“Communion must be symmetric”, well-known painter Salvador Dalí once said about Leonardo’s masterpiece “The Last Supper“. I could not help feeling reminded of this phrase when I made this snapshot at the European Semantic Web Conference 2008 in Tenerife. I took this picture at the panel discussion entitled “Does the Semantic Web Need Web Science?”. The central position of Stefan Decker, director of DERI Galway, might have some meaning: his institute had by far the most representatives and published papers at the conference, according to the nice ESWC2008 linked data browser (powered by RDF and the Exhibit data exploration tool).

Oh, and I really do think that the Semantic Web needs web science.