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

Thu Aug 23 09:37:35 UTC 2007

Dear Sören,

That's all very interesting.

Thanks for your reply, and good luck with your work.

All best wishes,

John.

Sören Auer wrote:
> 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
>
>
>