Ebook: Semantics, Web and Mining: Joint International Workshops, EWMF 2005 and KDO 2005, Porto, Portugal, October 3-7, 2005, Revised Selected Papers

Finding knowledge – or meaning – in data is the goal of every knowledge d- covery e?ort. Subsequent goals and questions regarding this knowledge di?er amongknowledgediscovery(KD) projectsandapproaches. Onecentralquestion is whether and to what extent the meaning extracted from the data is expressed in a formal way that allows not only humans but also machines to understand and re-use it, i. e. , whether the semantics are formal semantics. Conversely, the input to KD processes di?ers between KD projects and approaches. One central questioniswhetherthebackgroundknowledge,businessunderstanding,etc. that the analyst employs to improve the results of KD is a set of natural-language statements, a theory in a formal language, or somewhere in between. Also, the data that are being mined can be more or less structured and/or accompanied by formal semantics. These questions must be asked in every KD e?ort. Nowhere may they be more pertinent, however, than in KD from Web data (“Web mining”). This is due especially to the vast amounts and heterogeneity of data and ba- ground knowledge available for Web mining (content, link structure, and - age), and to the re-use of background knowledge and KD results over the Web as a global knowledge repository and activity space. In addition, the (Sem- tic) Web can serve as a publishing space for the results of knowledge discovery from other resources, especially if the whole process is underpinned by common ontologies.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed and extended post-proceedings of the joint European Web Mining Forum, EWMF 2005, and the International Workshop on Knowledge Discovery and Ontologies, KDO 2005, held in association with ECML/PKDD in Porto, Portugal in October 2005.

The 10 revised full papers presented together with 1 invited paper and 1 particularly fitting contribution from KDO 2004 were carefully selected for inclusion in the book. The authors' revisions have been significantly improved by the reviewers' comments and the discussions following the presentation. The papers focus on sophisticated techniques and tools that are used for semantic reasoning, semantic Web research, and Web data mining.