ESWC post conference press release

FYI, Please find below the ESWC post conference press release.



300 DELEGATES DISCUSS THE NEXT GENERATION OF THE WEB AT THE EUROPEAN  
SEMANTIC WEB CONFERENCE

The 3rd European Semantic Web Conference took place from 11th -14th  
of June, in the Montenegrin town of Budva. Over 300 semantic  
technology researchers and practitioners, an increase of more than  
25% on the previous year’s event, attended various workshops,  
tutorials and technical paper sessions encompassing all aspects of  
semantic technology including industrial considerations.

On June 13th, a highly charged crowd listened to the opening ceremony  
and the first invited speaker Frank van Harmelen, who outlined how a  
number of basic assumptions within computer science had been  
challenged by the Semantic Web and discussed aspects of the new  
research agenda this had brought up. Day 2 began with an enlightening  
talk by Eduard Hovy who discussed how Natural Language Processing  
techniques could enable semantics to be extracted from text within  
web pages in a scalable fashion. The conference concluded with the  
final invited speaker Anthony Jameson who addressed the usability of  
the Semantic Web. In particular, Anthony focused on the trade-off  
between hiding complexity and allowing the user to know what is going  
on behind the scenes.

Another highlight of the conference was the industry forum organised  
by Alain Leger, which featured two keynotes from Industry and  
Research. The first keynote was Natasa Milic-Frayling from Microsoft  
who spoke about “Issues and strategies for digitization preservation  
of the digital content” and Christian Drumm of SAP who gave a talk on  
“Semantic Business Automation.”

This year’s event also encompassed various opportunities for prizes  
and awards, including awards for the best paper, poster,  
demonstration system and a highly coveted iPod nano for the Semantic  
Conference Design Challenge.
The best paper awards went to Aditya Kalyanpur, Bijan Parsia, Evren  
Sirin, and Bernardo Cuenca-Grau for their paper titled “Repairing  
Unsatisfiable Concepts in OWL Ontologies” and also to Thomas Eiter,  
Giovambattista Ianni, Roman Schindlauer, Hans Tompits for their paper  
titled “Effective Integration of Declarative Rules with External  
Evaluations for Semantic Web Reasoning.”

The best demonstration system went to Marko Grobelnik, Blaz Fortuna  
and Dunja Mladenic for the OntoGen system. OntoGen is a system for  
(semi-)automatically deriving ontologies from large document  
collections.
The best poster award went to Max Völkel, Markus Krötzsch, Denny  
Vrandecic, Heiko Haller, Rudi Studer from the University of Karlsruhe  
for their poster on Semantic Wikipedia.
The Semantic Conference Design Challenge was won by Gunnar Grimnes  
from DFKI. This contest required delegates to write a short outline  
of a Semantic Web application or service that could feasibly be  
implemented to enhance the conference experience for delegates.

The ESWC conference series is organised by the European Semantic  
Systems Initiative (ESSI), which is a group of four European  
Commission 6th Framework Programme projects ASG, DIP, Knowledge Web  
and SEKT, who collectively aim to support world-wide research,  
development, industrial uptake and standardisation in the areas of  
the Semantic Web and Semantic Systems.

For further information please contact :
Christen Ensor
Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI)
Phone Number:  +353-91-495151
email: christen.ensor@deri.org.

Received on Friday, 21 July 2006 08:25:00 UTC