ISWC is near

Reporting from Karlsruhe. Final preparations are under way for an exciting week full of Semantic Web.

• Saturday, October 25th: ISWC08 Doctoral Consortium
• Sunday, October 26th and Monday, October 27th: ISWC08 Tutorials and Workshops. I’m co-organising one of them, on Monday, called Nature Inspired Reasoning for the Semantic Web, which will feature two invited speakers from natural computing (Jürgen Branke, University of Karlsruhe) and cognitive science (Kai-Uwe Kühnberger, University of Osnabrück), with the goal to provide bridges between their areas of research and Semantic Web reasoning.
• In parallel, on Sunday, October 26th and Monday, October 27th, there will be the co-located Fifth International Workshop on OWL – Experiences and Directions. Theorists and practitioners will gather to discuss the current state of OWL and future directions in making it an even more successful paradigm for the Semantic Web. If you’re at all interested in OWL, you don’t want to miss it.
• Tuesday, October 28th to Thursday, October 30th are the main days of ISWC08 with an exciting technical program, featuring keynotes by Ramesh Jain, UCI, John Giannandrea, Metaweb Technologies Inc. and  Stefan Decker, DERI. Winners of the Semantic Web Challenge and the Billion Triple Challenge will be awarded on Wednesday afternoon. The complete programme booklet is available online.
• Friday, October 31st and Saturday, November 1st, the Second International Conference on Web Reasoning and Rule Systems, RR2008, will take place at the same venue. One of the keynote talks, given by Michael Kifer, will be joint with RuleML-2008 in Orlando, Florida via teleconference!

So I expect to see you all soon in Karlsruhe. And in case you haven’t planned the trip yet – there’s still time enough to pack your suitcase and come join us for the events.