Leveraging the semantics of Web content - enriched with domain theories (ontologies), natural language and multimedia processing, as well as insights into Web usage  - will add a qualitatively new level of functionality to the Web. Semantic technologies will weave together a large network of human knowledge and make this knowledge machine-processable as part of novel services and applications. Various automated services, based on reasoning with metadata and ontologies, will help the users to achieve their goals by accessing and processing information in machine-understandable form. This network of knowledge systems will ultimately lead to truly intelligent systems, which will be employed for various complex decision-making tasks. Research about Web semantics can benefit from ideas and cross-fertilization with many other areas: Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Database and Information Systems, Information Retrieval, Multimedia, Distributed Systems, Social Networks, Web Engineering, and Web Science.

The mission of the ESWC is to bring together researchers and practitioners in all these areas dealing with different aspects of semantics on the Web.