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International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC)

The International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) is the leading conference for research on Semantic Web topics. It is held annually and is the successor of the Semantic Web Working Symposium (SWWS).

The SWSA Ten-Year Award recognizes most influential papers from the ISWC proceedings ten years prior.

The Code of conduct for ISWC delineates the behavioural norms expected of ISWC attendees.

The Semantic Web Conference Corpus provides access to information about all ISWC conferences in RDF. You can browse and search information on papers that were presented, people who attended, and other things that have to do with the main conferences and workshops.

Past Conferences

22nd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2023)

Athens, Greece

November 6th - 10th, 2023


360 Attendees | 33/170 Papers Accepted | 2 Tutorials | 10 Workshops


Best Paper: Spatial Link Prediction with Spatial and Semantic Embeddings. Genivika Mann, Alishiba Dsouza, Ran Yu and Elena Demidova


Ten-year award: Knowledge graph identification. ay Pujara, Hui Miao, Lise Getoor and William Cohen

The 21st International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2022)

Hangzhou, China (virtual)

October 23rd - 27th, 2022


487 Attendees | 30/156 Papers Accepted | 5 Tutorials | 11 Workshops


Best Paper: Efficient Dependency Analysis for Rule-Based Ontologies. Larry González, Alex Ivliev, Markus Krötzsch, Stephan Mennicke


Ten-year award: Semantic Sentiment Analysis of Twitter. Hassan Saif, Yulan He, Harith Alani

The 20th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2021)

Albany, USA (virtual)

October 24th - 28th, 2021


521 Attendees | 24/133 Papers Accepted | 3 Tutorials | 12 Workshops


Best Paper: Improving Inductive Link Prediction Using Hyper-Relational Facts. Mehdi Ali, Max Berrendorf, Mikhail Galkin, Veronika Thost, Tengfei Ma, Volker Tresp and Jens Lehmann


Ten-year award: LogMap: Logic-Based and Scalable Ontology Matching. Ernesto Jiménez-Ruiz & Bernardo Cuenca Grau

19th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2020)

Athens, Greece (virtual)

November 2nd - 6th, 2020


520 Attendees | 38/170 Papers Accepted | 2 Tutorials | 7 Workshops


Best Paper: Linked Credibility Reviews for Explainable Misinformation Detection. Ronald Denaux and Jose Manuel Gomez-Perez


Ten-year award: (1) When owl:sameAs Isn’t the Same: An Analysis of Identity in Linked Data. Harry Halpin, Patrick J. Hayes, James P. McCusker, Deborah L. McGuinness, Henry S. Thompson; (2) Ontology Alignment for Linked Open Data. Prateek Jain, Pascal Hitzler, Amit P. Sh

18th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2019)

Auckland, New Zealand

October 26th - 30th, 2019

Archived website: https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/ddis/iswc_archive/iswc/ab/2019/iswc2019.semanticweb.org/


Best Paper: Validating SHACL constraints over a SPARQL endpoint. Julien Corman, Fernando Florenzano, Juan L. Reutter and Ognjen Savkovic.


Ten-year award: (1) Executing SPARQL Queries over the Web of Linked Data. Olaf Hartig, Christian Bizer and Johann-Christoph Freytag. (2) Discovering and Maintaining Links on the Web of Data. Julius Volz, Christian Bizer, Martin Gaedke and Georgi Kobilarov.

17th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2018)

Monterey, CA, USA

October 8th - 12th, 2018

Archived website: https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/ddis/iswc_archive/iswc/ab/2018/iswc2018.semanticweb.org/


Best Paper: That’s interesting, tell me more! Finding descriptive support passages for explaining knowledge graph relationships. Sumit Bhatia, Purusharth Dwivedi and Avneet Kaur.


Ten-year award: (1) Laconic and Precise Justifications in OWL. Matthew Horridge, Bijan Parsia, Ulrike Sattler. (2) Semantic Grounding of Tag Relatedness in Social Bookmarking Systems. Ciro Cattuto, Dominik Benz, Andreas Hotho, Gerd Stumme

16th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2017)

Vienna, Austria

October 21st - 25th, 2017

Archived website: https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/ddis/iswc_archive/iswc/ab/2017/iswc2017.semanticweb.org/ 7 Tutorials | 18 Workshops


Best Paper: A Formal Framework for Comparing Linked Data Fragments. Olaf Hartig, Ian Letter and Jorge Pérez.


