2012 Workshop on Cross-Cultural and Cross-Linguistic Semantic Web is intended to provide a forum to share and discuss innovative ideas approaches in ontology, agent and Semantic Web research in areas related to the cross-linguistic and cross-cultural issues of the multilingual Semantic Web.

The issues discussed will not only be relevant and timely to WIC2012 participants, but also of much urgency, because the exponential growth non-English-speaking users of the Web and thus the Semantic Web. This urgency becomes apparent as most known written languages become part of the Web and as the rapid penetration rate of the Web users to over 25% of the World population, most of which speak a language other than English, so far the lingua franca of the Web, requires that we pay close attention to the potential issues that might arise from a multilingual and multicultural Semantic Web. We have barely scratched the surface of the Semantic Web with languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian and Arabic, which as of 2010 together account for about 773.7million users or about 34.2% of the total 2.1 billion Internet users . As the multilingual Web use increases, new approaches to enable the realization of the multilingual Semantic Web become even more important. This workshop is intended to for researchers and practicioners who are working on novel approaches to address the theoretical and practical issues related not only to lexical-to-conceptual mappings of natural language to ontologies, but also to a variety of non-linguistic issues, both from the scientific and engineering points of view.