Our research theme lies in the intersection of two major ongoing shifts in the ICT world. Semantic information systems encode their meaning separately from their data and operations and separately from their application code, using technologies such as OWL, RDF, SPARQL and SWRL and semantic resources such as DBpedia and Wordnet. Social information systems, such as Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia, are characterised by user-generated content, flat distributed control and scalability.

Investigating the intersection of semantic technologies and social media is an important idea. On the one hand, the two have central commonalities, such as being composed of autonomous, dynamically interconnected parts that produce emergent behaviour in the large. On the other hand, they are complementary. Social media tend to produce large collections of user-generated content that can potentially be leveraged by semantic technologies if they can be enriched (or “lifted”) semantically. For example, social technologies can be used to make information systems semantic by tagging their contents with references to semantic resources (e.g., DBpedia or WordNet), whereas semantic technologies can be used to make the contents of social information systems more findable and better organised. Social technologies can help making semantic technologies less top-down and expert-driven and semantic technologies can help making social technologies more navigable for humans and machines.