The 3rd Annual European Semantic Web Conference will be held in Budva, Montenegro from the 11th - 14th June, 2006. It will present the latest results in research and application in Semantic Web technologies (including knowledge markup languages, Semantic Web services, ontology management and more).
ESWC 2006 will also feature a special industry-oriented event providing European industry with an opportunity to become even more familiar with these technologies. It will offer a tutorial program, focusing on the latest in Semantic Web technologies.
ESWC 2006 is co-located with a meeting of the Knowledge Web network of excellence . Workshops and meetings of other European Commission 6th Framework Programme projects involved in the Semantic Web and Semantic Web technologies will be able to showcase their developments. ESWC 2006 is sponsored by ESSI (formerly SDK), a group of four European Commission 6th Framework Programme projects known as SEKT, DIP, Knowledge Web and ASG. Collectively these projects aim to improve world-wide research and standardisation in the areas of the Semantic Web and Semantic Web Systems.
The vision of the Semantic Web is to enhance today's Web by exploiting machine-processable metadata. The explicit representation of the semantics of data, enriched with domain theories (ontologies), will enable a web that provides a qualitatively new level of service. It will weave together a large network of human knowledge and makes this knowledge machine-processable. Various automated services 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. Semantic Web research can benefit from ideas and cross-fertilization with many other areas: Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Databases and Information Systems, Information Retrieval, Multimedia, Distributed Systems, Social Networks and Web Engineering. Many advances within these areas can contribute towards the realization of the Semantic Web.