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 thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the satellite events of the 9th International Conference on the Semantic Web, ESWC 2012, held in Heraklion, Crete, Greece, in May 2012. This volume contains 49 full papers and 13 short papers describing the posters and demonstrations. (SUGGESTION/ HELP needed).

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 deals with different theories, methods and implementations combining Web 2.0 paradigms and Semantic Web technologies in Enterprise environments. After introducing those terms, the current shortcomings of tools such as blogs and wikis are presented as well as tagging practices in an Enterprise 2.0 context. A definition of the SemSLATES methodology is given, as well as the global vision of a middleware architecture based on Semantic Web technologies and Linked Data principles (languages, models, tools and protocols) to solve these issues. Then, the various ontologies that we build to achieve this goal are detailed. On the one hand the models dedicated to socio-structural metadata, especially SIOC - Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities -, are presented and on the other hands models extending public ontologies for representing domain knowledge. Moreover, the MOAT - Meaning Of A Tag - ontology is discussed, providing a way to combine the flexibility of tagging and the power of ontology-based indexing. The book also describes several software implementations related to these models, done in the industrial context of EDF R&D, and dedicated to easily produce and use semantic annotations to enrich original tools: semantic wikis, advanced visualization interfaces (faceted browsing, semantic mash-ups, etc.) combined with a semantic search engine. Several contributions described in this publication have been published as public ontologies or open-source software, contributing more generally to this convergence between Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web, not only in enterprise but on the Web as a whole.