Abstract: What can happen if we combine the best ideas from the Social Web and Semantic Web? The Social Web is an ecosystem of participation, where value is created by the aggregation of many individual user contributions. The Semantic Web is an ecosystem of data, where value is created by the integration of structured data from many sources. What applications can best synthesize the strengths of these two approaches, to create a new level of value that is both rich with human participation and powered by well-structured information? This paper proposes a class of applications called collective knowledge systems, which unlock the "collective intelligence " of the Social Web with knowledge representation and reasoning techniques of the Semantic Web.

Blogging becomes a popular way for a Web user to publish information on the Web. Bloggers write blog posts, share their likes and dislikes, voice their opinions, provide suggestions, report news, and form groups in Blogosphere. Bloggers form their virtual communities of similar interests. Activities happened in Blogosphere affect the external world. One way to understand the development on Blogosphere is to find influential blog sites. There are many non-influential blog sites which form the “the long tail”. Regardless of a blog site being influential or not, there are influential bloggers. Inspired by the high impact of the influentials in a physical community, we study a novel problem of identifying influential bloggers at a blog site. Active bloggers are not necessarily influential. Influential bloggers can impact fellow bloggers in various ways. In this paper, we discuss the challenges of identifying influential bloggers, investigate what constitutes influential bloggers, present a preliminary model attempting to quantify an influential blogger, and pave the way for building a robust model that allows for finding various types of the influentials. To illustrate these issues, we conduct experiments with data from a real-world blog site, evaluate multi-facets of the problem of identifying influential bloggers, and discuss unique challenges. We conclude with interesting findings and future work.

A common perception is that there are two competing visions for the future evolution of the Web: the Semantic Web and Web 2.0. A closer look, though, reveals that the core technologies and concerns of these two approaches are complementary and that each field can and must draw from the other’s strengths. We believe that future web applications will retain the Web 2.0 focus on community and usability, while drawing on Semantic Web infrastructure to facilitate mashup-like information sharing. However, there are several open issues that must be addressed before such applications can become commonplace. In this paper, we outline a semantic weblogs scenario that illustrates the potential for combining Web 2.0 and Semantic Web technologies, while highlighting the unresolved issues that impede its realization. Nevertheless, we believe that the scenario can be realized in the short-term. We point to recent progress made in resolving each of the issues as well as future research directions for each of the communities.

Abstract: To date, one of the main aims of the World Wide Web has been to provide users with information. In addition to private homepages, large professional information providers, including news services, companies, and other organisations have set up web-sites. With the development and advance of recent technologies such as wikis, blogs, podcasting and file sharing this model is challenged and community-driven services are gaining influence rapidly. These new paradigms obliterate the clear distinction between information providers and consumers. The lines between producers and consumers are blurred even more by services such as Wikipedia, where every reader can become an author, instantly. This paper presents an overview of a broad selection of current technologies and services: blogs, wikis including Wikipedia and Wikinews, social networks such as Friendster and Orkut as well as related social services like del.icio.us, file sharing tools such as Flickr, and podcasting. These services enable user participation on the Web and manage to recruit a large number of users as authors of new content. It is argued that the transformations the Web is subject to are not driven by new technologies but by a fundamental mind shift that encourages individuals to take part in developing new structures and content. The evolving services and technologies encourage ordinary users to make their knowledge explicit and help a collective intelligence to develop.

Abstract. In this paper we present lessons learned from building a Semantic Desktop system, the gnowsis beta. On desktop computers, semantic software has to provide stable services and has to reflect the personal view of the user. Our approach to ontologies, the Personal Information Model PIMO allows to create tagging services like del.icio.us on the desktop. A semantic wiki allows further annotations. Continuous evaluations of the system helped to improve it. These results were created in the EPOS research project and are available in the open source projects Aperture, kaukoluwiki, and gnowsis and will be continued in the Nepomuk project. By using these components, other developers can create new desktop applications the web 2.0 way. 1

