5th European Semantic Web Conference
01 - 05 June 2008
Tenerife (Spain)
http://www.eswc2008.org/

Sponsored by the Okkam project http://fp7.okkam.org/

ESWC is the leading European conference on theory, practice and application of Semantic Web Technologies, constantly attracting a large number of high quality submissions from both academia and industry. In addition to its plenary scientific sessions, the conference includes a Ph.D. Symposium to allow doctoral students to present their work and obtain guidance from leading scientists in the field.

The ESWC 2008 Ph.D. Symposium will take place in Tenerife - Spain, on June 2, 2008. We invite doctoral students working on any aspect of the Semantic Web to submit an extended abstract describing the research problem they tackle in the context of their Ph.D. Each abstract will be thoroughly reviewed by two expert researchers in the field. In addition to the feedback received during the review process, students whose abstracts get accepted will have the opportunity to present their research agenda and interact with both their peers and experienced scientists during the symposium. All students are encouraged to submit an abstract, though preference will be given to students who are at an early stage of their Ph.D. (first or second year). Students who are submitting papers on specific portions of their work to the main conference are also invited to apply to the Ph.D. symposium. In that case, the short paper for the symposium must give an overview of the student's dissertation, while the paper for the main conference should focus on a specific piece of this work.

Submissions

Extended abstracts should not exceed five pages. Papers should be formatted according to Springer LNCS guidelines (see http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html/) and submitted electronically as pdf files through the EasyChair conference submission system here.

We encourage students to organize their extended abstract according to the following template:

• Research Problem: gives a description of the overall research problem tackled in the context of the Ph.D. and its relevance to Semantic Web area
• Related Work: discusses the state of the art in the particular field
• Contributions: describes how the proposed project will advance the state of the art, summarizes the expected contributions and real-world use-cases
• Evaluation: describes the methodology used to evaluate/validate the results of the projects
• Work Plan: sketches the different stages of the project, clearly differentiating between the results achieved so far, current work and planned work

Extended abstracts structured differently will be considered as well. The best submissions -- in terms of innovation, scientific soundness and clarity of presentation -- will be invited to the symposium for presentation. In addition to the full papers, a limited number of submissions will be accepted as two page posters. Students whose work get accepted as a full paper or poster will have to register to the symposium to present their work. 500 Euro will be awarded to the best presenter. In addition, papers and posters will be published online as CEUR Workshop Proceedings.

Important Dates

Extended Abstracts Due: March 7, 2008 (11:59pm CET)
Notification of Acceptance: April 4, 2008
Camera Ready Version Due: April 25, 2008
Ph.D. Symposium: June 2, 2008

TOPICS

Topics related to the symposium include, but are not limited, to:

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Daniel Abadi, Yale University (U.S.A.)
Karl Aberer, EPFL (Switzerland)
Harith Alani, University of Southampton (U.K.)
Abraham Bernstein, University of Zurich (Switzerland)
Paolo Bouquet, University of Trento (Italy)
Jeremy Carroll, HP Labs (U.K.)
Isabel Cruz, University of Illinois at Chicago (U.S.A.)
Jerome Euzenat, INRIA Rhone-Alpes (France)
Boi Faltings, EPFL (Switzerland)
Enrico Franconi, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Italy)
Carole Goble, University of Manchester (U.K.)
Peter Haase, University of Karlsruhe (Germany)
Siegfried Handschuh, NUI Galway (Ireland)
Frank van Harmelen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
Matthias Klusch, DFKI (Germany)
Diana Maynard, University of Sheffield (U.K.)
Riichiro Mizoguchi, Osaka University (Japan)
Enrico Motta, The Open University (U.K.)
Natasha Noy, Stanford University (U.S.A.)
Daniel Olmedilla, L3S Research Center (Germany)
Jeff Z. Pan, University of Aberdeen (U.K.)
Axel Polleres, NUI Galway (Ireland)
Marta Sabou, Open University (U.K.)
Sebastian Schaffert, Salzburg Research (Austria)
Guus Schreiber, Free University Amsterdam (The Netherlands)
Luciano Serafini, Istituto Trentino di Cultura (Italy)
Amit Sheth, Wright State University (U.S.A.)
Pavel Shvaiko, University of Trento (Italy)
Elena Simperl, University of Innsbruck (Austria)
Heiner Stuckenschmidt, University of Mannheim (Germany)
Hideaki Takeda, University of Tokyo (Japan)
Tomas Vitvar, NUI Galway (Ireland)
Chris Welty, IBM Watson Research Center (U.S.A.)
Ilya Zaihrayeu, University of Trento (Italy)
Michal Zaremba, University of Innsbruck (Austria)

For further information and for any questions regarding the event or the submission process, please contact the Ph.D. Symposium Chair:

Philippe Cudre-Mauroux
M.I.T. -- U.S.A.
pcm (AT) csail mit edu

We would like to thank the Okkam project (http://fp7.okkam.org/) for sponsoring this event and STI International (http://www.sti2.org/) for its help in organizing the symposium.