The International Conference on Digital Libraries and the Semantic Web is an Initiative to bring together two communities: those who are working on semantic web technology and those who managing big digital libraries. Too often the work on Digital Library Systems is poor in Semantic Technology; too often also the work on Semantic tools is not aware of the issues when working with large real world data sets.

ICSD tries to bring this together. The first conference was organized by the Indian Institute of Statistics in Bangaloren, October 2007. I presented there our work on AGRIS and the Agricultural Ontology Service. Together with ARD Prasad from the Indian Institute of Statistics we decided to make ICSD an Institution.

We brought together a convenor group for ICSD 2009 and I acted as one of the Conference Chairs. The Conference is documented at https://www.icsd-conference.org/.