Today, the first Web Monday in Jena will take place at TowerByte eG, c/o Intershop Tower, Leutragraben 1, 07743 Jena at 19.30. Lars Zapf volunteered to bring the idea of Web Monday to Jena. Web Monday is kind of an informal meeting focussed on the topic of web 2.0 (in the broadest sense). It connects users, developers, founders, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, researchers, web pioneers, bloggers, podcasters, designers and other folks interested in Web 2.0 topics. I will host the 'opening session' with a talk about 'Semantic Web / web 2.0 - Hype and Reality'.
The tricky thing for me in this talk is, how to connect semantic web and web 2.0.....and the answer is pretty simple as that. What is needed to bring Semantic Web to life? [short theatric pause] Yes, it's Metadata! And what's the 'dernier crie' concerning web 2.0? [another pause...] Yes, collaborative tagging! So, maybe we should choose collaborative tagging as kind of 'missing link' in between web 2.0 and semantic web.
Of course - you will say - tags are only flat (shallow) metadata without any structure, etc....But why not create structured metadata (or even 'deep' and complex metadata) in a collaborative way. What's missing are - again - suitable interfaces (technology) for easy (non expert) metadata (ontology) editing. In semantic web, somehow we have the same situation as in pre-Blog/pre-Wiki times....only experts are able to create complex metadata... but there are too few of them...and thus, too few metadata. Semantic Wiki is one initiative that points in the right direction. Rico Landefeld is one of my students, who for his diploma thesis tries to implement a fully functional semantic wiki (maariwa). more to come soon....
