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Recent developments in Web technologies and using AI techniques to support efforts in making the Web more intelligent and provide higher-level services to its users have opened the door to building the Semantic Web. That fact has a number of important implications for Web-based education, since Web-based education has become a very important branch of educational technology. Classroom independence and platform independence of Web-based education, availability of authoring tools for developing Web-based courseware, cheap and efficient storage and distribution of course materials, hyperlinks to suggested readings, digital libraries, and other sources of references relevant for the course are but a few of a number of clear advantages of Web-based education. However, there are several challenges in improving Web-based education, such as providing for more adaptivity and intelligence. Developments in the Semantic Web, while contributing to the solution to these problems, also raise new issues that must be considered if we are to progress. This paper surveys the basics of the Semantic Web and discusses its importance in future Web-based educational applications.

Abstract. Recent developments in Web technologies and using AI techniques to support efforts in making the Web more intelligent and provide higher-level services to its users have opened the door to building the Semantic Web. That fact has a number of important implications for Web-based education, since Web-based education has become a very important branch of educational technology. Classroom independence and platform independence of Web-based education, availability of authoring tools for developing Web-based courseware, cheap and efficient storage and distribution of course materials, hyperlinks to suggested readings, digital libraries, and other sources of references relevant for the course are but a few of a number of clear advantages of Web-based education.

To say that the Web has affected many societies and cultures is to understate its impact along several dimensions. The Web is a technology which not only affects, but in some sense encompasses societies, cultures, and certainly institutions. Higher education -- at least in the cluster of ways in which it is practiced in the US, the EU, and Japan -- is one such bundle of social institutions affected and encompassed by the Web. While it is possible to overstate or mis-state the Web's effect, whether on higher education or on other institutional clusters, the encompassing reach of the technology, used in every country on Earth by literally tens of millions of users, makes it clear that the Web truly has a revolutionary effect. However, exploring what the Web has affected and continues to effect is a necessary element of any accurate estimation of how the newly emerging Semantic Web may, in its turn, effect societies, cultures, and institutional clusters like higher education.

Research Topic: The Semantic Web - Reference Pages for Higher Education The semantic web is a complex and exciting technology that will change how we work in the information age, and how we interact with the Internet. To support research activity within the field of Education, this site provides dynamic links to resources around the world. Gathered here, you will find: * a vision for educational application of learning made possible with semantic web technologies, * a general reference resource for terms and definitions, * technical resources within the field of the semantic web and semantic networking, * case studies of the semantic web applied in different fields and in education, and * publications and conferences focusing on the semantic web.

Semantic Web Company Newsletter 15 October, 2008 EDITORIAL Towards a Semantic Web Industry VOICES Danny Ayers: "The Semantic Web is the path of least resistance" SWC UPDATE New book available: "Social Semantic Web" First KiWi project milestones achieved SWC sponsors Web of Data Practitioners Days

"The Semantic Web is an evolving development of the World Wide Web in which the meaning (semantics) of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.[1][2]"

The International Semantic Web Conference is a major international forum at which research on all aspects of the Semantic Web is presented. The Semantic Web Science Association Web, SWSA, is the Association that organizes the academic conferences on Semantic Web technology. If you would like to host the ISWC conference please submit an application to the president of the SWSA.

"Antoniou, Grigoris and Van Harmelen, Frank. A semantic web primer. Second edition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008. " This is the second edition of the very popular primer that introduces the semantic Web. Explaining what the semantic Web is involves not only contrasting it to the familiar 'everyday' Web, but also sorting out the various visions of the semantic Web suggested over the last decade. Explaining how it works involves relating a thicket of angle-bracket technology to semantics and logic processing. This book is an excellent introduction to both of these explanations.

Thomas Schandl interviewed developer Stephane Corlosquet about his efforts to integrate Semantic Web Technologies within Drupal 7. Stéphane Corlosquet has been the main driving force in incorporating Semantic Web capabilities into Drupal. In the recent release of Drupal 7, Semantic Web technologies became part of the core of this popular CMS, which is used to power at least 1% of all the world's web sites.

Topics of Interest - Be sure to click the link in "Proceedings of the workshop is available here..." Submissions are invited on work relating the Semantic Web with Social Network Analysis. Both theoretical as well as applciation papers are welcome. The topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following: * Social Network Analysis of the Semantic Web * Network Analysis Methods * Analysis of Large Online Communities (Wikipedia, DMOZ, EBay, ...) * Semantic Web Communities * Web Communities of Practice * Online Harvesting of Semantic Network Information * Network Analysis for Building the Semantic Web * Emergent Semantics in Communities * Change Detection * Self-organization and Management of Semantic Networks * Trust Issues in Semantic Networks * Semantic Network Metadata * Folksonomies * Communities in P2P systems * Online Social Networking (FOAF, Orkut, ...) * Applications of Online Semantic Networks * Knowledge Management with Semantic Networks

