EWDC 2011: 13th European Workshop on Dependable Computing. 11-12 May 2011, Pisa, Italy. Submission deadline: 3 February 2011.

The mission of the Extended Semantic Web Conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners dealing with different aspects of semantic technologies. Following a successful re-launch in 2010 as a multi-track conference, ESWC 2011 builds on the success of the former European Semantic Web Conference series, and seeks to extend its focus by collaborating with other communities and research areas, in which Web semantics play an important role, within and outside ICT, and in a truly international, not just ‘European’ context.

The semantics of content, enriched with domain ontologies, data about systems’ usage, natural language processing, and many other aspects, will enable a qualitatively new level of functionality on the Internet, or in any other application environment relying thereupon. It will weave together a large network of human knowledge, and make this knowledge machine-processable. A variety of automated services, based on reasoning over metadata and ontologies, will help the users to achieve their goals by accessing and processing information in machine-understandable form. This network of knowledge-based functionality will ultimately lead to truly intelligent behavior, which will be employed for a variety of complex decision-making tasks. Research on semantic technologies can benefit from ideas and cross-fertilization with many other areas, including Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Database and Information Systems, Information Retrieval, Multimedia, Distributed Systems, Social Networks, Web Engineering, and Web Science. These complementarities are reflected in the outline of the technical program of the ESWC 2011; in addition to the research and in-use tracks, we have furthermore introduced two special tracks this year, putting particular emphasis on inter-disciplinary research topics and areas that show the potential of exciting synergies for the future. In 2011, these special tracks focus on data-driven, inductive and probabilistic approaches to managing content, and on Digital Libraries, respectively.