The World Wide Web, which was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, becomes indispensable in our life. The Web makes business and our daily life much easier. In 1998, Tim proposed a roadmap to the Semantic Web. In 2001, W3C started the Semantic Web Activity. In 2006, Tim and his colleagues call for creating a Science of the Web.

Since 2002, we have been working on the Semantic Web technologies, together with the research community. For example, we have made some contributions to ontology matching. In 2007, we founded the Institute of Web Science at Southeast University (IWS@SEU) to pursue a science of the Web, which was envisioned by the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI).

On the Semantic Web, anything (objects or concepts) can be identified by URI references, and anybody can express whatever he/she wants to say about anything by using the RDF data model. Therefore, the Semantic Web can be modeled as a graph of semantically linked things (objects and concepts), instead of the linkage graph of Web pages (the basic model of the earlier Web).

One mission of IWS@SEU is to conduct cutting-edge research for Web Science and to make the vision of Semantic Web become reality. In fact, we have been working on searching and matching things on the Semantic Web as well as analyzing the structure of the Semantic Web. In addition, we conducted some research work on knowledge acquisition, ontology learning, trustfulness of RDF data and reasoning on the Semantic Web scale (or the Web of data). Another mission of IWS@SEU is to transit the state of the art in Web Science (including Semantic Web) to the industry community so that our daily life can benefit from the advance of Web Science.

Our research topics include, but are not limited to:

• Web Architecture
• Semantic Web
• Web Analysis
• Web Reasoning
• Web Search
• Web Engineering

To lead the Web to its full potential, there is a long way to go. At this institute, we are developing innovative technologies to make our dreams become reality.