Last week, Francesco, Angelo, and Tanay attended the 23rd International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) in Baltimore, Maryland. ISWC is the premier conference in the field of Semantic Web, known for its influence and presentation of the latest trends in the field.

The main theme of the conference focused on integrating Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GraphRAG and NL2SPARQL. There has been a significant debate on whether we should opt for one solution rather than the other to solve the ongoing challenges, including a dedicated panel session. The consensus is that “LLMs will help the Semantic Web, and Semantic Web technologies are absolutely needed to make LLMs succeed”, as also mentioned by Ora Lassila, during his keynote speech.

The attendees’ overall sentiment is that after a quarter of a century, the community is finally harvesting the fruits that they have been effortlessly planting throughout the years. Of course, now, new challenges have emerged: we can finally work toward the original vision of the Semantic Web, which meant knowledge representation and agents. And LLMs can definitely help. In sum, exciting times are ahead!

Also this year the SKM team has been involved with the conference on several initiatives. Francesco has acted as Industry Track Chair and organised the Job Fair. Angelo and Francesco organised the 4th edition of the International Workshop on Scientific Knowledge: Representation, Discovery, and Assessment, which saw remarkable success. The workshop featured nine paper presentations addressing various challenges within the scholarly knowledge domain. An exceptional highlight of the workshop was the keynote speech delivered by Natasha Noy, a Research Scientist at Google Research. Under the theme “Linking scientific knowledge: A dataset-centric view,” she discussed the critical importance of accurate metadata when annotating datasets. Additionally, she emphasised the need for community-wide incentives to facilitate the achievement of this mission.

Tanay presented his paper on “Identifying Semantic Relationships Between Research Topics Using Large Language Models in a Zero-Shot Learning Setting” co-authored with Angelo, Francesco, and Prof. Enrico Motta.

Francesco presented the paper “Assessing Large Language Models for SPARQL Query Generation in Scientific Question Answering” co-authored with Antonello Meloni, Diego Reforgiato, Angelo Salatino, Enrico Motta, Sahar Vahdati and Jens Lehmann.

Finally, Gregoire Burel, Harith Alani, and former PhD student Martino Mensio, contributed with the paper “CimpleKG: A Continuously Updated Knowledge Graph on Misinformation, Factors and Fact-Checks”, presented by Raphaël Troncy (EURECOM). The paper won the prestigious Best Resource Paper Award.

We are grateful to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Semantic Web Science Association (SWSA) for granting Tanay a generous student award of $2,871.70. This financial support helped Tanay attend the conference and present his research paper, which was a significant milestone in his doctoral studies. We truly appreciate the conference’s commitment to inclusivity, demonstrated through such grants to support students and foster their academic pursuits.

Next year, ISWC will take place in Nara (Japan), which will see Angelo acting as Resource Track Chair. We look forward to it.