Abstract
The social trend is progressively becoming the key feature of current Web understanding (Web 2.0). This trend appears irrepressible as millions of users, directly or indirectly connected through social networks, are able to share and exchange any kind of content, information, feeling or experience. Social interactions radically changed the user approach. Furthermore, the socialization of content around social objects provides new unexplored commercial marketplaces and business opportunities. On the other hand, the progressive evolution of the web towards the Semantic Web (or Web 3.0) provides a formal representation of knowledge based on the meaning of data. When the social meets semantics, the social intelligence can be formed in the context of a semantic environment in which user and community profiles as well as any kind of interaction is semantically represented (Semantic Social Web). This paper first provides a conceptual analysis of the second and third version of the Web model. That discussion is aimed at the definition of a middle concept (Web 2.5) resulting in the convergence and integration of key features from the current and next generation Web. The Semantic Social Web (Web 2.5) has a clear theoretical meaning, understood as the bridge between the overused Web 2.0 and the not yet mature Semantic Web (Web 3.0).
Highlights
If the Web 2.0 is a “fact”, the Web 3.0 is a rather clear conceptual model that experiments with certain difficulties deployed and applied in practice environments
There exists a set of semantic technologies that, at the moment, appear difficult to be applicable for generic purposes (Semantic Web) but that could propose extreme effectiveness in specific contexts
This paper presents a formalization of the Web 2.5, based on the most natural understanding: the convergence between the socialization of the web and semantic technologies [10,11,12,13]
Summary
If the Web 2.0 (or Social Web) is a “fact”, the Web 3.0 (or Semantic Web) is a rather clear conceptual model that experiments with certain difficulties deployed and applied in practice environments. On the other hand, during the past few years, virtualization techniques (e.g., [7]), cloud vision [8] and above all, mobile computing [9] alongside the increasing use of smart devices, provides interesting new scenarios These scenarios, both with the latest advancement in the development of semantic technologies, are converging on the Web 2.5 concept to address a model of the Web beyond the social (Web 2.0) but not yet semantic (Web 3.0). This understanding from an application point of view mainly matches the technological requirements of a new emerging research field (known as Social and Community Intelligence) and related research areas (such as social computing, reality mining, urban computing, human-centric sensing).
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