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 Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agentson the World Wide Web 6 (2008) 1–3
Editorial
Semantic Web and Web 2.0
The cluster of technologies and design patterns known asWeb 2.0 has now emerged as the leading contender for “thenext evolution of the Web.” Researchers, developers, and ven-ture capitalists are all flocking toward the banner of Web 2.0,based on its promise of massively increased sharing and partic-ipation among web users. At the same time, the technologiesof the Semantic Web have been quietly maturing and spreading,andnowtheyprovideaclearwaytoapplyabasiclevelofformalsemantics to the infrastructure and pages of the web. In distinc-tive ways, both the patterns of Web 2.0 and the technologies of the Semantic Web address the fundamental concept of sociallyshared meaning.Inthepastyear,ithasbecomeclearthatthesetwotechniquesare natural complements of each other. Further, the combina-tion of Semantic Web technologies with Web 2.0 applicationdesign patterns should give rise to a new and exciting off-spring: the social-semantic web, also referred to as Web 3.0.In a social-semantic web, certain formally representable partsof human meaning can be encoded and reasoned about via thetools of the semantic web, but can also be curated and main-tained via the social, community-oriented techniques of Web2.0. The results of this combination would be powerful indeed.The social-semantic web promises that the subtle variations inmeaning that characterize different human communities can bemanagedviatheuser-friendlycollaborationmechanismsofWeb2.0, while still maintaining the expressive precision and reason-ingpowerofthesemanticWeb.Thiswouldmakepossibleanewclass of applications that could leverage the semantic relationsthat exist between certain kinds of web-accessible data to auto-matically locate and fuse information, perform basic reasoning,and pivot and transform representations to meet a wide varietyofuserneeds.Thisspecialissueofthe
 JournalofWebSemantics
is dedicated to the emerging social-semantic web.Given the early, experimental stage of the field, the impres-sive flowering of ideas so far, and the resulting fragmentationof the works we have seen, we faced an interesting editorialchallenge in creating this special issue. We elected to departfrom the customary
Journal of Web Semantics
format of three-to-four deep and lengthy research papers, in favor of a largernumberofshorterandhopefullymorethought-provokingpieces.We did not propose particular topics of interest in our call forcontributions, nor did we specify a desired format for contri-butions. Instead, we posed a set of questions to motivate ourcontributors in thinking about the promises and pitfalls of com-bining Semantic Web and Web 2.0 technologies. In particular,we requested that our authors consider two different types of concrete challenges to the vision of the social-semantic web:
•
SemanticWebtechnologieswereinitiallydesignedbeforetheriseoftheWeb2.0methodsformanaginglarge-scalesociallycontributedcontent.WhatlessonsshouldSemanticWebtech-nologies draw from the popularity of tag systems, socialnetworks, mashups, and other Web 2.0 techniques? Does thesuccess of the social, user-oriented contribution models of Web 2.0 impact the way that Semantic Web data should becreated, deployed, exploited, managed, and shared? In short,shouldparticularaspectsoftheSemanticWebbereconsideredin order to maximally leverage the strengths of Web 2.0?
•
Web 2.0 applications always depend on some type of sharedsemantics—for example, between the software componentsof a mashup, or within the user community that contributes toa particular tagging system. Can the relative precision andrigor of Semantic Web representations and inference addsignificant value to Web 2.0 applications? Are the variousSemantic Web “bridge” technologies (like RDFa, GRDDL,and SPARQL) adequate to the semantic demands of Web2.0 applications? Can Semantic Web techniques be used tosubstantially enhance perceived user value in Web 2.0 socialnetworks, for example by linking across communities?We received contributions that span a range from discussionpapers to advances in research technology to demonstrations.We selected ten papers that represent a balance in terms of thesespecific types of contributions to the quickly emerging researchandtechnologylandscape.Theyfellintothreeroughcategories:discussion papers, technology papers, and systems papers.
