Empowering Semantic Web with Computational Intelligence [Editor's Remarks]

fter the New Year issue, I am now closing this issue before the Lunar New Year in Asia. Like previous years, I had to make reservations for air tickets and plan for my family holidays. Most of the time, I have to check against my kids’ co-curricular activities, my wife’s work schedule and my own appointments before going online to book the tickets. How nice if I could simply activate a programme on my mobile device that can automatically synchronize with my wife and children’s calendars, remind me to reschedule any important appointments that I might have overlooked, book the air tickets with our preferred seats and perhaps even update my accounting system and calendars automatically. This example sounds simple but it remains a longterm vision of intelligent Semantic Web, which essentially is the topic of this issue. While the World Wide Web has largely changed our way of lives, the next phase of web evolution can be described by Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the Semantic Web, which is “a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines.” In this issue, we showcase several successful deployments of computational intelligence (CI) technologies into Semantic Web applications, as guest-edited by Huajun Chen and Philippe Cudré-Mauroux. In the “Society Briefs” column of this issue, we congratulate the new IEEE Fellows in the Class of 2012 elevated through CIS, and welcome our five newly elected AdCom members who will assist in governing and administering of CIS. Empowering Semantic Web with Computational Intelligence