[okfn-discuss] Social Semantic Web (was Re: SABRE Conf. on Social Semantic Web)

[Sören Auer]

Dear John,

Thanks for you interest in CSSW. Although I'm not completely familiar
with your philosophically sounding terminology (e.g. organic, desiring
machines) I will try to answer:

1. regarding human welfare: The Semantic Web movement (or research
discipline) is per se not more or less about human welfare in general as
Mathematics or Database research. However, due to its base paradigms of
being de-centralized, heterogeneous, non-discriminating (technically) I
think the Semantic Web can contribute a lot and be a technical
development, which might result ultimately in an advancement of human
welfare. Technically, the SW movement resulted in a lot of building
blocks for realizing the vision of a Web of knowledge: we have knowledge
representation techniques (such as RDF, OWL, SWRL), knowledge stores
(Virtuoso, Sesame), semantic search engines (still preliminary) and much
more. However, the critical mass of deploying these techniques on a
global scale is not yet reached and might take a little more.

2. Regarding the socio-technical dimension: A problem we identified,
that the making-real of the SW takes longer than expected is that there
are not enough knowledge bases (semantic nets, taxonomies, ontologies)
available to create real benefits to SW users. I think this is due to
the fact, that the required initial effort in order to create such
knowledge bases is still simply too high. If understood as a social
process, where many members of a community simply contribute small
parts, however, I think we ca do much better. That's the motivation
behind the conference on Social Semantic Web and other projects I'm
currently involved in:

* OntoWiki [1] for example is a social, semantic, collaboration tool
* DBpedia [2] is a very large knowledge base (>100M facts) derived from
Wikipedia

Best,

Sören


[1] http://ontowiki.net
[2] http://dbpedia.org