Keynote Talks
Where the Social Web Meets the Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is an ecosystem of interaction among computer systems. The social web is an ecosystem of conversation among people. Both are enabled by conventions for layered services and data exchange. Both are driven by human-generated content
and made scalable by machine-readable data. Yet there is a popular misconception that the two worlds are alternative, opposing ideologies about how the web ought to be. Folksonomy vs. ontology. Practical vs. formalistic. Humans vs. machines.
This is nonsense, and it is time to embrace a unified view. I subscribe to the vision of the Semantic Web as a substrate for collective intelligence. The best shot we have of collective intelligence in our lifetimes
is large, distributed human-computer systems. The best way to get there is to harness the "people power" of the Web with the techniques of the Semantic Web. In this presentation I will show several ways that this can be, and is, happening.
Tom Gruber
The Semantic Web and Networked Governance: Promise and Challenges
The virtual state is a metaphor meant to draw attention to the structures and processes of the state that are becoming increasingly aligned with the structures and processes of the semantic web. Semantic Web researchers understand the potential for information sharing, enhanced search, improved collaboration, innovation, and other direct implications of contemporary informatics. Yet many of the broader democratic and governmental implications of increasingly networked governance remain elusive, even in the world of public policy and politics.
Governments, not businesses, remain the major information processing entities in the world. But where do they stand as knowledge managers, bridge builders and creators? As they strive to become not simply information-based but also knowledge-creating organizations, public agencies and institutions face a set of striking challenges. These include threats to privacy, to intellectual property, to identity, and to traditional processes of review and accountability. From the perspective of the organization of government, what are some of the key challenges faced by governments as they seek to become networked? What best practices are emerging globally? And in the networked world that is rapidly emerging and becoming institutionalized, how can public, private and nonprofit sectors learn from one another?
Jane Fountain
The Semantic Web: Suppliers and Customers
The notion of the Semantic Web can be coined as a Web of data when bringing database content to the Web or as a Web of enriched human-readable content when encoding the semantics of web-resources in a machine-interpretable form.
It has been clear from the beginning that realizing the Semantic Web vision will require interdisciplinary research. At this the fifth ISWC,
it is time to re-examine the extent to which interdisciplinary work has played and can play a role in Semantic Web research, and even how
Semantic Web research can contribute to other disciplines. Core Semantic Web research has drawn from various disciplines, such as knowledge representation and formal ontologies, reusing and further developing
their techniques in a new context.
However, there are several other disciplines that explore research issues very relevant to the Semantic Web in different guises and to differing extents. As a community, we can benefit by also recognizing and
drawing from the research in these different disciplines. On the other hand, Semantic Web research also has much to contribute to these disciplines and communities. For example, the Semantic Web offers
scenario that often ask for unprecedented scalability of techniques from other disciplines. Throughout the talk, I will illustrate these points
through examples from disciplines such as natural language processing, databases, software engineering and automated reasoning.
The industry also has a major role to play in the realization
of the
Semantic Web vision. I will therefore additionally examine the
added
value of Semantic Web technologies for commercial applications
and
discuss issues that should be addressed for broadening the market
for
Semantic Web technologies.
Rudi Studer
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PDF (abstract)
Presentation (Powerpoint)
