Making the Semantic Web Easier to Use

Semantic Web technologies have the potential to support many activities by providing a Web-based data representation that ties data to semantics models, facilitates data sharing and linking, supports provenance annotations, and can exploit a large and growing collection of background knowledge on the Web. While the concepts and technologies are mature and supported by sound standards, their use within most application communities remains relatively low. This talk will discuss current research aimed at reducing some of the barriers to wider adoption and use. It will describe approaches to publishing and sharing scientific data on social media systems, techniques enabling end users to generate Semantic Web data using familiar software tools, and new approaches to querying large collections of Semantic Web data.

Talk at the The Third International Workshop on Data Engineering Meets the Semantic Web (DESWEB) co-located with the the annual IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE2012) and held in Washington DC on April 1, 2012.