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From Visions to Applications - Semantics: The New Paradigm Shift in IT
Semantics 2006 is the first concentrated event in Europe focussing on applied aspects of semantic technologies. The event addresses researchers to contribute new research ideas, interesting applications, industrial adoption scenarios and visions in the Semantic Web domain.
Besides the impact on the research community, Semantics 2006 aims to bring together researchers with industry representatives like Chief Level Executives, Project Managers, Software Vendors and Investors.
Semantics 2006 is a sequel of the Semantics 2005, which took place from 23rd – 25th of November 2005 at the Tech Gate Vienna and attracted 250 visitors. The annual event is organized by a consortium, consisting of the Austrian Computer Society, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, NIWA websolutions, profactor Steyr, Salzburg New Media Lab and the Semantic Web School.

A major bottleneck towards business applications of Semantic Web technology and machine reasoning is the lack of industry-strength ontologies that go beyond academic prototypes. The design of such ontologies from scratch in a textbook-style ontology engineering process is in many cases unattractive, for it would require significant effort, and because the resulting ontologies could not build on top of existing community commitment. Also, real-world problems of data and systems interoperability can only be overcome using Semantic Web technology if ontologies exist that represent the very standards currently in use in systems and databases.
 

ISWC is a major international forum where visionary and state-of-the-art research of all aspects of the Semantic Web are presented. ISWC2006 follows the 1st International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2002 which was held in Sardinia, Italy, 9-12 June 2002), the 2nd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2003 which was held in Florida, USA, 20 - 23 October 2003), 3rd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2004 which was held in Hiroshima, Japan, 7 - 11 November 2004), and 4th International Semantic Web Conference 2005 (ISWC'05 which was held in Galway, Ireland, 6 - 10 November, 2005).

An International Workshop on Engineering Semantic Agent Systems will take place at the 30th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference in Chicago.
The workshop theme will be Applying Semantic Web Technologies in Research and Development of Software Agents, Mobile Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.
IMPORTANT DATES

• Apr 1, 2006 deadline for paper submission.
• May 15, 2006 notification of acceptance.
• June 16, 2006 camera-ready due.

Please follow the link for full details.

A new paradigm – service-orientation – is currently emerging for distributed computing and e-business processing; it has evolved from object-oriented and component-based computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. This new paradigm utilizes services (autonomous platform-independent computational elements that can be described, published, discovered and accessed over the Internet using standard protocols) as fundamental elements for developing applications/solutions; services will be important for customers and not the specific software or hardware component that is used to implement the services. In this context, services become the next level of abstraction in the process of creating systems that would enable automation of e-businesses. This paradigm shift is changing the way the computer software is developed and used (designed, architected, delivered, consumed, and analysed), and this way of reorganizing software applications and infrastructure into a set of interacting services is usually referred to as Service-oriented Architectures (SOA).
 

Web services have added a new level of functionality to the current Web by taking a first step towards seamless integration of distributed software components using Web standards. Nevertheless, current Web service technologies around SOAP, WSDL and UDDI operate at a syntactic level and, therefore, although they support interoperability (i.e. interoperability between the many diverse application development platforms that exist today) through common standards, they still require human interaction to a large extent. For example, the human programmer has to manually search for appropriate Web services in order to combine them in a useful manner, which limits scalability and greatly curtails the added economic value of envisioned with the advent of Web services.

co-located with The 1st Asian Semantic Web Conference (ASWC 2006 )
This workshop aims to tackle the research problems around methods, concepts, models, languages and technology that enables discovery of services in the context of the WWW. Of particular interest are the methodologies that enable automatic or semi-automatic discovery of services, semantic web service, web services, and e-services. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and industry attendees addressing many of these issues, and promote and foster a greater understanding of how the discovery of services can assist business to business and enterprise application integration.

The vision of the Semantic Web is to make the contents of the Web unambiguously computer interpretable, enabling automation of a diversity of tasks currently performed by human beings. The goal of providing semantics and automated reasoning capabilities to the Web draws upon research in a broad range of areas including Artificial Intelligence, Databases, Software Engineering, Distributed Computing and Information Systems. Contributions to date have included languages for semantic annotation of Web documents, automated reasoning capabilities for Web languages, ontologies, query and view languages, semantic translation of Web contents, semantic integration middleware, technologies and principles for building multi-agent and Grid systems, semantic interoperation of programs and devices, technologies and principles for describing, searching and composing Web Services, and more.
The 1st Asian Semantic Web Conference (ASWC2006) has been established to foster research and development of the Semantic Web and its related technology in Asia. ASWC will be run by ASWC steering committee in harmony with the sister conferences such as International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) and European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC).