Social Semantic Web: More than the Tale of Two Tims
Syed Sumair Qasim
School of Electronics and Computer
Science, University of Southampton,
Southampton, Hampshire, SO17 1BJ
+4407552059212
ssq1g10@ecs.soton.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
Within 20 years the Web has grown from a tool for scientists at
CERN into a global information space. While returning to its
roots as a read/write tool, its entering a more social and
participatory phase. Hence a new, improved version called the
Web 2.0. However for semantic web scientists, the essence lies in
the transformation to an information space in which machine-
readable data, infused with some sense of ‗meaning‘, the semantic
web. These two techniques are natural complements of each other.
In this study, we analyse the different research areas, compare
their approaches in social semantic web and also their technical
progress. Furthermore, we also enlighten the different types of
challenges to the vision of semantic web and web 2.0.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.3.5 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Online Information
Systems; H.4.3 [Communications applications]:
Information browsers; H.5.3 [Information Interfaces]:
Group and Organization Interfaces—Web-based interactions
General Terms
Languages, Human Factors
Keywords
Web 2.0, Blog, RDF, Semantic Web, Wiki, Social Networking
1. INTRODUCTION
Semantic web, the proposed evolution of the web by Tim Berners
Lee [1] and Web 2.0, the natural evolution of the web coined by
Tim O‘Reilly (O‘Reilly Media) [2] are currently popular research
topics both in academia and industry. At first glance, they appear
to contradict each other. Web 2.0 being described as the
accumulation of new Web-based collaboration technologies [2]
such as social networking sites, communication tools, and wikis
equipped with AJAX, Flash or RSS. Similarly, the vision of
semantic web explained in [1] has inspired researchers and
practitioners, and they have achieved number of goals like the
revision of RDF [3] and RDF(S) [4], and standardization of web
ontology language (OWL) [5].
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Both the patterns of the Web 2.0 and the technologies of semantic
web address the fundamental concept of socially shared meaning
hence making the two techniques natural complements of each
other. Moreover the combination of these two techniques gives
birth to the term ‗Social Semantic Web‘.
2. MOTIVATION
Web 2.0 service include blogs, wikis, social networks, data-mash-
ups, media sharing and social tagging which alone or together
make up a social web application (Facebook, Twitter, Blogger,
Wikipedia, YouTube). Although these application are heading
towards interconnected information space (blogosphere, inter-wiki
links, mash-ups etc.), at the same time they are experiencing
boundaries in terms of information integration, automation,
dissemination, and searchability [7]. Moreover, Tim Berners Lee
refers these applications as information silos [6]. Therefore,
Semantic Web is targeting these applications areas with number
of Semantic Web approaches e.g. semantic wikis (Semantic
MediaWiki), knowledge networking (Twine) and data portability
APIs (from Google and Facebook), etc. Number of semantic web
vocabularies have achieved success such as RSS, FOAF, SIOC.
This application of the Semantic Web to the Web 2.0 services is
leading to the creation of a network of interlinked and
semantically-rich knowledge.
3. RESEARCH AREAS OF SEMANTIC
WEB AND WEB 2.0
3.1 Knowledge and Information Sharing
Web 2.0 offers collaborative knowledge and information sharing
through collection of web pages, where anyone can create new
pages and edit existing pages by using a simplified markup
language; these applications are called wikis [8]. Beside all these
features, wikis (such as Wikipedia1) have some limitation like
knowledge discovery, reuse and consistency, which led to the idea
of semantic wikis where a semantic wiki engine to add semantic
markup2 which can be annotated using RDF and OWL [9].
Semantic MediaWiki is such a semantic wiki engine that is built
on top of MediaWiki developed by AIFB 3. Another famous
project is DBpedia [10] which allows users to ask sophisticated
queries against datasets derived from Wikipedia and to link other
datasets on the Web to Wikipedia data. The latest release (3.5.1)
has over 5 million external links to other RDF datasets and
565,000 Wikipedia categories [11].
1
http://www.wikipedia.org/ (URL last accessed 2011-04-05)
2
http://www.semwiki.org/ (URL last accessed 2011-04-05)
3
AIFB, Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods
3.2 Social Networking Services
Social networking services (SNS) [12] such as Facebook, Twitter
and LinkedIn allow a user to create and maintain an online
network of close friends or business associates for social and
professional reasons. But people are tired of repeating the same
information in multiple places, and through standard sign-on
systems like OpenID and profile representation mechanisms like
FOAF (Friend of a Friend); you can allow someone to define their
identity and to reuse it wherever they choose to use it. FOAF
descriptions are themselves published as linked documents in the
Web (eg. using RDF/XML or RDFa syntax) [13]. This leads to
the next generation of social networks called ‗Decentralized
Social Networks‘ [14], where a user does not need to join any
particular social networking service. Instead, the user chooses a
server which he trusts (OAuth) to host his own data such as his
FOAF [13] file.