Ten-year award: DBpedia: A Nucleus for a Web of Open Data. Sören Auer, Christian Bizer, Georgi Kobilarov, Jens Lehmann, Richard Cyganiak, Zachary G. Ives.

15th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2016)

Kobe, Japan

October 17th - 21st, 2016

Archived website: https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/ddis/iswc_archive/iswc/ab/2016/iswc2016.semanticweb.org/
417 Attendees | 39/212 Papers Accepted |


Best Paper: (1) The multiset semantics of SPARQL patterns. Renzo Angles and Claudio Gutierrez; (2) Unsupervised Entity Resolution on Multi-type Graphs. Linhong Zhu, Majid Ghasemi-Gol, Pedro Szekely, Aram Galstyan and Craig A. Knoblock


Ten-year award: Semantics and Complexity of SPARQL. Jorge Perez , Marcelo Arenas and Claudio Gutierrez

14th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2015)

Bethlehem, PA, USA

October 11th - 15th, 2015

Archived website: https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/ddis/iswc_archive/iswc/ab/iswc2015.semanticweb.org/
447 Attendees | 38/172 Papers Accepted | 8 Tutorials | 23 Workshops


Best Paper: "LOD Lab: Experiments at LOD Scale." L. Rietveld, W. Beek, and S. Schlobach


Ten-year award: "Ontologies Are Us: A Unified Model of Social Networks and Semantics", P. Mika

13th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2014)

Riva del Garda, Italy

October 19th - 23rd, 2014

Archived website: https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/ddis/iswc_archive/iswc/ab/2014/iswc2014.semanticweb.org/index.html


Best Paper: AGDISTIS - Graph-Based Disambiguation of Named Entities using Linked Data. Ricardo Usbeck, Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo, Michael Röder, Daniel Gerber, Sandro Athaide Coelho, Sören Auer and Andreas Both.


Ten-year award: The Protégé OWL plugin: An open development environment for semantic web applications. Holger Knublauch, Ray Fergerson, Natalya Noy, Mark Musen.

12th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2013)

Sydney, Australia

October 21st - 25th, 2013

Archived website: https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/ddis/iswc_archive/iswc/ab/2013/iswc2013-Nov13/iswc2013.semanticweb.org/


Best Paper: The Combined Approach to OBDA: Taming Role Hierarchies using Filters. Carsten Lutz, Inanc Seylan, David Toman and Frank Wolter.


Ten-year award: Reducing OWL Entailment to Description Logic Satisfiability. Ian Horrocks, Peter F. Patel-Schneider.

11th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2012)

Boston, USA

November 11th - 15th, 2012

Archived website: https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/ddis/iswc_archive/iswc/ab/2013/iswc2012.semanticweb.org/
481 Attendees | 41/183 Papers Accepted | 8 Tutorials | 18 Workshops


Best Paper: Discovering Concept Coverings in Ontologies of Linked Data Sources by 
Rahul Parundekar, Craig Knoblock and José Luis Ambite


Ten-year award: (1) Semantic Matching of Web Services Capabilities. Massimo Paolucci, Takahiro Kawamura, Terry Payne, Katia P. Sycara. (2) Sesame: A Generic Architecture for Storing and Querying RDF and RDF Schema. Jeen Broekstra, Arjohn Kampman, Frank van Harmelen.

10th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2011)

Bonn, Germany

October 23rd - 27th, 2011

Archived website: https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/ddis/iswc_archive/iswc/ab/2011pre/iswc2011.semanticweb.org/
597 Attendees | 50/264 Papers Accepted | 6 Tutorials | 16 Workshops


Best Paper: M. Morsey, J. Lehmann, S. Auer and A. Ngonga Ngomo "DBpedia SPARQL Benchmark Performance Assessment with Real Queries on Real Data"


Ten-year award: DAML-S: Semantic Markup for Web Services. Anupriya Ankolekar, Mark H. Burstein, Jerry R. Hobbs, Ora Lassila, David L. Martin, Sheila A. McIlraith, Srini Narayanan, Massimo Paolucci, Terry R. Payne, Katia P. Sycara, Honglei Zeng.

