This volume contains the proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Semantic Systems, SEMANTiCS 2021. SEMANTiCS is the annual meeting place for professionals and researchers who make semantic computing work, who understand its benefits and encounter its limitations. Every year, SEMANTiCS attracts information managers, IT-architects, software engineers, and researchers from organisations ranging from research facilities, NPOs, through public administrations to the largest companies in the world.

SEMANTiCS offers a forum for the exchange of the latest scientific results in semantic systems and complements these topics with new research challenges in areas like data science, machine learning, logic programming, content engineering, social computing, and the Semantic Web. The conference is in its 17th year and has developed into an internationally visible and professional event at the intersection of academia and industry.

Contributors to and participants of the conference learn from top researchers and industry experts about emerging trends and topics in the wide area of semantic computing. The SEMANTiCS community is highly diverse; attendees have responsibilities in interlinking areas such as artificial intelligence, data science, knowledge discovery and management, big data analytics, e-commerce, enterprise search, technical documentation, document management, business intelligence, and enterprise vocabulary management.

The conference’s subtitle in 2021 was “In the Era of Knowledge Graphs”, and especially welcomed submissions on the following topics:

∙ Web Semantics & Linked (Open) Data

∙ Enterprise Knowledge Graphs, Graph Data Management, and Deep Semantics

∙ Machine Learning & Deep Learning Techniques

∙ Semantic Information Management & Knowledge Integration

∙ Terminology, Thesaurus & Ontology Management

∙ Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery

∙ Reasoning, Rules, and Policies

∙ Natural Language Processing

∙ Data Quality Management and Assurance

∙ Explainable Artificial Intelligence

∙ Semantics in Data Science

∙ Semantics in Blockchain environments

∙ Trust, Data Privacy, and Security with Semantic Technologies

∙ Economics of Data, Data Services, and Data Ecosystems

We additionally issued calls for three special sub-topics:

∙ Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage

∙ LegalTech

∙ Distributed and Decentralized Knowledge Graphs

Due to the health crisis caused by the Corona-Virus pandemic, 2021’s SEMANTiCS took place in a hybrid form in Amsterdam. A call for papers was distributed publicly and we received 66 submissions to the Research and Innovation track.

In order to properly provide high-quality reviews, a program committee comprising 99 members supported us in selecting the papers with the highest impact and scientific merit. For each submission, at least 3 reviews were written independently from the assigned reviewers in a single–blind review process (author names are visible to reviewers, reviewers stay anonymous). After all reviews were submitted the PC chairs compared the reviews and discussed discrepancies and different opinions with the reviewers to facilitate a meta-review and suggest a recommendation to accept or reject the paper. Overall, we accepted 19 papers which resulted in an acceptance rate of 29%.

In addition to the peer-reviewed work, the conference had four renowned keynote speakers: Joe Pairman (Senior Product Manager, Tridion Docs; Prof. Enrico Motta (Professor of Knowledge Technologies at the Knowledge Media Institute – The Open University); Prof. Maria-Esther Vidal (Head of Scientific Data Management Research Group TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library); and Dr. Vanessa Lopez (Research Scientist and Manager – AI for Health and Social Care – IBM).

Additionally, the program had posters and demos, a comprehensive set of workshops, as well as talks from industry leaders.

We thank all authors who submitted papers. We particularly thank the program committee which provided careful reviews in a quick turnaround time. Their service is essential for the quality of the conference.

Sincerely yours,

The Editors

Amsterdam, September 2021