SPECIAL SESSION CHAIRS* Nikos Manouselis, Greek Research & Technology Network (Greece)* Ioannis Athanasiadis, Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence(Switzerland)* Johannes Keizer, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations(Italy)AIM & TOPICSThe aim of the Special Track on Metadata and Semantics for Agriculture, Food & Environment of MTSR'09 is to bring together researchers and practitioners that are working on agricultural and food & environment knowledge production, organization, and exchange from a Semantic Web perspective. It aims to serve as a discussion forum where interested experts will present the results of their work, and establish liaisons with other groups that are working on related subjects. In addition, it aims to outline the rich potential of these subjects as an application field for advanced metadata- and semantic-driven systems and services.Topics include but are not limited to contributions dealing with the following issues in the context of for agriculture, food & environment:* Information standards and specifications* Metadata schemas and application profiles* Multilingual vocabularies, taxonomies, glossaries and thesauri* Metadata generation, harvesting, and exchange* Knowledge acquisition, elicitation and extraction* Infrastructures, systems and services for knowledge organisation* Knowledge repositories and archives* Ontology approaches, models, theories, and languages* Ontology development, integration, lifecycle, and evaluation* Management of large ontology-driven knowledge basesIMPORTANT DATES28 February 2009: Submissions15 April 2009: Notifications30 May 2009: Camera-ready of accepted papers1-2 October 2009: MTSR in MilanSUBMISSIONSInterested authors can submit either full papers (12 pages) or short papers (6 pages) about complete or ongoing research. Papers should be original and not previously submitted to other venues. Submission will be available through the EasyChair submission system: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mtsr09If you haven't an EasyChair account yet, you'll be asked to create it before you can access the MTSR'09 page. PUBLICATION Springer will publish MTSR'09 accepted papers in the form a book in the CCIS Series. In addition, best papers will be selected for publishing revised versions at several International Journals covering the diversity of topics, like the International Journal of Metadata, Semantics and Ontologies and The Electronic Library.ABOUT MTSR'09The 3rd International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR'09) will be hosted by the Department of Computer Science Systems and Communication of the University of Milano-Bicocca from 30th September to 2nd October 2009. It targets researchers and practitioners from the fields of metadata and semantics research as well as applications of the semantic web and related technologies. See http://www.lintar.disco.unimib.it/MTSR09/index.html for details.