Federating Distributed Social Data to Build an Interlinked Online Information Society

While research on the relation- ship between the Semantic Web and social media was originally motivated by the lack of semantics in mainstream Web 2.0 ser- vices, this vision can go much further, impacting society at large in terms of how in- formation is shared, interlinked and man- aged on the Web. In this paper, we will demonstrate how semantic technologies can be applied to social media, thereby creating a Web where data is socially created and maintained through end-user interactions, but is also machine-readable and there- fore open towards sophisticated queries and large-scale information integration. In particular, we will emphasise the impact of what we term "Social Semantic Information Spaces" on the creation of an Inter- linked Online Information Society, where any social data is a component in a world- wide collective intelligence ecosystem.