Tomorrow morning, very early, me and some collegues of mine are going to leave for Tenerife, to attend at the 5th edition of the “European Semantic Web Conference” (ESWC), in which we will also have to present two of our scientific papers. The ESWC is one of the most important european event about the Semantic Web, during which the last research results and applications will be presented.

The ESWC conference will be certainly a very important event for my research activities and for my current work. But…this time, I’m not very happy to leave…

As usual, the workshop “Semantic Web Applications And Perspectives (SWAP 2007)” was a very interesting event, a unique opportunity which brought together researchers and practitioners in the challenging area of Semantic Web technologies.

There were a lot of interesting presentations. In particular, the presentations/tutorials from Chris Welty and Giovanni Tummarello were very interesting: Chris Welty talked about Ontologies and methodologies to design and develop them, while Giovanni Tummarello shown the Semantic Web in action.

This year the 4th workshop “Semantic Web Applications And Perspectives” (SWAP 2007) will take place in Bari (Italy), from 18th to 20th December, 2007, at the IT Department of the Università degli Studi di Bari.

The workshop will provide a unique opportunity to bring together researchers and practitioners in the challenging area of Semantic Web technologies. In particular, SWAP 2007 aims at giving an overview of work going on in the Italian (and not only) Semantic Web community.

The official program of the workshop is not published yet. Anyway, briefly, the first day (18th December) will be dedicated to tutorials, while the second and the third day will be dedicated to the presentation of the accepted works/papers.

The invited talks are:

• Chris Welty: research scientist at ‘IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York;
• Giovanni Tummarello: researcher at Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), Galway (Ireland).

An update (4th December): The offical program of the workshop has been published. You can see it following this link.

An interesting event: the first italian conference dedicated to RubyOnRails. RailsToItaly 2007 will be on th 26th and 27th October in the nice city of Pisa in the IT department of University of Pisa in “largo B. Pontecorvo” (room Gerace). If you are interested in attending the conference, please register. If you wish to deliver a lecture or a presentation about Ruby or RubyOnRails or related topics, please follow the call for papers. At the Rails To Italy 2007 conference some important members of the Rails Community has been invited. At the moment people who’ve already confirmed their attendance are: David Heinemeier Hansson and Eyal Oren. For more information see the RailsToItaly official website .

This year the third Italian Workshop on Semantic Web Applications and Perspectives (SWAP) will be held in beautiful Pisa (Pisa, 18-20 December, 2006). Don’t miss a chance for an exciting meeting held in a speacial time and place.