SSWS 2011 co-located with ISWC 2011

The series of SSWS workshops aim at creating a forum for discussing a critical issue for the Semantic Web, that is, scalability. As the Semantic Web evolves, scalability becomes increasingly important. This workshop will focus on addressing of the scalability issue with respect to the development and deployment of knowledge base systems on the Semantic Web. Typically, such systems deal with information described in Semantic Web languages like OWL and RDF(S), and provide services such as storing, reasoning, querying and debugging. There are two basic requirements for these systems. First, they have to satisfy the application’s semantic requirements by providing sufficient reasoning support. Second, they must scale well in order to be of practical use. Given the sheer size and distributed nature of the Semantic Web, these requirements impose additional challenges beyond those addressed by earlier knowledge base systems. This has been well recognized by the community as demonstrated by the excitement around the billion triples challenge at ISWC 2009 and 2010.

We expect that the above issue is going to challenge the Semantic Web for a long period of time and significant effort is needed in order to tackle the problem. This workshop seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners to share their recent ideas and progresses towards building scalable knowledge base systems for the Semantic Web.

The SSWS workshop is co-located with the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2011) in Bonn, Germany.

Workshop Topics

The workshop will be centered on the discussion of three major aspects: 1) foundations, methods and technologies for pushing forward the state-of-the-art; 2) performance evaluation and related principles, methodologies and tools; 3) identification of important issues and future research directions. Topics of interest for the workshop include, but are not limited to:

  • Semantic Web repositories
  • Reasoning mechanisms, techniques and systems
  • Query evaluation and optimization
  • Performance evaluation and benchmarks
  • Distributed knowledge base systems
  • Large scale knowledge base management
  • Semantic Web-based information integration