Tom Gruber Keynote
Where the Social Web Meets the Semantic Web
The Semantic Web is an ecosystem of interaction 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.
This is nonsense, and it
is time to embrace a unified view. I subscribe to the vision
of the Semantic Web as a substrate for collective intelligence.
The best shot we have of collective intelligence in our lifetimes
is 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.
In this presentation I will show several ways that this can
be, and is, happening.
About the speaker
Tom Gruber is a researcher, inventor, and
entrepreneur with a focus on systems for knowledge sharing and
collective intelligence. He did foundational work in ontology
engineering and is
well-known for his definition of ontologies in the
context of Artificial Intelligence. The approaches and technologies
from this work are precursors to the infrastructure for today's
Semantic Web. At Stanford University in the early 1990's, Tom was a pioneer in the use
of the Web for collaboration and knowledge sharing. He invented HyperMail, a widely-used open source
application that turns email conversations into collective memories,
which chronicled many of the early discussions that helped define the Web. He built ontology-engineering tools and established the first web-based public exchange for
ontologies, software, and knowledge bases. During the rise of
the Web, Dr. Gruber founded Intraspect, an enterprise software
company that pioneered the space of collaborative knowledge management. Intraspect applications help professional people collaborate in large distributed communities, continuously contributing to a collective body of knowledge. His current project is RealTravel.com, which aspires to be the best place on the web to share knowledge and experiences about travel. RealTravel provides an environment for a community of travel enthusiasts to create beautiful travel journals of their adventures, share them with friends and family, and learn from other like-minded travelers
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