When the Social Meets the Semantic: Social Semantic Web or Web 2.5

Abstract

Abstract:The social trend is progressively becoming the key feature of current Web understanding (Web 2.0). This trend appears irrepressible as millions of users, directly or indirectly connected through social networks, are able to share and exchange any kind of content, information, feeling or experience. Social interactions radically changed the user approach. Furthermore, the socialization of content around social objects provides new unexplored commercial marketplaces and business opportunities. On the other hand, the progressive evolution of the web towards the Semantic Web (or Web 3.0) provides a formal representation of knowledge based on the meaning of data. When the social meets semantics, the social intelligence can be formed in the context of a semantic environment in which user and community profiles as well as any kind of interaction is semantically represented (Semantic Social Web). This paper first provides a conceptual analysis of the second and third version of the Web model. That discussion is aimed at the definition of a middle concept (Web 2.5) resulting in the convergence and integration of key features from the current and next generation Web. The Semantic Social Web (Web 2.5) has a clear theoretical meaning, understood as the bridge between the overused Web 2.0 and the not yet mature Semantic Web (Web 3.0).

Big Data in Complex Systems

“…mobile services (Reichenbacher 2009)), as well as a number of fields (such as social science (Goodchild et al 2008)) that are changing their approaches and perspectives due to the enhanced technological environment provided by IT (McAfee 2006) in terms of information size (e.g.Big Data (Katina & Miller 2013)), information complexity (e.g. social networks (Pileggi et al 2012)) and computing capability (McAfee 2006).…”

“…(F. Luckel & P.Woloszyn 2009, C.Shahabi et al 2010,H.H.Eldien 2009,D.Zheng-yu & W.Quan 2009) that, often, does not allow an open and flexible approach for the space representation. The representation of Social Objects (Pileggi et al 2012) is missed, even looking at the latest solutions. This lack seems to be explicitly in contrast with the last trends for data and applications that assume an increasing socialization of the information (Thompson 2013).…”

“…Social Data (Wellman 2001, Pileggi et al 2012). A higher scale implies further and more consistent needs for interoperability (Winters et al 2006) as well as for semantics (Fagin et al 2002) and it is progressively leading researchers towards richer data models (Ontology (Web Ontology Language (OWL) n.d.)), including declarative structures, and towards more sophisticated computing techniques (Semantic Reasoning (Guo 2008)).…”

Addressing Semantic Geographic Information Systems

“…Here is the core of the problem: regardless of the current availability of semantic technologies [15], semantics is a debatable open research issue, and the understanding of the third generation web is a continuously evolving concept [16]. Therefore, semantic GIS has to be designed and developed in the context of a not-yet-mature and consolidated technological framework.…”

“…Rich data models are required to provide capabilities for effective data management and sharing. An additional effort is required to manage complex data on a large scale (e.g., Open Data [27] and social objects [16]) as well as to provide multi-dimensional perspectives of data (such as in semantic similarity measurement [28]). …”