Having attended ISWC numerous times, this conference is long dead. It is the perfect example of eminence-based vs evidence-based science. Technicality of paper if low, most of the paper gathers bad and useless description logic theorems from the very same guys each year. The consanguinity rate is higher than any other CS conference. The quality of the conference is in fact well disputed among academics. Core[1] ranking puts it as a B conference (later updated to A due to request based on scholar values[2]). Arnetminer[3] and Academic Search[4] put it in A+/A tier. These latter are drawn from bibliographic metrics while the first ranking is the result of a poll among australian researcher. Altough we disagree on rugby, I'm with the aussies for this one.

The industry track exists for the record. Much of semweb companies were funded using EU money and went bankrupt when the money went out. I can't believe the EU continues to inject plenty of money for the semweb in H2020 despite having wasted more than 1B in the previous decade (publicly admitted by the EU).

At ISWC 2012 in a workshop that took place the day before the conference, some guy (don't remember his name) asked the speaker "would this building explode, do you think the semweb would still exist ?". The speaker tried to find examples of people doing semweb in the industry, but did not manage to convince anyone, not sure if he did it for himself. This was (and is) a nice summary of the situation of the semantic web.

[1] http://core.edu.au/

[2] http://103.1.187.206/core/1338/

[3] http://arnetminer.org/page/conference-rank/html/All-in-one.h...

[4] http://academic.research.microsoft.com/RankList?entitytype=3...