The winners of the 2012 Semantic Web Challenge (SWC), determined by a jury from both academia and industry, were announced at the International Semantic Web Conference held in Boston. The challenge and allocated prizes were sponsored by Elsevier. 

 In 2003, the SWC was set up to showcase the very latest in semantic web technology and every year the final rounds of this competition take place at the annual International Semantic Web Conference. Semantic Web Challenge contestants competed in any of two challenge categories: 'Open Track' and 'Billion Triples Track'. 

Open Track contestants are required to submit applications that utilize the semantics (meaning) of data and applications are designed to operate in an open web environment where information sources are under diverse ownership and control; Billion Triples Track contestants have to reason with a pre-supplied, very big data set of mixed quality.

The jury selected 4 Open Track Challenge winners and 1 Billion Triples Track winner. 

Open Track challenge:

 - 1st prize: "Event Media" by Houd Khrouf, Vuk Milicic and Raphael Troncy from EURECOM, Sophia Antipolis, France demonstrates how to use semantic web technology to more efficiently and easily integrate multiple online and social media content sources that evolve over time.

- 2nd prize: "Semantic Processing of Urban Data" by S. Kotoulas, V. Lopez, R Lloyd, M. Sbodid, F. Lecue, M. Stephenson, E. Daly, V. Bicer, A. Gkoulalas-Divanis, G. Di Lorenzo, A. Schumann and P. Aonghusa from IBM research's Smart Cities Team. The mayor of Dublin wanted to know why his ambulances were perennially late so this team 'knowledge mined' hundreds of information sources emanating from the city ranging from usual twitter feeds to garbage collection tags and many more to help the mayor improve city service.

- 3rd prize: jointly awarded to: 
"Wildfire Monitoring  and "Open Self Medication".
Open Self Medication
by Olivier Cure of Universite Paris-Est, LIGM, CNRS advises on self-medication, using the Linked Open Data cloud to mine contraindications for various over the counter medications and adds to these where they were missing. A mobile geo location price comparison tool enables users to find nearby pharmacies that sell the cheapest drugs, enabling French health care insurance companies to reduce their costs; Wildfire Monitoring by K. Kyzirakos, M. Karpathiotakis, G. Garbis, C. Nikoladu, K. Bereta, I Papatousis, T. Herekakis, D. Michail, M. Koubarakis and C. Kontoes from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, National Observatory of Athens and the Harokopeio University of Athens combines multimedia satellite images with ontologies and Linked Geospatial Data to improve the wildfire monitoring service used by the Greek civil protection agencies, military, and firefighters. 

Billion Triples Track challenge:

- "Exploring the linked data cloud by X. Zhang, D. Song, S.Priya, Z. Daniels, K. Reynolds and J. Heflin of Lehigh University allows users to understand how massive data sets are populated and reveals patterns in within these data sets. 

 "We were extremely impressed by the demos this year, many of which were interesting, well designed, highly polished, and had clear use cases for both the general public and for domain experts," explained SWC co-chairs Andreas Harth, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Diana Maynard, University of Sheffield. 

"Elsevier is a proud sponsor of the Semantic Web Challenge as it clearly illustrates what the Semantic Web can provide to the world by highlighting the state-of-the-art developments in web technology each year. Furthermore, allowing researchers to showcase their work and compare it to others stimulates current research in this exciting and growing field," said Sweitze Roffel, Senior Publisher in Computer Science at Elsevier.