The Future of Social Networks on the Internet: The Need for Semantics

Abstract

Everyone on the Internet knows the buzzword social networking. Social networking services (SNS) usually offer the same basic functionalities: network of friends listings, person surfing, private messaging etc. With such features, SNSs demonstrate how the Internet continues to better connect people for various social and professional purposes. The fundamental problems with today's SNSs block their potential to access the full range of available content and networked people online. A possible solution is to build semantic social networking into the fabric of the next-generation Internet itself-interconnecting both content and people in meaningful ways. The semantic Web is a useful platform for linking and for performing operations on diverse person-and object-related data gathered from heterogeneous social networking sites. In the other direction, object-centered networks can serve as rich data sources for semantic Web applications.