ODBASE 2008 PC Co-chairs' Message

Welcome to the proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Ontologies, Databases, and Applications of Semantics (ODBASE 2008) held in Monterrey, Mexico, November 11 --- 13, 2008. We are now moving towards meaningful Internet systems and ubiquitous computing, earmarking the significant transitions of semantic technologies in the years since the first ODBASE conference in 2002. Recent methods allow us to scale semantic technologies to handle trillions of triples; to compose intriguing semantic applications within a few days; to address target applications from science up to e-commerce and e-health; and to develop or choose among plenty of ontologies and RDF stores, inferencing engines, ontology mapping, maintaining, and evaluation systems, to name but a few.