DESEMWEB 2018 - DECENTRALIZING THE SEMANTIC WEB (DESEMWEB2018)

The Semantic Web is increasingly becoming a centralized story: we rely on large-scale server-side infrastructures to perform intense reasoning, data mining, and query execution. This kind of centralization leads to a number of problems, including lock-in effects, lack of users’ control of their data, limited incentives for interoperability and openness, and the resulting detrimental effects on privacy and innovation. Therefore, we urgently need research and engineering to bring back the “Web” to the Semantic Web, aiming for intelligent clients—instead of intelligent servers—as sketched in the original Semantic Web vision. Following the success of last year’s workshop at ISWC2017, DeSemWeb2018 focuses on decentralized and client-side applications, to counterbalance the centralized discourse of other tracks. While we recognize the value in all subfields of the Semantic Web, we see an urgent need to revalue the role of clients. This proposal details the topics of the workshop, as well as the organisational aspects. We believe this proposal will help put different topics on the Semantic Web community’s research agenda, which should lead to new inspiration and initiatives to build future Semantic Web and Linked Data applications.