Data Semantics: what, where and how? A. Sheth Large Scale Distributed Information Systems Lab, Department of Computer Science, University of Georgia 415 GSRC, Athens, GA 30602-7404, USA e-mail: amit@cs.uga.edu; URL:http://www.cs.uga.edu/LSDIS/ Abstract At the panel held during the last session of the DS-6 conference, four panelists -- Leo Mark, Robert Meersman, Sham Navathe, and Arnon Rosenthal -- addressed the key questions related to the topic of the conference, related their perspectives to what was presented and discussed at the conference, and suggested research issues in data semantics that they would like to see addressed in the future. The panel was organized, introduced, and moderated by the author. Several conference participants also presented short position statements during the panel. This chapter summarizes the lively and often insightful panel discussion, along with additional thoughts of the author/moderator. Keywords Data Semantics, Application Semantics 1 INTRODUCTION The panelists participating in the panel on “Data Semantics: what, where and how?” were asked to address four fundamental questions directly related to the subjects of this conference: • What is data semantics? • Where do you find it (what do you look for and where do you look to understand the semantics of data) and how do you derive it? • How do you represent it? • What are the uses of semantics (how do humans, applications, and data management systems use data semantics)? Several papers at the conference also dealt, either directly or indirectly, with the above questions. In addition to giving their own insights, the panelists pointed out and interpreted the papers presented at the conferences that dealt with these questions. They also offered their view on future research that could better address the questions posed to them. In writing this chapter that describes and summarizes the discussions, we have also