We are happy to announce that this year ESWC will provide a travel grant programme to support talented PhD students that face financial difficulties in attending the conference. Funds have been secured for this purpose from the generous contributions of STI International and JSAI. JSAI will sponsor students studying at Japanese universities, so we particularly encourage submissions from these students.
Awards will be distributed taking into account financial needs and academic merit. While the application process for the award is open to all students, we primarily expect submissions from students that encounter financial difficulties in funding their travel. Priority will be given to students that have a paper accepted at the PhD Symposium or are first authors of a paper accepted for the main conference (i.e., Research and In Use tracks), followed by those who are co-authoring a paper in the main conference. We will also consider students that have submitted their own or a joint contribution to a workshop or to the demo session. Affiliation to an STI member institution with reduced research funds might be taken into consideration in a tie situation.

To apply for the award please send the following documents to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it by the 16th of March 2009:

• a short description of your research work, your ESWC'09 accepted paper(s) or current workshop/demo submissions, the institution where the PhD is performed and the expected graduation date;
• an estimate of the funds needed for travelling to ESWC;
• a letter of support from your supervisor confirming the status of the PhD;
• a CV.

The value of the awards is not fixed but will be settled on a case-to-case basis according to the financial context and the academic merit of each student. It is unlikely that the award will cover all expenses, so interested students should be prepared to cover the rest of their travel costs.Notifications about the award distribution will be sent by the 6th of April 2009, thus allowing about two months for preparing the travel to the conference. The payment of the award will be performed after the event and as a refund based on actual invoices.

Note: Given that the notification of the award distribution will happen after the early bird registration date, the ESWC’09 organization committee decided that all applicants will still be able to pay the early-bird fee (in those cases when the award will not cover registration). This will be achieved using a voucher system, details of which will be announced shortly.

Report on the distribution of the travel funds.

We are pleased to announce that we have received 23 applications and that the available funds have been used to support the expenses of 16 applicants. Given that all applicants had comparable financial backgrounds, the major decision criterion was their academic achievement for ESWC’09. As a result, 3 non-European applicants with papers accepted in the main research track or at the PhD Symposium were awarded grants of 1000 euros. Further, 10 European applicants with the same achievement level were each awarded 500 euros. Finally, the remaining funds were divided amongst the 3 applicants with workshop papers, each being entitled to approximately 300 euros. Regretfully, we were not able to fund the 6 applicants with poster and demo submissions. However, additionally to these grants, all 23 applicants benefited from a reduction of 15% from the early bird registration fee thus having to pay only a fee of 440 euros. This help was generously offered by STI International.

Note that the received funds can be used to cover any type of expenses encountered during travelling to ESWC’09. Refund will be performed based on receipts and within the amount of the awarded grant.

The members of the PhD Strudent Travel Grant committee were: Marta Sabou (coordinator), John Domingue, Fabio Ciravegna, Riichiro Mizoguchi and Pascal Hitzler.