The success of Wikipedia has demonstrated the power of peer production in knowledge building. However, unlike many other examples of collective intelligence, tasks in Wikipedia can be deeply interdependent and may incur high coordination costs among editors. Increasing the number of editors increases the resources available to the system, but it also raises the costs of coordination. This suggests that the dependencies of tasks in Wikipedia may determine whether they benefit from increasing the number of editors involved. Specifically, we hypothesize that adding editors may benefit low-coordination tasks but have negative consequences for tasks requiring a high degree of coordination. Furthermore, concentrating the work to reduce coordination dependencies should enable more efficient work by many editors. Analyses of both article ratings and article review comments provide support for both hypotheses. These results suggest ways to better harness the efforts of many editors in social collaborative systems involving high coordination tasks. Author Keywords Wikipedia, wiki, social collaboration, collective

Abstract: The WWW is currently experiencing a revolutionary growth due to its increasing participative community software applications. This paper highlights an emerging application development paradigm on the WWW, called mashup. As blogs have enabled anyone to become a publisher, mashups stimulate web development by allowing anyone to combine existing data to develop web applications. Current applications of mashups include tracking of events such as crime, hurricanes, earthquakes, meta-search integration of data and media feeds, interactive games, and as an organizer for web resources. The implications of this emerging web integration and structuring paradigm remains yet to be explored fully. This paper describes mashups from a number of angles, highlighting current developments while providing sufficient illustrations to indicate its potential implications. It also highlights the role of mashups in complementing and enhancing digital journals by providing insights into the quality academic content, extent of coverage, and the enabling of expanded services. We present pioneering initiatives for the Journal of Universal Computer Science in our efforts to harness the collective intelligence of a collaborative scholarly network.

Abstract—The recent three years have witnessed an explosion of networked video sharing, represented by YouTube, as a new killer Internet application. Their sustainable development however is severely hindered by the intrinsic limit of their client/server architecture. A shift to the peer-to-peer paradigm has been widely suggested with success already shown in live video streaming and movie-on-demand. Unfortunately, our latest measurement demonstrates that short video clips exhibit drastically different statistics, which would simply render these existing solutions suboptimal, if not entirely inapplicable. Our long-term measurement over five million YouTube videos, on the other hand, reveal interesting social networks with strong clustering among the videos, thus opening new opportunities to explore. In this paper, we present NetTube, a novel peer-topeer assisted delivering framework that explores the clustering in social networks for short video sharing. We address a series of key design issues to realize the system, including a bi-layer overlay, an efficient indexing scheme and a pre-fetching strategy leveraging social networks. We evaluate NetTube through simulations and prototype experiments, which show that it greatly reduces the server workload, improves the playback quality and scales well. I.

In this paper, we describe a public web service, “PodCastle”, that provides full-text searching of Japanese podcasts on the basis of automatic speech recognition. This is an instance of our research approach, “Speech Recognition Research 2.0”, which is aimed at providing users with a web service based on Web 2.0 so that they can experience state-of-the-art speech recognition performance, and at promoting speech recognition technologies in cooperation with anonymous users. PodCastle enables users to find podcasts that include a search term, read full texts of their recognition results, and easily correct recognition errors. The results of the error correction can then be used to improve the performance of both full-text search and speech recognition. Although we know of no state-of-the-art speech recognizer that can successfully transcribe all of the various kinds of podcasts, the mechanism we propose will gradually increase the usefulness and applicability of PodCastle. Index Terms: information retrieval, speech recognition, error correction, wisdom of crowds, Web 2.0

CiteSeer began as the first search engine for scientific literature to incorporate Autonomous Citation Indexing, and has since grown to be a well-used, open archive for computer and information science publications, currently indexing over 730,000 academic documents. However, CiteSeer currently faces significant challenges that must be overcome in order to improve the quality of the service and guarantee that Cite-Seer will continue to be a valuable, up-to-date resource well into the foreseeable future. This paper describes a new architectural framework for CiteSeer system deployment, named CiteSeer Plus. The new framework supports distributed indexing and storage for load balancing and fault-tolerance as well as modular service deployment to increase system flexibility and reduce maintenance costs. In order to facilitate novel approaches to information extraction, a blackboard framework is built into the architecture.