Extending RDFHomepage : semantic Web meets Web 2.0

Abstract

The Web has brought together people from all over the world to collaborate and improved on the body of human knowledge. For many years the importance of the Web has ever in creased and over the years the Web has evolved into Web 2.0: an evolution of the Web focused on the user and personalisation. But a further evolution of the Web is on the horizon: the Semantic Web. This Web of meaning aims at revitalising the Web by adding meaning to its contents. We will be able to do things we could not do before. In 2005, Sven Schwarz coined the term RDFHomepage - a semantic homepage that laid the foundation of the Semantic Web for homepages. Such a homepage uses a Semantic Web language, RDF, to encode all the knowledge about a person and their associations. This homepage separates the content from the model allowing users to customise the view of the homepage without editing its content. So was born the idea of social semantic home pages. We have decided to take this idea further and immerse it in the world of Web 2.0 technologies: a union of Semantic Web and Web 2.0 focused on making the Semantic Web easy to use to average users via powerful but simplistic Web 2.0 interfaces. We overhauled the architecture and focused on a modular structure which included many standard Web 2.0 applications such as weblog, calendar and search.