3.3 Social Bookmarking
Web-based tagging systems such as Del.icio.us, Technorati and
Flickr allow participants to annotate a particular resource with
tags. Cameron et al [15] provides a brief description of academic
work where researchers have formalized tagging terminology
[16], studied about ‗Collaborative Tagging Systems [17]‘ and
presented tools to incorporate into social networks. Broadly their
work can be divided two main areas: linking existing
folksonomies to taxonomies or ontologies and defining semantic
web models for tags and related objects (Semantic Tagging). The
Tag Ontology4 was the first RDF-based model for representing
tags and tagging actions, based on the initial ideas of Gruber [18]
where the ontology is based FOAF vocabulary and defines a Tag
class. Each tag has a URI and can be used as both subject and
object of RDF triples. It also uses a lightweight RDFS vocabulary
called SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) allowing
people to define controlled vocabularies and thesauri.
3.4 Blogging
Blogs can be more than an easy-to-use publishing tool. Their
ability to also generate machine readable RSS and Atom feeds in
order to distribute their content or aggregate similar information
from a number of sources [19], [20]. Traditionally, these feeds are
used for the headlines from blog postings, but by combining the
ideas behind the Semantic Web with blogging software (Semantic
Blogging), it is be possible to develop new information
management systems. SparqlPress5 is prototype that leverages
Semantic Web technologies in blogs. It is not a separate blogging
system but rather an open-source plugin for the popular
WordPress platform and it aims to produce, integrate and reuse
RDF data for an enhanced user experience. SparqlPress mainly
relies on the FOAF, SIOC and SKOS Semantic Web vocabularies.
Microblogging (e.g Twitter) is a recent social phenomenon on the
Social Web, with similar usage motivations. Michael Arrington
wrote a post6 about the need for a ‗decentralised Twitter‘ and for
open alternative microblogging platforms, which was picked up
by technologists. The SMOB7 or semantic microblogging
4
http://www.holygoat.co.uk/projects/tags/ (URL last accessed 2011-
04-05)
5
http://bzr.mfd-consult.dk/sparqlpress/(URL last accessed 2011-04-
05)
6
http://techcrunch.com/2008/05/05/twitter-can-be-liberated-heres-
how/ (URL last accessed 2011-04-05)
7 machine readable data having some semantics.
http://smob.me/ (URL last accessed 2011-04-15)
prototype is an example of how Semantic Web technologies can
provide an open platform for decentralised / distributed publishing
of microblogging content mainly using the FOAF and SIOC
vocabularies.
4. TECHNOLOGY AND STANDARD
Semantic web applications equipped with Web 2.0 services have
been made possible due to the various technologies and standards
proposed by research communities (W3C/IETF).
Extensible Markup Language (XML) [21] is the basis of most of
semantic web and web 2.0 technologies. The Resource
Description Framework (RDF) is a framework for representing
information in the Web. Presented as a recommendation in 1999
RDF became a specification in 2004. Since then research and
development has led to newer standards like SPARQL [22], OWL
[23] and SKOS [24]. In June 2010, W3C organized a workshop
[25] to gather feedback from the Web community and discuss
possible revisions and improvements to RDF (e.g ‗Named
Graphs‘)
The most commonly adopted syndication format is ‗RSS‘, from
the Semantic Web perspective, the RSS 1.0 variant (in RDF)
allows us to combine syndicated articles with metadata from other
vocabularies such as FOAF or Dublin Core. Similar to RSS is the
Atom Syndication Format, an XML format and recent IETF
standard that is also commonly used for syndicating web feeds
(e.g. from Blogger.com). The lack of unification between RSS
formats is one of the reasons that led to Atom being created [7].
AJAX, standing for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a
method for creating interactive web applications whereby data is
retrieved from a web server asynchronously without interrupting
the display of a currently-viewed web page (e.g Google Maps).
Other trends being researched and developed in the social
semantic web are Mashups, Cloud computing, Open APIs, OAuth,
and Microformats [26].
5. CONCLUSION
In the past year, it has become clear that these two techniques are
natural complements of each. However they are faced with two
different types of challenges. Does the success of social, user
oriented models of Web 2.0 impact the way that Semantic Web
data should be created and exploited? And can the relative
precision of Semantic Web representations and inference add
significant value to Web 2.0 applications?
Researchers tend to belief that the social semantic web is likely to
become a major application area of Semantic Web Technology.
Tom Gruber [26] argues that Web 2.0 stops at what he calls
―Collected Intelligence‖, adding semantics into the mix would
allow reaching collective intelligence. Bojars, Breslin and Finn
[27] would certainly agree with Hendler and Golbeck [28] on the
power of linking. Their attention is focused on linking Web 2.0-
style social spaces. Adida‘s proposal [29] for translating between
the emerging worlds of microformats and RDFa is called
hGRDDL
All of these and similar researches have contributed to the
formalization of areas like Semantic web and E-Learning,
Interlinking Online Communities (SIOC) and Social Sharing of
Software. Therefore, the evolution of Web is more than the ‗Tale
of two Tims‘ it is an information space with some social
participation from its users, simultaneously interlinked with
6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS [15] Marlow Cameron. et all. HT06, Tagging Paper, Taxonomy,
My sincere thanks to ECS faculty for developing interest in this Flickr, Academic Article, To Read, In Proceedings of the
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