science

Social Semantic Web

Social Semantic Web is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Social Semantic Web rather than just read about it. In short: The concept of the Social Semantic Web subsumes developments in which social interactions on the Web lead to the creation of explicit and semantically rich knowledge representations. The Social Semantic Web can be seen as a Web of collective knowledge systems, which are able to provide useful information based on human contributions and which get better as more people participate.

Key takeaways

Social Semantic Web belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Social Semantic Web to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Social Semantic Web from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The concept of the Social Semantic Web subsumes developments in which social interactions on the Web lead to the creation of explicit and semantically rich knowledge representations. The Social Semantic Web can be seen as a Web of collective knowledge systems, which are able to provide useful information based on human contributions and which get better as more people participate. The Social Semantic Web combines technologies, strategies and methodologies from the Semantic Web, social software and the Web 2.0.

Overview The social-semantic web (s2w) aims to complement the formal Semantic Web vision by adding a pragmatic approach relying on description languages for semantic browsing using heuristic classification and semiotic ontologies. A socio-semantic system has a continuous process of eliciting crucial knowledge of a domain through semi-formal ontologies, taxonomies or folksonomies. S2w emphasize the importance of humanly created loose semantics as means to fulfil the vision of the semantic web. Instead of relying entirely on automated semantics with formal ontology processing and inferencing, humans are collaboratively building semantics aided by socio-semantic information systems. While the semantic web enables integration of business processing with precise automatic logic inference computing across domains, the socio-semantic web opens up for a more social interface to the semantics of businesses, allowing interoperability between business objects, actions and their users. Socio-semantic web was coined by Manuel Zacklad and Jean-Pierre Cahier in 2003 and used in the field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). It was then discussed in Peter Morville's 2005 book Ambient Findability. In Chapter 6, he defines the socio-semantic web as relying on "the pace-layering of ontologies, taxonomies, and folksonomies to learn and adapt as well as teach and remember." Morville writes, “I'll take the ancient tree of knowledge over the transient leaves of popularity any day”. There is undoubtedly scepticism towards the adoption of folksonomies. The socio-semantic web may be seen as a middle way between the top-down monolithic taxonomy approach like the Yahoo! Directory and collaborative tagging (folksonomy) approaches. The socio-semantic web differs from the semantic web in that the semantic web often is regarded as a system that will solve the epistemic interoperability issues we have to day. While the semantic web will provide ways for businesses to interoperate across domains the socio-semantic web will enable users to share knowledge. There are various possible social approaches for solving the problems of user driven ontology evolution for the semantic web. First, users could create a folksonomy (flat taxonomy). With Social Network Analysis (SNA) in conjunction with automated parsers, the ontology could be extracted from the tags and this ontology could be entered into a Topic Map/TMCL or RDF/OWL ontology store. Secondly a set of ontology engineers or ontologists could manually analyze the tags created by the users and by using this data, create a more sound ontology. The third approach is to create a system for self governance where the users themselves create the ontology over time in an organic fashion. All of these approaches could start out with an empty ontology or be seeded manually or with an existing ontology, for example the WordNet ontology. Social Networks Ontology is the most important concept in social web.

Examples DBpedia is a community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web. It allows you to ask sophisticated queries against Wikipedia and to link other datasets on the Web to Wikipedia data. SIOC provides methods for interconnecting discussion methods such as blogs, forums and mailing lists to each other. It consists of the SIOC ontology, an open-standard machine readable format for expressing the information contained both explicitly and implicitly in internet discussion methods, of SIOC metadata producers for a number of popular blogging platforms and content management systems, and of storage and browsing / searching systems for leveraging this SIOC data. Twine combined features of forums, wikis, online databases and newsgroups and mined and store data relationships expressed using RDF statements. S3DB is a HTTP-REST webservice prototype for a collaborative annotation system defined by a RDFS model. FOAF is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects.

References

[1]

External links AAAI Symposium on Social Semantic Web, Spring 2009 Archived January 3, 2013, at the Wayback Machine Mashups in the Middle - Bridging the Gap to the Semantic Web Digital Identities and Management of Identifiers for a Socio-Semantic Web A Web-based Annotation System for Improving Cooperation in a Care Network

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Social Semantic Web

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Social Semantic Web claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Social Semantic Web before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Social Semantic Web ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Social Semantic Web

In research: Social Semantic Web appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Social Semantic Web in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Social Semantic Web is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Semantic Web, Web 2.0, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Social Semantic Web outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Social Semantic Web in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Social Semantic Web means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Social Semantic Web out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Social Semantic Web in simple terms?

Why does Social Semantic Web matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Social Semantic Web?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Social Semantic Web.