The 5th ESWC Summer School will run in southern Crete from the morning of Monday August 31st to midday Saturday September 5th 2015. The overall goal for this event is to provide intensive training and networking opportunities for the next EWC generation. In particular we wish to facilitate the creation of a new cohort of ESWC: Master’s, Ph.D. students and junior researchers who will in time become the next leaders of the ESWC conference and of the Semantic Web research area in general.

In this respect the above the topics of the ESWC summer school will be aligned with the most prominent and emerging topics of the ESWC conference. We will also provide opportunities for attendees to network with their peers, the school tutors and keynotes as well as senior members of STI International and senior members of the Semantic Web community who are participating in the conference.

The organization and tutorial team for this summer school have extensive experience in these types of events having organized similar events in Europe, the US and Asia over a number of years. Building from this experience, and also knowledge of pedagogy we know that learning-by-doing leads to successful learning. We also know the true value of networking in the research context and that this is best supported by an informal atmosphere coupled with an enjoyable inclusive social program. Supporting the above will be a dominant theme of the EWSC summer school and a significant portion of the school will involve hands-on sessions with the latest generation of Semantic Web tools.

Recent press have highlighted the value of Open Educational Resources (OERs) within Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs. The summer school will make extensive use of OERs from the Euclid and PlanetData EU projects allowing participants to:

• View materials related to the technical part of the Summer School as high quality eBooks (available on eBook readers, on iPads, Kindle) in web form (see 'Learning Materials' menu item).
• View the technical presentations as Webinars (see 'Learning Materials' menu item).
• Provide feedback on all materials to the course authors and Summer School tutors for the benefit of both educators and learners.

The summer school is open to anyone studying in a Semantic Web related post-graduate course or is at an early stage of a Semantic Web related career and is engaged in suitable Semantic Web activities. Places will be limited to 50 in order to ensure that all participating students receive quality time with their tutors. Accepted students will be obliged to attend the whole week.

We encourage anyone who is at an early stage of their Semantic Web career to apply our school which benefits from its close association with the conference.

The ESWC summer school is supported by a number of European projects including PlanetData and also videolectures.net.