Semantic Web technologies are used in many diverse domains. Mainstream applications of Semantic Technologies now include Bioinformatics and healthcare with Smart cities an up and coming domain. Domains such as oceanography, astronomy, finance, and law utilize Semantic technologies, but are generally under-represented in the broader Semantic Web community. The primary aim of the workshop is to discuss such nonregular, underrepresented and diverse topics related to the Semantic Web domain including work-in-progress, feasible ideas, failures and lessons learned. This workshop aims at bridging the gap between the under-represented topics and rest of the Semantic Web community. This leads to a more widespread adoption of Semantic Web principles.
A half-day workshop named Diversity++ was organized based on these ideas on October 12, 2015. This was the first edition of the workshop. It was co-located with the 14th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2015) in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, USA. The call for papers was designed in support of the workshop goals and we received 5 submissions. Three reviewers were assigned to each paper and based on their reviews, 4 papers were accepted. Along with these 4 paper presentations, there were two more presentations. One was a keynote by Pascal Hitzler titled “Ontology modeling with domain experts" and another was an invited talk by Monika Solanki titled “Towards event-based traceability in provenance-aware supply chains". These two speakers also submitted invited papers on topics closely related to their talk. Presentations in the workshop covered use of Semantic Web technologies in diverse areas such as oceanography, geoscience, supply chain, environmental impact of a product and carbon science.
We would like to thank all the authors for their submissions and we are very grateful to members of the program committee for their useful reviews and comments. We thank our invited speakers, Pascal Hitzler and Monika Solanki, for their inspiring talk. We also thank the ISWC workshop chairs, Miriam Fernandez and Krzysztof Janowicz, for their support. We thank the organizers of ISWC 2015 for hosting the Diversity++ workshop.
Further information about the Diversity++ workshop can be found at the website: http://dase.cs.wright.edu/activities/diversity2015.
University of Bari, Italy
Marymount University, USA
University of Passau, Germany
IBM Research, Ireland
Wright State University, USA
Airbus Defence and Space, Germany
IBM Research, Ireland
Wright State University, USA
University of Kentucky, USA
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA
SRI International, USA
City University, UK
Vrije University Amsterdam, Netherlands
The University of Sheffield, UK Jeff Z. Pan The University of Aberdeen, UK