The Semantic Web Conference Corpus

The call to "eat your own dog-food" is often heard in the Semantic Web research area. The motto encourages us to use the languages and tools that we are developing to support our own work and demonstrate convincing arguments for the introduction of explicit semantics.

The International Semantic Web and European Semantic Web Conference series have followed this maxim and published metadata describing the events. This metadata covers information about papers, schedules, attendees etc. Tools can then consume this information and provide services, such as intelligent scheduling or search, to conference attendees.

In 2006, ontologies were developed for ESWC that made use of existing vocabularies like Friend of a Friend (FOAF). Additions were also made for ISWC to encompass the the SWRC ontology, which provides relationships for encoding bibtex information and iCal formats for scheduling events.

In previous conferences, data has been hosted at the conference site. This introduces potential problems of curation and sustainability. At data.semanticweb.org we intend to provide a permanent, central, home for this conference metadata. This is not just a site for ISWC and ESWC though. We hope that, in time, other metadata sets relating to Semantic Web activity will be hosted here — additional bibliographic data, test sets, community ontologies and so on.

How to get to the Data

The data on data.semanticweb.org is available in two flavours:

• There are rdf/xml dumps for each conference and workshop in the repository. All those dumps are available at http://data.semanticweb.org/dumps/.
• There is a SPARQL repository which contains all data for all conferences and workshops:
  
  http://data.semanticweb.org/sparql
  
  You can post a SPARQL query to the repository by simply appending ?query=$ESCAPED_QUERY. The repository itself is split up into a number of named graphs, one for each event (i.e., conference or workshop). This means that you can either do an integrated query over the whole repository, or restrict the query to a specific event, using the GRAPH directive.

Available Data

Here is a list of the currently available graphs:

Conferences

• ESWC2008, Tenerife, Spain:
  • http://data.semanticweb.org/conference/eswc/2008 (homepage)
  • http://data.semanticweb.org/conference/eswc/2008/complete (graph URI)
• ISWC+ASWC2007, Busan, Korea: http://data.semanticweb.org/conference/iswc-aswc/2007 (both homepage and graph URI)
• ESWC2007, Innsbruck, Austria: http://data.semanticweb.org/conference/eswc/2007 (both homepage and graph URI)
• ISWC2006, Athens, GA, USA: http://data.semanticweb.org/conference/iswc/2006 (both homepage and graph URI)

Workshops

• FEWS2007, at ISWC+ASWC2007: http://data.semanticweb.org/workshop/fews/2007
• PEAS2007, at ISWC+ASWC2007: http://data.semanticweb.org/workshop/peas/2007
• OWLED2007, at ESWC2007: http://data.semanticweb.org/conference/owled/2007

SPARQL Queries

For an easy and fun way to explore the dataset, we have added the interactive SPARQL exploter Snorql to the site: http://data.semanticweb.org/snorql

To see how the SPARQL queries for this server work in general, here are two small examples that show how to get the information about all people in the repository and their affiliations. The first version queries the complete repository, the second one only the part of the repository that contains data about ISWC+ASWC2007.

    PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
    PREFIX swrc: <http://swrc.ontoware.org/ontology#>
    SELECT $person $affiliation
    WHERE {
        $person a foaf:Person.
        $person swrc:affiliation $affiliation
    }
	

    PREFIX foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
    PREFIX swrc: <http://swrc.ontoware.org/ontology#>
    SELECT $person $affiliation
    WHERE {
        GRAPH <http://data.semanticweb.org/conference/iswc-aswc/2007> {
            $person a foaf:Person.
            $person swrc:affiliation $affiliation
        }
    }
	

Contact

If you are interested in hosting data on data.semanticweb.org, please contact the Dog Food Czars.

data.semanticweb.org is currently administered by (in alphabetical order):

• Sean Bechhofer, University of Manchester, UK
• Richard Cyganiak, DERI/NUIG
• Tom Heath, Open University, UK
• Knud Möller, DERI/NUIG