The cooperative web: a complement to the semantic web

The Web is a colossal document repository that is nowadays processed by humans only. The machines' role is just to transmit and display the contents, barely being able to do something else. The Semantic Web tries to change this status so that software agents can manipulate the semantic contents of the Web. There are some technologies proposed for this task that facilitate the definition of ontologies and the semantic markup of documents based on those ontologies. However, although the Semantic Web can be very useful in fields such as e-business, digital libraries or knowledge management inside corporate intranets, it is difficult to apply to the global Web. We propose a different, although complementary, approach: The Cooperative Web. With this approach, it would be possible to extract semantics from the Web without the need of ontological artifacts. Besides, the experience of the users would also be leveraged.