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The mission of the Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2010) is to bring together researchers and practioners dealing with different aspects of semantics on the Web. ESWC2010 builds on the success of the former European Semantic Web Conference series, but seeks to extend its focus by engaging with other communities within and outside ICT, in which semantics can play an important role. At the same time, ESWC2010 is a truly international conference. Semantics of web content, enriched with domain theories (ontologies), data about web usage, natural language processing, etc. will enable a web that provides a qualitatively new level of functionality. It will weave together a large network of human knowledge and make this knowledge machine-processable. Various automated services, based on reasoning with metadata and ontologies, will help the users to achieve their goals by accessing and processing information in machine-understandable form. This network of knowledge systems will ultimately lead to truly intelligent systems, which will be employed for various complex decision-making tasks. Research about web semantics can benefit from ideas and cross-fertilization with many other areas: Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Database and Information Systems, Information Retrieval, Multimedia, Distributed Systems, Social Networks, Web Engineering, and Web Science.

The STI International Symposium 2010 is the annual event where representatives from the STI Member organizations gather together to share research achievements and establish beneficial relationships with fellow researchers and developers in the progressing field of semantic technologies. The Symposium is a broaden version of our previous two Offsites with more invited talks, as well as extended poster and demo sessions providing participants with more interactive time focusing on sharing their impressive accomplishments of the past year with fellows and colleagues from around the world. The STI International Symposium 2010 will take place in Kalamaki, Crete.

The Web of Data aims at exposing data as resources on the Web and interlinking them with semantically related resources. This tutorial shows how multimedia content can be integrated into the Web of Data from a practical point of view and how users and developers can consume and benefit from linked data. Attendees will receive an easy introduction into the technical principles of the Web of Data, accompanied with practical demos. The tutorial is split into two parts: in the first part, an overview of the Web of Data and the Linking Open Data (LOD) initiative is given. The second part focuses on aspects of multimedia in the context of the Web of Data. All materials and demos will be available online.

The 3rd European Semantic Technology Conference - ESTC2009 - will be organized in Vienna, Austria for the third time in a row. The aim of the conference is to bring together the world's leading thinkers, innovators, developers, engineers, and senior practitioners within organizations responsible for information technology and systems in one place to learn about how to integrate this unparalleled technology into their operations. ESTC is Europe's most prominent and authoritative conference focusing on the growth of the ICT semantic technology markets, highlighted by showcased industry practices, advancements in the field of semantic technologies achieved in the past year, and successful marketing strategies in delivering semantic applications that generate new revenues. Participants will learn how to develop a cohesive strategy for managing semantic technology initiatives and how to utilizing these to evolve the operations and effectiveness of their organizations.

Heavily inspired by the idea of the VoCamp, the Linked Data Camp is a series of informal events where people can spend some dedicated time, discussing and working on the aforementioned aspects of an even better Web of Data, by designing and creating prototypes, vocabularies, mock-ups, or applications. People are asked to come together, to share their thoughts and to get hands on developing novel applications for the Web of Data. The emphasis of the events is not on creating the perfect result, a new technology, ready-to-use services, or a detailed concept for a new application, but on discovering and creating new building blocks and concepts that are good enough for other people to build upon.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is becoming a key aspect for rapidly evolving businesses that require agile system composability and flexibility. As core concepts of any SOA-based system, services have recently received significant interest. They can be used to support Business-to-Business (B2B), Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), and collaborations within or between Virtual Organizations. Like other software components services expose both functional properties (i.e. what they do) and non-functional properties (i.e. the way they are supplied). Non-functional properties (NFPs) of a system are many and varied, including all properties, which are not directly related to the functionality provided. NFPs include quality of service (QoS) as well as other properties such as cost, adherence to standards and obligations on the consumer/provider. QoS is one of the most important subsets of non-functional properties. Although the term QoS is traditionally used to refer specifically to network performance and reliability characteristics (and methods of guaranteeing these properties) in the context of SOA the term must refer to a wider variety of service properties. This is because there are numerous properties which can be used as indicators of quality (including, e.g. performance, dependability, security, accuracy, customer service, trust, etc.). The term, as applied in SOA, must also refer to properties of system components at different levels of granularity (e.g. network, server, service, operation).

Service oriented computing is an interdisciplinary paradigm that revolutionizes the very fabric of distributed software development, including not only complex enterprise applications but also scientific, mobile, telecommuncations and embedded system-based applications.

This year ICSOC and its European partner ServiceWave Conference series are particularly pleased to join forces. The joint ICSOC/ServiceWave 2009 aims to provide a world-leading forum and unique opportunity for academic researchers and industry practitioners to report on groundbreaking research work in service oriented computing. The joint conference fosters the creation of cross-community scientific excellence by gathering academic and industrial experts from various disciplines such as business process management, distributed systems, computer networks, wireless & mobile communication networks, grid computing, networking, service science and software engineering.

ICSOC/ServiceWave 2009 places particular emphasis on outstanding research papers leading towards the convergence of the Internet of Services & Things.

The conference will feature research and industry talks, tutorials, demonstrations, and workshops.

This SWS Challenge workshop, in conjunction with ECOWS 2009, provides a forum for researchers and developers of Semantic Web Services to present and discuss the latest progress in the area and to discuss the gap between research, required methodologies, tools and their applications in practice.
 
The workshop invites the submission of papers related to the topics of interest below as well as papers describing a solution for one of the SWS-Challenge scenarios. Participants are also invited to propose industrially-relevant new scenarios to be incorporated into the official SWS Challenge testbed.