09271 Report – Perspectives Workshop: Semantic Web Reflections and Future Directions

With an ever increasing amount of data being stored and processed on computers, and the ubiquitous use of the Web for communication and dissemination of content, the world contains a vast amount of digital data that is growing ever faster. The available data is increasingly used to gain insights for science and research, to create commercial value, and to hold governments accountable. Semantic Web technologies for supporting machine-readable web content aim at facilitating the processing and integration of data from the open web environment where large portions of the publicly available data is being published. Since the first Dagstuhl seminar “Semantics on the Web” in 2000 the amount of machine-readable data on the web has exploded, and Semantic Web technologies have matured and made their way from research labs and universities into commercial applications. This report identifies lessons learned and future directions for the field as discussed at a Perspectives Workshop on Semantic Web, which took place in Dagstuhl, Germany, in June/July 2009.