"Special issue on the Semantic Web Issue Editor's Introduction ball The Semantic Web: opportunities and challenges for next-generation Web applications, by Shiyong Lu, Ming Dong and Farshad Fotouhi, Department of Computer Science, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA ball Forms of labour in information systems, by Julian Warner, School of Management and Economics, The Queen's University of Belfast, UK ball The Semantic Web, universalist ambition and some lessons from librarianship, by Terrence A. Brooks, Information School, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA ball The necessity for information space mapping for information retrieval on the semantic web, by Gregory B. Newby, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA"

"The mantra of the information age has been "The more information the better!" But what happens when we search the web and get so much information that we can't sort through it, let alone evaluate it? Enter the semantic web, or Web 3.0. Among other things, the semantic web makes information more meaningful to people by making it more understandable to machines."

The Semantic Web Awareness Barometer 2009 aims at providing the reader with a brief overview over current trends and possible future topics in the fast evolving and dynamic field of web semantics. It also addresses Social Software, since these two areas are expected to condition each other. The data analysed in this survey was primarily collected among Semantic Web specialists from science and industry.

A complex set of extensions to the World Wide Web, the Semantic Web will make data and services more accessible to computers and useful to people. Some of these extensions are being deployed, and many are coming in the next years. This is the only book to explore the territory of the Semantic Web in a broad and conceptual manner. This Guide acquaints you with the basic ideas and technologies of the Semantic Web, their roles and inter-relationships. The key areas covered include knowledge modeling (RDF, Topic Maps), ontology (OWL), agents (intelligent and otherwise), distributed trust and belief, "semantically-focused" search, and much more. The book's basic, conceptual approach is accessible to readers with a wide range of backgrounds and interests. Important points are illustrated with diagrams and occasional markup fragments. As it explores the landscape it encounters an ever-surprising variety of novel ideas and unexpected links. The book is easy and fun to read - you may find it hard to put down.

"Semantic Web: Web 3.0 in Education"

"Ivan Herman discusses Semantic Web activity at the World Wide Web Consortium"

"International Conference for Digital Libraries and the Semantic Web (ICSD2009) September 8-11, 2009 - University of Trento, Trento (ITALY) Digital libraries, in the central view of the term, focus on storing and organizing digital objects and providing access to these objects through professional or user-generated metadata or content-based search (full text, image content, full musical score). In an expanded view, DLs also support annotation, generation or editing of digital objects and provide tools for processing digital objects. The semantic Web focuses on the formal representation of data for more precise retrieval and, more importantly, for reasoning so that many often disparate items of data can be combined to directly answer a user's question or to devise a plan of action. ICDLSW addresses two main questions: (1) How can digital libraries support Semantic Web functionality? (2) How can Semantic Web technology improve digital libraries? "

"2009-09-01 [09:30 - 11:00] : Session 3A: Web, Semantics and Ontologies I" 2009-09-01 [14:00 - 15:30] : Session 4A: Web, Semantics and Ontologies II 2009-09-01 [16:00 - 17:30] : Session 5A: Web, Semantics and Ontologies III 2009-09-02 [09:30 - 11:00] : Session 6B: Semantic Web and Ontologies IV (short papers)

The application of "Semantic Web" technologies to learning processes is receiving an increasing attention from the perspective of facilitating the selection, delivery and tailoring of learning experiences. But most of the current approaches are centered on the final interaction of the learner with the "learning objects" provided for him/her, neglecting the organizational perspective. From the viewpoint of an organization, the application of Semantic Web technologies should be motivated by the improvement of learning-oriented mechanisms, including both cultural and structural aspects, and considering the ideal of achieving a state of continuous improvement in learning behavior. Such an approach to achieving a "semantic learning organization" gives a complementary perspective to existing "educational Semantic Web" propositions. In this paper, the potential role of the Semantic Web as a driver for enhanced learning organizations is analyzed, and a conceptual framework for the notion of a semantic learning organization is provided.

At the ACM Hypertext Conference a panel discussed "The Next Big Thing Inc." in the area of hypertext and hypermedia. The Web has been the "Big Thing" during the past 10 years, but its success has also made it very difficult to find the appropriate information in an ocean of over 3 billion pages. Whereas search engines achieve incredible precision, they suffer from the same "one size fits all" approach that characterizes the Web sites they index. The paper defends the position that personalization, and in particular automatic personalization or adaptation, is the key to reach the goal of offering each individual user (or user group) the information they need. During the panel discussion there was debate about whether the user should always have access and control over the entire (hypertextual) information space. There were different views on whether the "right" to all the information is best guaranteed by offering tools that reduce the information space the user perceives so that the user can actually find and reach the information, or by offering unfiltered access to an ocean of information in which everything is available but in which perhaps nothing can be found. We argue in favor of adaptation but at the same time point out flaws in the way adaptive hypermedia has been used until now. The paper then proposes a new, modular adaptive hypermedia architecture that should lead to adaptive Web-based systems as the "Next Big Thing" indeed.