Where the Social Web Meets the Semantic Web | Keynote | ISWC, The 5th International Semantic Web Conference | November 7, 2006

The Semantic Web is an ecosystem of interactions among computer systems. The social web is an ecosystem of conversation among people. Both are enabled by conventions for layered services and data exchange. Both are driven by human-generated content and made scalable by machine-readable data. Yet there is a popular misconception that the two worlds are alternative, opposing ideologies about how the web ought to be. Folksonomy vs. ontology. Practical vs. formalistic. Humans vs. machines.

It is time to embrace a unified view. In this talk Tom outlines what he believes is the best shot we have of collective intelligence in our lifetimes: large, distributed human-computer systems. The best way to get there is to harness the “people power” of the Web with the techniques of the Semantic Web.