Social Semantic Web
Encyclopedia
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
.
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.
Socio-semantic web was coined by Manuel Zacklad and Jean-Pierre Cahier in 2003 and used in the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work
(CSCW). It recently gained wider appeal after the release of Peter Morville
's book Ambient Findability. In Chapter 6 he defines the socio-semantic web as relying on "the pace-layering of ontologies, taxonomies, and folksonomies to learn and adapt as well as teach and remember." We are seeing an increasing use of folksonomies on the web, and a corresponding decrease in the use of hierarchical taxonomies. Morville, the recognized librarian and information architect writes; “I’ll take the ancient tree of knowledge over the transient leaves of popularity any day”. There is undoubtedly scepticism towards the widespread and bushfire like adoption of folksonomies. The socio-semantic web may be seen as a middle way between the top-down monolithic taxonomy approach like the Yahoo! Directory
and the more recent collaborative tagging (folksonomy) approaches.
The socio-semantic web differs from the semantic web in that the semantic web often is regarded as a system that will solve the epistemic interoperability issues we have to day. While the semantic web will provide ways for businesses to interoperate across domains the socio-semantic web will enable users to share knowledge.
Morville is vague in his definition of the socio-semantic web and does not lay out any proposed models. We have identified three possible social approaches for solving the problems of user driven ontology evolution for the semantic web. First, users could create a folksonomy (flat taxonomy). With Social Network Analysis (SNA) in conjunction with automated parsers, the ontology could be extracted from the tags and this ontology could be entered into a Topic Map
/TMCL or RDF
/OWL
ontology store. Secondly a set of ontology engineers or ontologists could manually analyze the tags created by the users and by using this data, create a more sound ontology. The third approach is to create a system for self governance where the users themselves create the ontology over time in an organic fashion. All of these approaches could start out with an empty ontology or be seeded manually or with an existing ontology, for example the WordNet
ontology. Social Networks Ontology is the most important concept in social web.
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
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
Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...
, social software
Social software
Social software applications include communication tools and interactive tools. Communication tools typically handle the capturing, storing and presentation of communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. Interactive tools handle mediated interactions between a...
and the Web 2.0
Web 2.0
The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...
.
Overview
The social-semantic web (s2w) aims to complement the formal Semantic Web vision by adding a pragmatic approach relying on description languagesSpecification language
A specification language is a formal language used in computer science.Unlike most programming languages, which are directly executable formal languages used to implement a system, specification languages are used during systems analysis, requirements analysis and systems design.Specification...
for semantic browsing using heuristic classification and semiotic ontologies
Ontology (computer science)
In computer science and information science, an ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It can be used to reason about the entities within that domain and may be used to describe the domain.In theory, an ontology is...
. 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.
Socio-semantic web was coined by Manuel Zacklad and Jean-Pierre Cahier in 2003 and used in the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Computer supported cooperative work
The term computer-supported cooperative work was first coined by Irene Greif and Paul M. Cashman in 1984, at a workshop attended by individuals interested in using technology to support people in their work. At about this same time, in 1987 Dr...
(CSCW). It recently gained wider appeal after the release of Peter Morville
Peter Morville
Peter Morville is president of Semantic Studios, an information architecture and findability consultancey. For over a decade, he has advised such clients as AT&T, IBM, Microsoft, Harvard Business School, Intenet2, Procter & Gamble, Vanguard, and Yahoo!...
's book Ambient Findability. In Chapter 6 he defines the socio-semantic web as relying on "the pace-layering of ontologies, taxonomies, and folksonomies to learn and adapt as well as teach and remember." We are seeing an increasing use of folksonomies on the web, and a corresponding decrease in the use of hierarchical taxonomies. Morville, the recognized librarian and information architect writes; “I’ll take the ancient tree of knowledge over the transient leaves of popularity any day”. There is undoubtedly scepticism towards the widespread and bushfire like adoption of folksonomies. The socio-semantic web may be seen as a middle way between the top-down monolithic taxonomy approach like the Yahoo! Directory
Yahoo! Directory
The Yahoo! Directory is a web directory that rivals the Open Directory Project in size. The directory was Yahoo!'s first offering. When Yahoo! changed to crawler-based listings for its main results in October 2002, the human-edited directory's significance dropped, but it was still being updated in...
and the more recent collaborative tagging (folksonomy) approaches.
The socio-semantic web differs from the semantic web in that the semantic web often is regarded as a system that will solve the epistemic interoperability issues we have to day. While the semantic web will provide ways for businesses to interoperate across domains the socio-semantic web will enable users to share knowledge.
Morville is vague in his definition of the socio-semantic web and does not lay out any proposed models. We have identified three possible social approaches for solving the problems of user driven ontology evolution for the semantic web. First, users could create a folksonomy (flat taxonomy). With Social Network Analysis (SNA) in conjunction with automated parsers, the ontology could be extracted from the tags and this ontology could be entered into a Topic Map
Topic map
Topic Maps is a standard for the representation and interchange of knowledge, with an emphasis on the findability of information. Topic maps were originally developed in the late 1990's as a way to represent back-of-the-book index structures so that multiple indexes from different sources could be...
