In recent years the field of distributed systems is increasingly becoming service oriented and information/knowledge centric. In this context the role of application and data semantics in designing large-scale distributed systems is gaining critical importance. While there have been number of conferences and workshops on Semantic Web, Databases and Information Systems, there has been very limited discussion on the role of semantics in generic class of services (beyond Web services), and virtually no research discussion on the role of semantics at the network levels. However, push from the industry (such as CISCO's Application Oriented Networking) as well as increasing role of semantics and associated data engineering techniques at application servers and network component levels make this area worthy of research discussions.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from two important areas, namely distributed systems/services, and data and information semantics (including but not limited to the Semantic Web). The goal of the workshop is to start exploring novel and interesting research issues related to understanding, supporting, and managing semantics in distributed computing, services, grid and network components, and utilizing the data/content and application semantics to enhance the scalability, performance, and security of large-scale distributed systems and services.

The workshop will result in an on line proceedings (with printed copies for the participants) and will be followed up with a book edited by the PC Co-chairs primarily based on the best papers in the workshop in the Spring Book Series on "Semantic Web and Beyond" (Series Editors: Ramesh Jain and Amit Sheth).