistent Ontologies.- Statistical Learning for Inductive Query Answering on OWL Ontologies.- Optimization and Evaluation of Reasoning in Probabilistic Description Logic: Towards a Systematic Approach.- Modeling Documents by Combining Semantic Concepts with Unsupervised Statistical Learning.- Comparison between Ontology Distances (Preliminary Results).- Folksonomy-Based Collabulary Learning.- Combining a DL Reasoner and a Rule Engine for Improving Entailment-Based OWL Reasoning.- Improving an RCC-Derived Geospatial Approximation by OWL Axioms.- OWL Datatypes: Design and Implementation.- Laconic and Precise Justifications in OWL.- Learning Concept Mappings from Instance Similarity.- Instanced-Based Mapping between Thesauri and Folksonomies.- Collecting Community-Based Mappings in an Ontology Repository.- Algebras of Ontology Alignment Relations.- Scalable Grounded Conjunctive Query Evaluation over Large and Expressive Knowledge Bases.- A Kernel Revision Operator for Terminologies - Algorithms and Evaluation.- Description LogicReasoning with Decision Diagrams.- RDF123: From Spreadsheets to RDF.- Evaluating Long-Term Use of the Gnowsis Semantic Desktop for PIM.- Bringing the IPTC News Architecture into the Semantic Web.- RDFS Reasoning and Query Answering on Top of DHTs.- An Interface-Based Ontology Modularization Framework for Knowledge Encapsulation.- On the Semantics of Trust and Caching in the Semantic Web.- Semantic Web Service Choreography: Contracting and Enactment.- Formal Model for Semantic-Driven Service Execution.- Efficient Semantic Web Service Discovery in Centralized and P2P Environments.- Exploring Semantic Social Networks Using Virtual Reality.- Semantic Grounding of Tag Relatedness in Social Bookmarking Systems.- Semantic Modelling of User Interests Based on Cross-Folksonomy Analysis.- ELP: Tractable Rules for OWL 2.- Term Dependence on the Semantic Web.- Semantic Relatedness Measure Using Object Properties in an Ontology.- Semantic Web in Use Track.- Thesaurus-Based Search in Large Heterogeneous Collections.- Deploying Semantic Web Technologies for Work Integrated Learning in Industry - A Comparison: SME vs. Large Sized Company.- Creating and Using Organisational Semantic Webs in Large Networked Organisations.- An Architecture for Semantic Navigation and Reasoning with Patient Data - Experiences of the Health-e-Child Project.- Requirements Analysis Tool: A Tool for Automatically Analyzing Software Requirements Documents.- OntoNaviERP: Ontology-Supported Navigation in ERP Software Documentation.- Market Blended Insight: Modeling Propensity to Buy with the Semantic Web.- DogOnt - Ontology Modeling for Intelligent Domotic Environments.- Introducing IYOUIT.- A Semantic Data Grid for Satellite Mission Quality Analysis.- A Process Catalog for Workflow Generation.- Inference Web inAction: Lightweight Use of the Proof Markup Language.- Supporting Ontology-Based Dynamic Property and Classification in WebSphere Metadata Server.- Towards a Multimedia Content Marketplace Implementation Based on Triplespaces.- Doctoral Consortium Track.- Semantic Enrichment of Folksonomy Tagspaces.- Contracting and Copyright Issues for Composite Semantic Services.- Parallel Computation Techniques for Ontology Reasoning.- Towards Semantic Mapping for Casual Web Users.- Interactive Exploration of Heterogeneous Cultural Heritage Collections.- End-User Assisted Ontology Evolution in Uncertain Domains.- Learning Methods in Multi-grained Query Answering.

The Web is a globalinformationspace consistingoflinked documents andlinked data. As the Web continues to grow and new technologies, modes of interaction, and applications are being developed, the task of the Semantic Web is to unlock the power of information available on the Web into a common semantic inf- mation space and to make it available for sharing and processing by automated tools as well as by people. Right now, the publication of large datasets on the Web, the opening of data access interfaces, and the encoding of the semantics of the data extend the current human-centric Web. Now, the Semantic Web c- munity is tackling the challenges of how to create and manage Semantic Web content, how to make Semantic Web applications robust and scalable, and how to organize and integrate information from di?erent sources for novel uses. To foster the exchange of ideas and collaboration, the International Semantic Web Conference brings together researchers and practitioners in relevant disciplines such as arti?cial intelligence, databases, social networks, distributed computing, Web engineering, information systems, natural language processing, soft c- puting, and human-computer interaction. This volume contains the main proceedings of ISWC 2008, which we are - cited to o?er to the growing community of researchers and practitioners of the Semantic Web. We got a tremendous response to our call for research papers from a truly international community of researchers and practitioners from 41 countries submitting 261 papers. Each paper receivedan averageof 3.