This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th European Semantic Web Conference ESWC 2008 held in Tenerife Canary Islands Spain in June 2008. The 51 revised full papers presented together with 3 invited talks and 25 system description papers were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 270 submitted papers. The papers are organized in topical sections on agents application ontologies applications formal languages foundational issues learning ontologies and natural language ontology alignment query processing search semantic Web services storage and retrieval of semantic Web data as well as user interfaces and personalization.