Semantic need: an approach for guiding users contributing metadata to the Semantic Web

摘要

In its core, the Semantic Web is about the creation, collection and interlinking of metadata on which agents can perform tasks for human users. While many tools and approaches support either the creation or usage of semantic metadata, there is neither a proper notion of metadata need, nor a related theory of guidance which metadata should be created. In this paper, we address the issue of why and how metadata is provided for the public Semantic Web. In particular, we introduce a mechanism called semantic need which targets to support knowledge providers. It is based on the principle of aggregating unsatisfied information needs in order to recommend the sharing or capturing of semantic metadata. We describe the abstract architecture, algorithms and an empirical analysis of information gaps in public Semantic Web applications.