08391 Executive Summary – Social Web Communities

Abstract

Blogs, Wikis, and Social Bookmark Tools have rapidly emerged on
the Web. The reasons for their immediate success are that people are happy to
share information, and that these tools provide an infrastructure for doing so
without requiring any specific skills. At the moment, there exists no foundational
research for these systems, and they provide only very simple structures for organising
knowledge. Individual users create their own structures, but these can
currently not be exploited for knowledge sharing. The objective of the seminar
was to provide theoretical foundations for upcoming Web 2.0 applications and to
investigate further applications that go beyond bookmark- and file-sharing.

The main research question can be summarized as follows: How will current and
emerging resource sharing systems support users to leverage more knowledge
and power from the information they share on Web 2.0 applications? Research
areas like Semantic Web, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Information
Extraction, Social Network Analysis, Natural Language Processing, Library and
Information Sciences, and Hypermedia Systems have been working for a while
on these questions. In the workshop, researchers from these areas came together
to assess the state of the art and to set up a road map describing the next steps
towards the next generation of social software.