Social Semantic Web

The Social Web has captured the attention of millions of users as well as billions of dollars in investment and acquisition. As more social websites form around the connections between people and their objects of interest, and as these “object-centered networks” grow bigger and more diverse, more intuitive methods are needed for representing and navigating content both within and across social websites. Also, to better enable user access to multiple sites and ultimately to content-creation facilities on the Web, interoperability among social websites is required in terms of both the content objects and the person-to-person networks expressed on each site. Semantic Web representation mechanisms are ideally suited to describing people and the objects that link them together, recording and representing the heterogeneous ties involved. The Semantic Web is also a useful platform for performing operations on diverse, distributed person- and object-related data. In the other direction, object-centered networks and user-centric services for generating collaborative content can serve as rich data sources for Semantic Web applications. This chapter will give an overview of the “Social Semantic Web,” where semantic technologies are being leveraged to overcome the aforementioned limitations in a variety of Social Web application areas.