This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed postproceedings of the Second International Workshop on Semantic Web and Databases, SWDB 2004, held in Toronto, Canada in August 2004 as a satellite workshop of VLDB 2004.

The 14 revised full papers presented together with 2 papers by the invited keynote speakers were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from 47 submissions. Among the topics addressed are data semantics, semantic Web services, service-oriented computing, workflow composition, XML semantics, relational tables, ontologies, semantic Web algebra, heterogeneous data sources, context mediation, OWL, ontology engineering, data integration, semantic Web queries, database queries, and peer-to-peer warehouses.

Autorentext
Christoph Bussler is Staff Software Engineer at BEA Systems, Inc., working in the core WebLogic application server product development organization. Before joining BEA, Chris was architect at Cisco Systems, Inc. in San Jose, CA, USA, responsible for the service-oriented architecture at Cisco Systems'Quote-to-Cashbusiness unit. Before taking this position he was Science Foundation Ireland Professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway in Ireland and Executive Director of the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI). In addition to his role as Executive Director of DERI, Chris led the Semantic Web Services research group at DERI. Chris has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Erlangen, Germany and a Master in computer science from the Technical University of Munich, Germany. Chris published a book titled'B2B Integration', two books on workflow management, over 100 research papers in journals and academic conferences, gave tutorials on several topics including B2B integration, workflow management and service-oriented architectures and was keynote speaker at many conferences and workshops on topics like workflow management, B2B and EAI integration as well as Semantic Web.

Inhalt
Service Oriented Computing: Opportunities and Challenges.- Data Semantics Revisited.- Dynamic Agent Composition from Semantic Web Services.- Ontology-Extended Component-Based Workflows : A Framework for Constructing Complex Workflows from Semantically Heterogeneous Software Components.- Data Procurement for Enabling Scientific Workflows: On Exploring Inter-ant Parasitism.- XSDL: Making XML Semantics Explicit.- Refining Semantic Mappings from Relational Tables to Ontologies.- Triadic Relations: An Algebra for the Semantic Web.- Semantically Unlocking Database Content Through Ontology-Based Mediation.- Representation and Reasoning About Changing Semantics in Heterogeneous Data Sources.- Context Mediation in the Semantic Web: Handling OWL Ontology and Data Disparity Through Context Interchange.- HCOME: A Tool-Supported Methodology for Engineering Living Ontologies.- Query Answering by Rewriting in GLAV Data Integration Systems Under Constraints.- Utilizing Resource Importance for Ranking Semantic Web Query Results.- Querying Faceted Databases.- Constructing and Querying Peer-to-Peer Warehouses of XML Resources.