/TMCL or RDF
Resource Description Framework
The Resource Description Framework is a family of World Wide Web Consortium specifications originally designed as a metadata data model...
/OWL
Web Ontology Language
The Web Ontology Language is a family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies.The languages are characterised by formal semantics and RDF/XML-based serializations for the Semantic Web...
ontology store. Secondly a set of ontology engineers or ontologists could manually analyze the tags created by the users and by using this data, create a more sound ontology. The third approach is to create a system for self governance where the users themselves create the ontology over time in an organic fashion. All of these approaches could start out with an empty ontology or be seeded manually or with an existing ontology, for example the WordNet
WordNet
WordNet is a lexical database for the English language. It groups English words into sets of synonyms called synsets, provides short, general definitions, and records the various semantic relations between these synonym sets...
ontology. Social Networks Ontology is the most important concept in social web.
Examples
- DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from WikipediaWikipediaWikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
and to make this information available on the Web. DBpediaDBpediaDBpedia is a project aiming to extract structured content from the information created as part of the Wikipedia project. This structured information is then made available on the World Wide Web. DBpedia allows users to query relationships and properties associated with Wikipedia resources,...
allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia and to link other datasets on the Web to Wikipedia data. - SIOCSIOCSemantically-Interlinked Online Communities Project is a Semantic Web technology. SIOC provides methods for interconnecting discussion methods such as blogs, forums and mailing lists to each other...
provides methods for interconnecting discussion methods such as blogBlogA blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
s, forums and mailing lists to each other. It consists of the SIOC ontologyOntologyOntology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
, an open-standard machine readable format for expressing the information contained both explicitly and implicitly in internet discussion methods, of SIOC metadata producers for a number of popular blogging platforms and content management systems, and of storage and browsing / searching systems for leveraging this SIOC data. - OPOOnline Presence OntologyThe OPO is an ontology which aims to model the dynamic aspects of a user’s presence online and to enable exchange of the Online Presence data. The creator of the OPO is Milan Stankovic, a young researcher and a member of the GOOD OLD AI Research Network...
provides a way to describe the data relative to user's presence in online social systems, for the purposes of data integration and exchange among heterogeneous systems. The presence information, scattered and distributed all over the Web can be consolidated using OPO-based tools. - Stumpedia is a social project and community effort that relies on human participation and folksonomies to index, organize, and review the world wide webWorld Wide WebThe World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
. The aim is to help build Natural Language ProcessingNatural language processingNatural language processing is a field of computer science and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages; it began as a branch of artificial intelligence....
and the Semantic WebSemantic WebThe Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...
. - Semandeks is a bottom-up approach for building the semantic web. Its strength is the UI it uses.
- TwineTwine (website)Twine is an online, social web service for information storage, authoring and discovery. Created by Radar Networks, the service was announced on October 19, 2007 and made open to the public on October 21, 2008. On March 11, 2010, Radar Networks was acquired by Evri Inc...
combines features of forums, wikis, online databases and newsgroups and employs intelligent software to automatically mine and store data relationships expressed using RDF statements. - Faviki and Tagnauts are social bookmarking communities which restrict their users to tags to which Wikipedia articles exist.
External links
- AAAI Symposium on Social Semantic Web, Spring 2009
- Conference on Social Semantic Web (CSSW)
- I-Semantics 2007, introducing the Social Semantic Web
- MetawebMetawebMetaweb Technologies, Inc. was a United States company based in San Francisco that developed Freebase, described as an "open, shared database of the world's knowledge". The company was founded by Danny Hillis in July, 2005, and operated in stealth mode until 2007. Metaweb was acquired by Google in...
— developers of the online semantic database FreebaseFreebaseFreebase is a large collaborative knowledge base consisting of metadata composed mainly by its community members. It is an online collection of structured data harvested from many sources, including individual 'wiki' contributions. Freebase aims to create a global resource which allows people to... - Radar NetworksRadar NetworksRadar Networks is a San Francisco based company developing semantic web applications for the general public. The company was founded in 2003 by Nova Spivack and Kristinn R. Thórisson .- History :...
— developers of semantic web applications for the general public - Mashups in the Middle - Bridging the Gap to the Semantic Web
- Collaborative Tagging Approaches for Ontological Metadata in Adaptive E-Learning Systems (PDF).
- Digital Identities and Management of Identifiers for a Socio-Semantic Web
- A Web-based Annotation System for Improving Cooperation in a Care Network
- A Social Semantic Web Application
- Social Data on the Web (SDoW) workshops: SDoW 2008, SDoW 2009, SDoW 2010, and SDoW 2011