Federating Distributed Social Data to Build an Interlinked Online Information Society

Abstract

While research on relationships between the Semantic Web and Social Media has been originally motivated by the lack of semantics in mainstream Web 2.0 services, this vision can go far further, impacting the whole society regarding how information is shared, interlinked and managed on the Web. In this paper, we will show that it offers a growing field of possibilities to provide a Web where data is socially created and maintained through end-user interactions, but also machine-understandable and so re-usable for advanced querying purposes. We will especially emphasise the impacts of such Social Semantic Information Spaces to build an Interlinked Online Information Society, where any social data is the component of a worldwide collective intelligence ecosystem.