Why Yahoo bought del.icio.us …

An outstanding talk at this year´s European Semantic Web Conference was Ron Brachman´s “Emerging Sciences of the Internet: Some New Opportunities“. Yahoo´s (and somehow this company has more and more to do with the Semantic Web…) Vice-President of Worldwide Research (with his strong background in the fields of AI and description logics) pointed out the need for rethinking traditional approaches of computer science: “…another emerging element in what we might call a new Science of Search is a social one… Will ontologies matter or do folksonomies rule? Others have begun to address the substantial differences between the social Web world and the Semantic Web world. While sometimes portrayed as diametrically opposed, the sides may benefit from each other if we look more deeply. My intuition is that there is room for synergy, and it would behoove us to investigate.”

That´s it! The Social Semantic Web finally became a huge business opportunity… (And again, I think it´s actually more accurate to say “Semantic Social Web”, because it´s the Social Web which will be enhanced by Semantic Web technologies and not vice versa.)