This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and the Semantic Web, KESW 2017, held Szczecin, Poland, in November 2017. The 16 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 58 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on natural language processing; knowledge representation and reasoning; ontologies and controlled vocabularies; scalable data access and storage solutions; semantic Web and education; linked data; semantic technologies in manufacturing and business.