Semantic web has grown into a mature field of research. Its methods find innovative applications on and off the World Wide Web. Its underlying technologies have significant impact on adjacent fields of research and on industrial applications. This new book series reports on the state-of-the-art in foundations, methods, and applications of semantic web and its underlying technologies. It is a central forum for the communication of recent developments and comprises research monographs, textbooks and edited volumes on all topics related to the semantic web. In this first volume several non-monotonic extensions to description logics (DLs) are investigated, namely auto-epistemic DLs, circumscriptive DLs and terminological default rules, all of which extend standard DL inference mechanisms by forms of closed-world and default reasoning associated to common-sense features. A matchmaking framework is established for semantic resource descriptions formulated in the DL formalism that uses various DL inferences to judge resource compatibility. Special emphasis lies on mapping the technical formalities of model-theoretic semantics of DLs to more intuitive notions that abstract from the details of logic for the framework’s easier adoption in applications. The particular contributions of Semantic Matchmaking with Nonmonotonic Description Logics span the fields of non-monotonic reasoning with description logics in artificial intelligence, matchmaking of ontology-based descriptions and semantic web service discovery. A novel tableaux calculus for reasoning in circumscriptive DLs is introduced and it is demonstrated how the various nonmonotonic extensions to description logics can be used to realize common-sense features and local closed-world reasoning in a semantic web setting in general.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems, RR 2012, held in Vienna, Austria, in September 2012. The 27 revised research papers, presented together with 2 invited talks and 5 research summaries were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions. The papers were organized in topical sections on technical communications, algorithms, design aspects of rule markup, design of ontology languages, engineering of engines, translators, and other tools, standardization efforts, such as the Rules Interchange Format activity at W3C, and applications.

This volume contains papers from the technical program of the 7th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2010), held from May 30 to June 3, 2010, in Heraklion, Greece. ESWC 2010 presented the latest results in research and applications of Semantic Web technologies. ESWC 2010 built on the success of the former European Semantic Web Conference series, but sought to extend its focus by engaging with other communities within and outside Information and Communication Technologies, in which semantics can play an important role. At the same time, ESWC has become 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 p- vides 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 infor- tion in machine-understandable form. This network of knowledge systems will ultimately lead to truly intelligent systems, which will be employed for va- ous complex decision-making tasks. Research about Web semantics can bene?t from ideas and cross-fertilization with many other areas: arti?cial intelligence, natural language processing, database and information systems, information - trieval, multimedia, distributed systems, social networks, Web engineering, and Web science.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems, RR 2009, held in Chantilly, VA, USA, in October 2009. The 15 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 41 submissions. The papers address all current topics in Web reasoning and rule systems such as proof/deduction procedures, scalability, uncertainty, knowledge amalgamation and querying, and rules for decision support and production systems.

The two-volume set LNCS 8218 and 8219 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2013, held in Sydney, Australia, in October 2013. The International Semantic Web Conference is the premier forum for Semantic Web research, where cutting edge scientific results and technological innovations are presented, where problems and solutions are discussed, and where the future of this vision is being developed. It brings together specialists in fields such as artificial intelligence, databases, social networks, distributed computing, Web engineering, information systems, human-computer interaction, natural language processing, and the social sciences. Part 1 (LNCS 8218) contains a total of 45 papers which were presented in the research track. They were carefully reviewed and selected from 210 submissions. Part 2 (LNCS 8219) contains 16 papers from the in-use track which were accepted from 90 submissions. In addition, it presents 10 contributions to the evaluations and experiments track and 5 papers of the doctoral consortium.

The general objective of the thesis is to provide domain independent, and resource independent methods and tools for speeding up the ontology development process and is achieved by reusing and re-engineering as much as possible available non-ontological resources (NORs). To fulfil this overall goal, we have decomposed it into the following methodological and technological objectives: - The definition of methodological aspects related to the reuse of non-ontological resources for building ontologies. - The definition of methodological aspects related to the re-engineering of non-ontological resources for building ontologies. - The creation of a library of patterns for re-engineering non-ontological resources into ontologies. - The development of a software library, NOR2O, that implements the suggestions given by the re-engineering patterns.

This volume constitutes the revised selected papers of the 6th International Workshop, DALT 2008, held as satellite workshop of AAMAS 2008, the 7th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, in Estoril, Portugal, on May 12, 2008. The 12 papers, presented together with 3 invited papers, were carefully reviewed and selected from 14 submissions. The workshop provided a discussion forum to both (i) support the transfer of declarative paradigms and techniques to the broader community of agent researchers and practitioners, and (ii) to bring the issue of designing complex agent systems to the attention of researchers working on declarative languages and technologies.

Ontological modelling today is applied in many areas of science and technology, including the Semantic Web. The W3C standard OWL defines one of the most important ontology languages based on the semantics of description logics. An alternative is to use rule languages in knowledge modelling, as proposed in the W3C’s RIF standard. So far, it has often been unclear how to combine both technologies without sacrificing essential computational properties. This book explains this problem and presents new solutions that have recently been proposed. Extensive introductory chapters provide the necessary background for understanding the goals and challenges of this field, whereas advanced chapters discuss novel solutions in full detail. Enriched knowledge representation languages that are introduced include DL Rules, Horn description logics, and DL+safe Rules. In each of these cases, emphasis is put on finding a favourable trade-off between expressiveness and computational complexity. This naturally leads to the light-weight DL rule language ELP which illustrates that expressive ontological modelling and tractable inferencing can indeed go together. Comprehensive references for further reading are provided throughout the book.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the joint 6th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2007, and the 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference, ASWC 2007, held in Busan, Korea, in November 2007. The 50 revised full academic papers and 12 revised application papers presented together with 5 Semantic Web Challenge papers and 12 selected doctoral consortium articles were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 257 submitted papers to the academic track and 29 to the applications track. The papers address all current issues in the field of the semantic Web, ranging from theoretical and foundational aspects to various applied topics such as management of semantic Web data, ontologies, semantic Web architecture, social semantic Web, as well as applications of the semantic Web. Short descriptions of the top five winning applications submitted to the Semantic Web Challenge competition conclude the volume.

The geosciences are one of the fields leading the way in advancing semantic technologies. This book continues the dialogue and feedback between the geoscience and semantic web communities. Increasing data volumes within the geosciences makes it no longer practical to copy data and perform local analysis. Hypotheses are now being tested through online tools that combine and mine pools of data. This evolution in the way research is conducted is commonly referred to as e-Science. As e-Science has flourished, the barriers to free and open access to data have been lowered and the need for semantics has been heighted. As the volume, complexity, and heterogeneity of data resources grow, geoscientists are creating new capabilities that rely on semantic approaches. Geoscience researchers are actively working toward a research environment of software tools and interfaces to data archives and services with the goals of full-scale semantic integration beginning to take shape. The members of this emerging semantic e-Science community are increasingly in need of semantic-based methodologies, tools and infrastructure. A feedback system between the geo- and computational sciences is forming. Advances in knowledge modeling, logic-based hypothesis checking, semantic data integration, and knowledge discovery are leading to advances in scientific domains, which in turn are validating semantic approaches and pointing to new research directions. We present mature semantic applications within the geosciences and stimulate discussion on emerging challenges and new research directions.