Social Networks and the Semantic Web offers valuable information to practitioners developing social-semantic software for the Web. It provides two major case studies. The first case study shows the possibilities of tracking a research community over the Web. It reveals how social network mining from the web plays an important role for obtaining large scale, dynamic network data beyond the possibilities of survey methods. The second case study highlights the role of the social context in user-generated classifications in content, such as the tagging systems known as folksonomies.

This work provides two major case studies. The first shows the possibilities of tracking a research community over the Web, combining the information obtained from the Web with other data sources, and analyzing the results. The second study highlights the role of the social context in user-generated classifications in content.

The Social Web (including services such as MySpace, Flickr, last.fm, and WordPress) has captured the attention of millions of users as well as billions of dollars in investment and acquisition. Social websites, evolving around the connections between people and their objects of interest, are encountering boundaries in the areas of information integration, dissemination, reuse, portability, searchability, automation and demanding tasks like querying. The Semantic Web is an ideal platform for interlinking and performing operations on diverse person- and object-related data available from the Social Web, and has produced a variety of approaches to overcome the boundaries being experienced in Social Web application areas. After a short overview of both the Social Web and the Semantic Web, Breslin et al. describe some popular social media and social networking applications, list their strengths and limitations, and describe some applications of Semantic Web technology to address their current shortcomings by enhancing them with semantics. Across these social websites, they demonstrate a twofold approach for interconnecting the islands that are social websites with semantic technologies, and for powering semantic applications with rich community-created content. They conclude with observations on how the application of Semantic Web technologies to the Social Web is leading towards the "Social Semantic Web" (sometimes also called "Web 3.0"), forming a network of interlinked and semantically-rich content and knowledge. The book is intended for computer science professionals, researchers, and graduates interested in understanding the technologies and research issues involved in applying Semantic Web technologies to social software. Practitioners and developers interested in applications such as blogs, social networks or wikis will also learn about methods for increasing the levels of automation in these forms of Web communication.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th European Semantic Web Conference, ESWC 2007, held in Innsbruck, Austria, in June 2007. Coverage includes semantic Web services, ontology learning, inference and mapping, social semantic Web, ontologies, personalization, foundations of the semantic Web, natural languages and ontologies, and querying and Web data models.

Collaborative working has been increasingly viewed as a good practice for organizations to achieve efficiency. Organizations that work well in collaboration may have access to new sources of funding, deliver new, improved, and more integrated services, make savings on shared costs, and exchange knowledge, information and expertise. Collaboration and the Semantic Web: Social Networks, Knowledge Networks and Knowledge Resources showcases cutting-edge research on the intersections of Semantic Web, collaborative work, and social media research, exploring how the resources of so-called social networking applications, which bring people together to interact and encourage sharing of personal information and ideas, can be tapped by Semantic Web techniques, making shared Web contents readable and processable for machine and intelligent applications, as well as humans. Semantic technologies have shown their potential for integrating valuable knowledge, and they are being applied to the composition of digital learning and working platforms. Integrated semantic applications, linked data, social networks, and networked digital solutions can now be used in collaborative environments and present participants with the context-aware information that they need.

The past ten years have seen a rapid growth in the numbers of people signing up to use Web-based social networks (hundreds of millions of new members are now joining the main services each year) with a large amount of content being shared on these networks (tens of billions of content items are shared each month). With this growth in usage and data being generated, there are many opportunities to discover the knowledge that is often inherent but somewhat hidden in these networks. Web mining techniques are being used to derive this hidden knowledge. In addition, the Semantic Web, including the Linked Data initiative to connect previously disconnected datasets, is making it possible to connect data from across various social spaces through common representations and agreed upon terms for people, content items, etc. In this book, we detail some current research being carried out to semantically represent the implicit and explicit structures on the Social Web, along with the techniques being used to elicit relevant knowledge from these structures, and we present the mechanisms that can be used to intelligently mesh these semantic representations with intelligent knowledge discovery processes. We begin this book with an overview of the origins of the Web, and then show how web intelligence can be derived from a combination of web and Social Web mining. We give an overview of the Social and Semantic Webs, followed by a description of the combined Social Semantic Web (along with some of the possibilities it affords), and the various semantic representation formats for the data created in social networks and on social media sites. Provenance and provenance mining is an important aspect here, especially when data is combined from multiple services. We will expand on the subject of provenance and especially its importance in relation to social data. We will describe extensions to social semantic vocabularies specifically designed for community mining purposes (SIOCM). In the last three chapters, we describe how the combination of web intelligence and social semantic data can be used to derive knowledge from the Social Web, starting at the community level (macro), and then moving through group mining (meso) to user profile mining (micro).

The Semantic Web represents a vision for how to make the huge amount of information on the Web automatically processable by machines on a large scale. For this purpose, a whole suite of standards, technologies and related tools have been specified and developed over the last couple of years and they have now become the foundation for numerous new applications. A Developer’s Guide to the Semantic Web helps the reader to learn the core standards, key components and underlying concepts. It provides in-depth coverage of both the what-is and how-to aspects of the Semantic Web. From Yu’s presentation, the reader will obtain not only a solid understanding about the Semantic Web, but also learn how to combine all the pieces to build new applications on the Semantic Web. The second edition of this book not only adds detailed coverage of the latest W3C standards such as SPARQL 1.1 and RDB2RDF, it also updates the readers by following recent developments. More specifically, it includes five new chapters on schema.org and semantic markup, on Semantic Web technologies used in social networks and on new applications and projects such as data.gov and Wikidata and it also provides a complete coding example of building a search engine that supports Rich Snippets. Software developers in industry and students specializing in Web development or Semantic Web technologies will find in this book the most complete guide to this exciting field available today. Based on the step-by-step presentation of real-world projects, where the technologies and standards are applied, they will acquire the knowledge needed to design and implement state-of-the-art applications.