Why the Semantic Web won´t fail

Today I had a great meeting at LMU Munich together with Francois Bry, Sebastian Schaffert, Peter Dolog and Peter Axel Nielsen discussing the potentials semantic wikis have. Before that meeting, when I was reading the newspaper, I coincidentally stumbled upon an article about the increasing number of wikis used in several industries as knowledge management systems. 

No doubt, that wikis have several advantages over NOT using wikis, but the use of wikis can als be part of a new problem:

Just think about a company which just has installed it´s 100th wiki (and there are many companies out there already which run more than 5.000 wikis!!). How could this company solve the problem, that more and more information will be generated in a wiki-way but all this information is not connected to related information inside and outside the company in a meaningful way? Information is still distributed and knowledge will be re-invented again and again.

Our discussion about Semantic Wikis showed again, that there is a way to improve the wiki-way, which is only the basis for a really powerful knowledge management.

Wikis + Semantic Web = Semantic Social Web

which means, that people´s knowledge work will be really supported by machines, which won´t only render some HTML for us anymore…

Web 2.0 helps to relax

Whenever you feel stressed by all that uploading, commenting, blogging, networking etc. in Web 2.0 go to this (german speaking) website: alleinr (beta).

“alleinr” means “alonr” and helps a little bit to relax from all that Web 2.0 – *+**/&%#

New Web 2.0 application: “Vote for my hair cut”

Henry Story has demonstrated that it just has begun: The rather infinite options users have to build Web 2.0 applications. Henry´s meshup of blogging, voting and flickr (without deploying any webservice!) shows that even non-programmers can build their own new apps.

Next step, I guess, is a real-time voting system which can be installed at any hair cutter 2.0… (We could try that out at SL first!)

RDFa is on it´s way…

Maybe a year old now, but still a really useful Web-Service is provided by Elias Torres: His RDFa Extractor also shows how to insert HTML containing RDFa into a Sparql-Query.

RDFa, what is this? Have a look at this short summary, and it´s also worth discussing about the co-existence between RDFa and microformats.

Video on the semantic social web

No doubt that Stefan Decker and Tom Gruber are the most influental persons in the involving semantic social web. Both are working on a unified view on folksonomies & ontologies, practical as well as formalistic aspects of the web and develop things like the “social semantic desktop” or “tag ontologies”.

Tom Gruber´s presentation at ISWC 06 “Where the Social Web Meets the Semantic Web” can be watched at videolectures.net: In one of the main parts of his talk he will state the question: “How can we put all these tagclouds out there together?”

Definitively an important question…

I-SEMANTICS 2007 – Call for Papers

I-SEMANTICS 2007, 3rd International Semantic Technology Conference will be co-located with I-KNOW 2007 and I-MEDIA 2007 (5th – 7th September 2007, Graz, Austria).

The special focus of I-SEMANTICS 2007 is „Social Semantic Web & Semantic Social Software – Convergence of Semantic Web, Web 2.0 & Social Software”. As a conference aiming to bring together science and industry, I-SEMANTICS encourages both, scientific (research/application) and industrial contributions.

Call for Papers.

Semantic Social Web barometer

Posts that contain Semantic Web per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Posts that contain "social Web" per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Vilém Flusser`s comments on Web 2.0

The always inspiring Flusser has anticipated Web 2.0 about 15 years ago: His “telematic society” is what we call the blogosphere today.

“Social network dialogues would no longer be dominated by discourses, but would be fully dialogic and supported in their democratic character by a technological infrastructure that is organized itself as network dialogue.” (C. Fuchs: The Internet as a Self-Organizing Socio-Technological System)

Social Semantic Web OR Semantic Social Web

Just the flipside of the same coin: But – I rather focus on the Social Web, cause the web is about connecting people, nothing else. And the Semantic part “only” helps to make communication and connections more efficient and better. So: I prefer to talk about the semantic social web… Nevertheless, the Social Web (aka Web 2.0) is “only” vehicle, making on the surface everything better… but not solving the problem at all.

Whilst helping to connect even more people, producing even more content, Web 2.0 offers no tools except social tagging for organizing all the “new” knowledge. So, let´s think about semantic technologies, how they can help us to make an even better Web 2.0, okay?