Social Semantic Web

The concept of the Social Semantic Web subsumes developments in which social interactions on the Web lead to the creation of explicit and semantically rich knowledge representations. The Social Semantic Web can be seen as a Web of collective knowledge systems, which are able to provide useful information based on human contributions and which get better as more people participate. The Social Semantic Web combines technologies, strategies and methodologies from the Semantic Web, social software and the Web 2.0.

Overview

The social-semantic web (s2w) aims to complement the formal Semantic Web vision by adding a pragmatic approach relying on description languages for semantic browsing using heuristic classification and semiotic ontologies. A socio-semantic system has a continuous process of eliciting crucial knowledge of a domain through semi-formal ontologies, taxonomies or folksonomies. S2w emphasize the importance of humanly created loose semantics as means to fulfil the vision of the semantic web. Instead of relying entirely on automated semantics with formal ontology processing and inferencing, humans are collaboratively building semantics aided by socio-semantic information systems. While the semantic web enables integration of business processing with precise automatic logic inference computing across domains, the socio-semantic web opens up for a more social interface to the semantics of businesses, allowing interoperability between business objects, actions and their users.

Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is an extension of the Web through standards by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The standards promote common data formats and exchange protocols on the Web, most fundamentally the Resource Description Framework (RDF).

According to the W3C, "The Semantic Web provides a common framework that allows data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise, and community boundaries". The term was coined by Tim Berners-Lee for a web of data that can be processed by machines. While its critics have questioned its feasibility, proponents argue that applications in industry, biology and human sciences research have already proven the validity of the original concept.

The 2001 Scientific American article by Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila described an expected evolution of the existing Web to a Semantic Web. In 2006, Berners-Lee and colleagues stated that: "This simple idea…remains largely unrealized". In 2013, more than four million Web domains contained Semantic Web markup.