Sheila A. McIlraith – författare

The Workshop on Web Services, E-Business, and the Semantic Web (WES) was heldMay27-28,2002inconjunctionwithCAiSE02,the14thInternationalC- ferenceonAdvancedInformationSystemsEngineering.Theworkshopcomprised three tracks: a track on Web services co-chaired by Barbara Pernici (Politecnico di Milano) and Jian Yang (Tilburg University); a track on e-business, co-chaired byMariaE.Orlowska(UniversityofQueensland)andChristophBussler(Oracle Corporation, USA); and a track on e-services and the Semantic Web, co-chaired byRickHull(BellLaboratories,LucentTechnologies,USA)andSheilaMcIlraith (Knowledge Systems Laboratory, Stanford University, USA). The Internet is changing the way businesses operate. Organizations are using the web to deliver their goods and services, to ?nd trading partners, and to link theirexisting(maybelegacy)applicationstootherapplications.Webservicesare rapidly becoming the enabling technology of today's e-business and e-commerce systems, and will soon transform the Web as it is now into a distributed c- putation and application framework.On the other hand, e-business as an emerging concept is also impacting so- ware applications, the everyday services landscape, and the way we do things in almost each domain of our life. There is already a body of experience accu- lated that demonstrates the di?erence between just having an online presence andusingtheWebasastrategicandfunctionalmediumine-business-to-business interaction (B2B) as well as in marketplaces. Finally, the emerging Semantic Web paradigm promises to annotate Web artifactstoenableautomatedreasoningaboutthem.Whenappliedtoe-services, the paradigm hopes to provide substantial automation for activities such as discovery, invocation, assembly, and monitoring of e-services. But much work remains to be done before realizing this vision.

The 3rd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2004) was held Nov- ber 7–11, 2004 in Hiroshima, Japan. If it is true what the proverb says: “Once by accident, twice by habit, three times by tradition,” then this third ISWC did indeed ?rmly establish a tradition. After the overwhelming interest in last year’s conference at Sanibel Island, Florida, this year’s conference showed that the Semantic Web is not just a one-day wonder, but has established itself ?rmly on the research agenda. At a time when special interest meetings with a Sem- tic Web theme are springing up at major conferences in numerous areas (ACL, VLDB, ECAI, AAAI, ECML, WWW, to name but a few), the ISWC series has established itself as the primary venue for Semantic Web research. Response to the call for papers for the conference continued to be strong. We solicited submissions to three tracks of the conference: the research track, the industrial track, and the poster track. The research track, the premier venue for basic research on the Semantic Web, received 205 submissions, of which 48 were accepted for publication. Each submission was evaluated by three p- gram committee members whose reviews were coordinated by members of the senior program committee. Final decisions were made by the program co-chairs in consultation with the conference chair and the senior program committee. The industrial track, soliciting papers describing industrial research on the - mantic Web, received 22 submissions, of which 7 were accepted for publication.

The 3rd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2004) was held Nov- ber 7–11, 2004 in Hiroshima, Japan. If it is true what the proverb says: “Once by accident, twice by habit, three times by tradition,” then this third ISWC did indeed ?rmly establish a tradition. After the overwhelming interest in last year’s conference at Sanibel Island, Florida, this year’s conference showed that the Semantic Web is not just a one-day wonder, but has established itself ?rmly on the research agenda. At a time when special interest meetings with a Sem- tic Web theme are springing up at major conferences in numerous areas (ACL, VLDB, ECAI, AAAI, ECML, WWW, to name but a few), the ISWC series has established itself as the primary venue for Semantic Web research. Response to the call for papers for the conference continued to be strong. We solicited submissions to three tracks of the conference: the research track, the industrial track, and the poster track. The research track, the premier venue for basic research on the Semantic Web, received 205 submissions, of which 48 were accepted for publication. Each submission was evaluated by three p- gram committee members whose reviews were coordinated by members of the senior program committee. Final decisions were made by the program co-chairs in consultation with the conference chair and the senior program committee. The industrial track, soliciting papers describing industrial research on the - mantic Web, received 22 submissions, of which 7 were accepted for publication.