9th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2010)

Shanghai, China

November 7th - 11th, 2010

Archived website: https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/ddis/iswc_archive/iswc/ab/2010/iswc2010.semanticweb.org/
410 Attendees | 51/228 Papers Accepted | 8 Tutorials | 13 Workshops


Best Paper: Shenghui Wang and Paul Groth. Measuring the dynamic bi-directional influence between content and social networks


8th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2009)

Washington D.C. Area, USA

October 25th - 29th, 2009

Archived website: https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/ddis/iswc_archive/iswc/pps/web/iswc2009.semanticweb.org/
527 Attendees | 43/250 Papers Accepted | 11 Tutorials | 19 Workshops


Best Paper: Ugur Kuter and Jennifer Golbeck: Semantic Web Service Composition in Social Environments


7th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2008)

Karlsruhe, Germany

October 26th - 30th, 2008

Archived website: https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/ddis/iswc_archive/iswc/pps/web/iswc2008.semanticweb.org/
627 Attendees | 43/261 Papers Accepted | 11 Tutorials | 13 Workshops


Best Paper: Matthew Horridge, Bijan Parsia and Ulrike Sattler for Laconic and Precise Justifications in OWL


6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2007)

Busan, Korea

November 11th - 15th, 2007

Archived website: https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/ddis/iswc_archive/iswc/pps/web/iswc2007.semanticweb.org/main/default.asp.html
550 Attendees | 50/257 Papers Accepted | 8 Tutorials | 13 Workshops


Best Paper: Dimitris Zeginis, Yannis Tzitzikas and Vassilis Christophides.On the Foundations of Computing Deltas between RDF models


5th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2006)

Athens, Georgia

November 5th - 9th, 2006

Archived website: https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/ddis/iswc_archive/iswc/pps/web/2006/lsdis.cs.uga.edu/iswc06/ 52/215 Papers Accepted | 4 Tutorials | 13 Workshops


Best Paper: Marcelo Arenas, Jorge Perez and Claudio Gutierrez. Semantics and Complexity of SPARQL


4th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2005)

Galway, Ireland

November 6th - 10th, 2005

Archived website: https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/ddis/iswc_archive/iswc/ab/2005/iswc2005.semanticweb.org/ 54/217 Papers Accepted | 4 Tutorials | 9 Workshops


Best Paper: Peter Mika. Ontologies are us: A unified model of social networks and semantics.


3d International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2004)

Hiroshima, Japan

November 7th - 11th, 2004

Archived website: https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/ddis/iswc_archive/iswc/ab/2004/iswc2004.semanticweb.org/ 48/205 Papers Accepted | 6 Tutorials | 8 Workshops


Best Paper: Y. Guo, Z. Pan, and J. Heflin. An Evaluation of Knowledge Base Systems for Large OWL Datasets


2nd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2003)

Sanibel Island, Florida, USA

October 20th - 23rd, 2003

Archived website: https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/ddis/iswc_archive/iswc/pps/web/iswc2003.semanticweb.org/ 49/262 Papers Accepted | 4 Tutorials | 5 Workshops


Best Paper: Aimilia Magkanaraki, Val Tannen, Vassilis Christophides, Dimitris Plexousakis. Viewing the Semantic Web through RVL Lenses


Ten-year award: Ian Horrocks, Peter F. Patel-Schneider "Reducing OWL Entailment to Description Logic Satisfiability"

1st International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2002)

Sardinia, Italy

June 9th - 12th, 2002

Archived website: https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/ddis/iswc_archive/iswc/pps/web/iswc2002-zip/ 27/95 Papers Accepted | 5 Tutorials |


Best Paper: Peter F. Patel-Schneider, Jérôme Siméon. Building the Semantic Web on XML


Ten-year award: (1) Massimo Paolucci, Takahiro Kawamura, Terry Payne, Katia P. Sycara: "Semantic Matching of Web Services Capabilities."; (2) Jeen Broekstra, Arjohn Kampman, Frank van Harmelen: "Sesame: A Generic Architecture for Storing and Querying RDF and RDF Schema"

Semantic Web Working Symposium (SWWS) (ISWC2001)

Stanford University, California, USA

July 30th - 1st, 2001

Archived website: https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/ddis/iswc_archive/iswc/pps/web/swws-zip/
245 Attendees | 35/58 Papers Accepted | 3 Tutorials | 0 Workshops



Ten-year award: Anupriya Ankolekar, Mark H. Burstein, Jerry R. Hobbs, Ora Lassila, David L. Martin, Sheila A. McIlraith, Srini Narayanan, Massimo Paolucci, Terry R. Payne, Katia P. Sycara, Honglei Zeng "DAML-S: Semantic Markup for Web Services"