Stefan Decker - Böcker

“Evolve or perish” – this is the motto for living systems. Judging by this saying, the Web is alive and well: new sites and business ideas are coming online almost daily and are able to attract millions of users often. The more recently coined term “Web 2.0” summarizes many of the new developments, capturing efforts making the Web more interactive (like Ajax), more collaborative (like Wikis), or more relationship oriented (like online social networks), aiming to partially fulfill the original promise of the Web. These new Web developments offer an opportunity and challenge for the Semantic Web: what previously manifested itself mostly in “dry” specifications is now becoming the foundation for information exchange on the Web, creating a shared semantic information space. These and other challenges have been picked up by several hundred computer scientists, developers, vendors, government workers, venture capitalists, students, and users, gathered in Athens, Atlanta, USA, November 5–9, 2006, for the Fifth International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2006). Building on previous successful meetings in Sardinia, Sanibel Island, Hiroshima, and Galway, this sixth annual conference demonstrates new research results, technology, and applications that show current incarnations of the Semantic Web. Especially encouraging is the shift towards more applications—whereas the Research Track attracted roughly as many papers as in the previous year, the contributions submitted to the In-Use Track doubled.

This book contains a collection of thoroughly revised tutorial papers based on lectures given by leading researchers at the Second International Summer School on the Reasoning Web in Dresden, Germany, September 2007. The nine tutorial papers cover methods and research issues of the Semantic Web, ontology languages and their relation to description logics, techniques in Web information extraction, employing ontologies to ease construction of software applications, and more.

The Social Web (including services such as MySpace, Flickr, last.fm, and WordPress) has captured the attention of millions of users as well as billions of dollars in investment and acquisition. Social websites, evolving around the connections between people and their objects of interest, are encountering boundaries in the areas of information integration, dissemination, reuse, portability, searchability, automation and demanding tasks like querying. The Semantic Web is an ideal platform for interlinking and performing operations on diverse person- and object-related data available from the Social Web, and has produced a variety of approaches to overcome the boundaries being experienced in Social Web application areas.After a short overview of both the Social Web and the Semantic Web, Breslin et al. describe some popular social media and social networking applications, list their strengths and limitations, and describe some applications of Semantic Web technology to address their current shortcomings by enhancing them with semantics. Across these social websites, they demonstrate a twofold approach for interconnecting the islands that are social websites with semantic technologies, and for powering semantic applications with rich community-created content. They conclude with observations on how the application of Semantic Web technologies to the Social Web is leading towards the "Social Semantic Web" (sometimes also called "Web 3.0"), forming a network of interlinked and semantically-rich content and knowledge.The book is intended for computer science professionals, researchers, and graduates interested in understanding the technologies and research issues involved in applying Semantic Web technologies to social software. Practitioners and developers interested in applications such as blogs, social networks or wikis will also learn about methods for increasing the levels of automation in these forms of Web communication.

The Social Web (including services such as MySpace, Flickr, last.fm, and WordPress) has captured the attention of millions of users as well as billions of dollars in investment and acquisition. Social websites, evolving around the connections between people and their objects of interest, are encountering boundaries in the areas of information integration, dissemination, reuse, portability, searchability, automation and demanding tasks like querying. The Semantic Web is an ideal platform for interlinking and performing operations on diverse person- and object-related data available from the Social Web, and has produced a variety of approaches to overcome the boundaries being experienced in Social Web application areas.After a short overview of both the Social Web and the Semantic Web, Breslin et al. describe some popular social media and social networking applications, list their strengths and limitations, and describe some applications of Semantic Web technology to address their current shortcomings by enhancing them with semantics. Across these social websites, they demonstrate a twofold approach for interconnecting the islands that are social websites with semantic technologies, and for powering semantic applications with rich community-created content. They conclude with observations on how the application of Semantic Web technologies to the Social Web is leading towards the "Social Semantic Web" (sometimes also called "Web 3.0"), forming a network of interlinked and semantically-rich content and knowledge.The book is intended for computer science professionals, researchers, and graduates interested in understanding the technologies and research issues involved in applying Semantic Web technologies to social software. Practitioners and developers interested in applications such as blogs, social networks or wikis will also learn about methods for increasing the levels of automation in these forms of Web communication.