1. Discussion papers
Much to our surprise, while we expected debates to emergeamong the
discussion papers
, our authors were united in theirbelief that the social-semantic web is likely to become a majorapplication area of Semantic Web technology. As Tom Gruberexplains in our first paper, Web 2.0 brings massive amounts
1570-8268/$ – see front matter © 2008 Published by Elsevier B.V.doi:10.1016/j.websem.2007.12.002
 
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Editorial / Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 6 (2008) 1–3
of user-generated content and a proven recipe of humans andmachines working together in synergy. However, he argues thatWeb 2.0 stops at what he calls “collected intelligence,” the merepoolingofcontributionsfromindividualusers.AddingSemanticWebtechnologyintothemixwouldallowtoreachtruecollectiveintelligence, which he defines as the higher level understand-ing constituted by answers, discoveries and other results notfound in the original contributions. Gruber suggests that theSemantic Web technology will act in two principal ways: byadding structure to user data and by connecting the existingsilos of data that characterize the Web 2.0 landscape. Whatmakes Gruber’s argumentation particularly strong is the wealthof examples drawn from his experiences at RealTravel, a Web2.0-style travel site employing lightweight semantic technolo-gies. These examples validate the old semantic web clich´e thata little semantics goes a long way, and at a fraction of thecost.In the next paper, Hendler and Golbeck also see theman–machine synergy in the marriage of the Semantic Web andWeb 2.0. They cast their argument in terms of networks: whileWeb 2.0 is a rich network connecting users, the Semantic Webis a network connecting data through semantic relations. Theyargue that the power of linking in networks increases super-linearly in networks in general, and that these two networks areno exception. Interconnecting these networks is thus certain tobringvalueasnewconnectionsbecomepossiblewithinthem.Asanexample,theydiscusstheexistingpoorconnectivityofcollab-orative tagging systems as a semantic space (“tags do not createmuchofalinkspace”),goingalmostasfarasclaimingthatmostof tagging is selfish (serving only individuals or small groups).These spaces they argue would benefit from minimal semanticsin the form of stable URIs for concepts and limited core ontolo-gies. Hendler and Golbeck leave the problem of how to graftontologies on tag spaces as future work: they reject bottom–upmethodsor“emergentsemantics”asamethodthatcanonlyreli-ably determine the semantics of the most common terms (whichare not necessarily the ones users may care about), but they alsocriticize expert-system style approaches to the Semantic Web.They hint that the solution is partly a user-interface challenge,e.g
.
capturing semantics at the point of metadata creation. Sim-ilarly, they see a great deal of work to be done in exploiting thenew linkages.Bojars, Breslin and Finn would certainly agree with Hendlerand Golbeck on the power of linking. Their attention is focusedon linking Web 2.0-style social spaces, especially the manyforums for discussion that exist on the Web. Their criticism of thecurrentstate-of-the-art,inparticularmicroformats,isexactlythe lack of possibilities for interlinking and their limited exten-sibility. They describe the work they have carried out in the pastyearsinDERI’sSIOCinitiative,whichprovidesagoodexampleof reusing existing core vocabularies in creating an overlay net-work of semantics. Their work is both technically advanced andpragmatically feasible. In filling SIOC’s semantic network withlive data, the authors also do not mind getting their hands dirty:in fact, they have been doing a outstanding work in promotingSIOC in the semantics community, helping others implementit, and stepping in themselves to add SIOC support to existingsocial platforms in order to capture semantic annotations at thesource.
2. Technology papers
While Bojars
et al.
are mostly concerned with the externalrepresentation of contextual metadata, our first more focused
technology paper 
, Iyad Rahwan’s “Mass Argumentation andthe Semantic Web,” goes deeper in exploring how to imposea layer of semantics on discussions themselves. More pre-cisely, Rahwan describes a formal representation of genericargument structures. Although primitive ways of connectingarguments in the social space already exist (e.g
.
through theuse of tags, links and trackbacks as references), Rahwan’s pro-posal augments these with several much more formal conceptsof argumentation theory and rhetoric, such as the different rolesthat facts can play in debate. To make this work, Rahwan needsthe human element in Web 2.0, because extracting argumentstructures fully automatically is one of the hardest tasks innatural language processing. Participants in complex intellec-tual debate are often willing to invest the extra time to expresstheir arguments in a careful and structured way. The idea of arich,ontology-basedargumentrepresentationcertainlyholdsthepotential for interesting applications, such as multi-perspectivequestion answering or argumentative semantic blogging whereparticipants can link precisely to particular aspects of a discus-sionandprovidesupportingevidence,endorsementsorrebuttals(which can be later retrieved and aggregated with the contribu-tions of other users).In one of the most formal papers in our collection, J¨aschke
et al.
propose a method for ontology learning in folksonomies,in particular based on frequently co-occurring sets of users, tagsand resources. They view ontologies as social constructs, wherea concept can be described by a set of tags pertaining to a setof users and used to characterize certain kinds of resources.Adapting results from Formal Concept Analysis, they providean efficient method of learning the most salient concepts in afolksonomy. Interpreting or even visualizing the results is non-trivial,buttheirmethodcouldleadustobetterwaysofnavigatingand comprehending the complex and noisy folksonomies thatmany Web 2.0 websites are built upon.Ben Adida’s paper provides a bridge between Web 2.0-styleterm-based knowledge representation and the more logicallydemanding formalisms of the Semantic Web. Translation is atheme of many of the successful technologies we have seenin recent months. Adida’s proposal for translating between theemerging worlds of microformats and RDFa is called hGRDDL(lacking vowels, best pronounced as ‘h-griddle’). His idea isto apply GRDDL-style transformations to convert microformat-enabled web pages into semantically equivalent pages wherethe microformats have been replaced with RDFa markup, whileensuring that the transformation preserves the visual presenta-tion of the page. hGRDDL is a practical proposal that preparesus for the a world where RDFa and microformats will existside-by-side.Battle and Benson’s paper bridges the Semantic Web andWeb 2.0 at the level of access to data and services. They have
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