Mission
The mission of the Extended Semantic Web Conference is to bring together researchers and practioners dealing with different aspects of semantics on the Web. Starting with the 2010, the ESWC 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, ESWC 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.

Former Events

1st European Semantic Web Symposium (ESWS2004)
Location: Heraklion, Greece
Academic Track Chairs: Dieter Fensel, Rudi Studer
Industrial Track Chair: Christoph Bussler

2nd European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2005)
Location: Heraklion, Greece
General Chair: Jérôme Euzenat
Program Chair: Asunción Gómez Pérez

3rd European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2006)
Location: Budva, Montenegro
General Chair: John Domingue
Program Chair: York Sure

4th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2007)
Location: Innsbruck, Austria
General Chair: Enrico Franconi
Program Chairs: Michael Kifer, Wolfgang May

5th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2008)
Location: Tenerife, Spain
General Chair: Manfred Hauswirth
Program Chairs: Sean Bechhofer, Manolis Koubarakis

6th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC2009)
Date: May 31 - June 1, 2009
Location: Heraklion, Greece
General Chair: Fabio Ciravegna
Program Chairs: Lora Aroyo, Paolo Traverso

History
This conference series started its life as the European Semantic Web Symposium (ESWS), which was held in Heraklion, Greece in May of 2004. The event was established by the SEKT, DIP, and KnowledgeWeb projects that made up the SDK cluster. Based on the success of this first event, the symposium was expanded and upgraded to a conference with the new name the European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC). From 2005 through to 2008 the conference has grown in stature and quality, visiting Budva in Montenegro, Innsbruck in Austria, and Tenerife in Spain. The SDK Cluster that initially established the conference series later became known as ESSI with the addition of the ASG project. ESSI was the major seed for the establishment of STI International, which now runs the series as one of its major activities. In 2009 the conference will return to its spiritual home in Heraklion, Greece. From 2010 on, the ESWC is named Extended Semantic Web Conference to underline the international Character behind the event.