Social Networks, the Semantic Web, and the Future of Online Scientific Collaboration

 

 

Jennifer Golbeck

University of Maryland, College Park

 

 

The Semantic Web offers great potential for scientific collaboration.  Heterogeneous data can be stored in distributed locations and, using ontologies and their semantics, portals can aggregate the data and provide a single point of entry for browsing and searching. At the same time, this kind of environment opens up many issues in trust, provenance, security, and data access. In this talk, I will discuss the use of Semantic Web technology for science. Then, I will describe how web-based social networks can be used to create trust and policy systems on the Semantic Web, and how that, in turn, can facilitate and improve collaboration.