[Editor's Note: This week, Juan Sequeda is reporting in from the International Semantic Web Conference in Bonn, Germany. See his other reports here:
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 ]

Day 4 of ISWC 2011 was the second full day of the conference and started out with a keynote from Frank van Harmelen, titled “10 Years of Semantic Web: does it work in theory?“  There were several sessions on RDF Querying of Multiple Sources, RDF Data Analysis, Formal Ontology & Patterns, Knowledge Representation Semantics, Web of Data, MANCHustifications and Provenance, the In Use track on Environmental data, the Semantic Web Challenge and a very exciting Deathmatch panel.

The main question addressed in the keynote was if a decade of Semantic Web work has helped to discover any Computer Science laws? Frank stated that what has been built in the past 10 years can be characterized in 3 parts:

1. created a lot of vocabularies
2. created a lot of URIs
3. connected them all together

However, the main question still is: “Did we learn any science, ideally science that is valid beyond the particular artifacts that we have so successfully built over the past 10 years?” Luckily, his keynote is online with descriptions, so I’ll let you figure it out by yourselves.

The Semantic Web Challenge consisted of 15 submissions but only  7 passed to the final round. The open track presentations were The Linked Sensor Middleware – Connecting the real world and the Semantic Web, Aemoo: exploratory search based on knowledge patterns over the Semantic Web, Seevl – mining music connections to bring context and discovery to the music you like and BOTTARI: Location based Social Media Analysis with Semantic Web. More details of each application, including links to the other applications can be found on the Semantic Web Challenge website.

One of the main highlights of the day was the Semantic Web Death Match, a panel addressing the issue of Industry vs Academia vs Standards. Check out my other blogpost with more detailed information about that session.