During the last two years the Semantic Web community has increasingly been "eating its own dog food", by ensuring that it produces the data necessary to build a Semantic Web, and then consumes this data in novel applications. This trend has been evident in Semantic Web conferences such as ESWC and ISWC, in which KMi members have been heavily involved. ESWC2006, chaired by John Domingue, saw the first widespread deployment of conference-related data in RDF/XML (the primary format for Semantic Web data), and the trend has continued ever since.

November 1st saw the release of the RDF/XML data set for the co-located 6th International Semantic Web Conference and 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference (ISWC+ASWC 2007), taking place from 11-15 November in Busan, Korea. The data set has been produced by the conference Metadata Chairs Knud Moeller (DERI Galway) and Tom Heath (KMi). In addition to trying to capture and publish more data about the conference than ever before, this years effort has focused on establishing an infrastructure at http://data.semanticweb.org on which future conferences and workshops can build.

The data.semanticweb.org infrastructure hosts data from a number of Semantic Web conferences and workshops according to the "Linked Data" principles (some basic ‘rules’ for publishing data on the Semantic Web), and provides a "SPARQL endpoint" allowing all data sets to be queried remotely over the Web. As the size of the data set grows with each event, we will no doubt see increasingly compelling applications of the data at Semantic Web conferences.

Related Links:

• The 6th International Semantic Web Conference and the 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference, 2007
  
• The Semantic Web Conference Corpus
  
• ISWC+ASWC 2007 RDF/XML Data Set
  
• The Dog Food Blog