Combining human and computational intelligence for collaborative knowledge creation

The Semantic Web is gaining momentum. As of today it has reached an order of magnitude of hundreds of billions of RDF triples, most of which being the result of the increasingly popular Linked Open Data community project, supported by related open access-motivated initiatives such as data.gov and its counterparts worldwide, and the solid theoretical and technical foundations of a decade of Semantic Web research and development. Despite these very encouraging statistics, the usage of this wealth of data in high-impact applications and services is currently not more than an exciting prospect. At the same time, it is already clear that the challenges related to purposefully exposing semantic data will require significant shares of human effort, going beyond the enthusiasm of the past couple of years. Motivating people to engage with the Semantic Web is still an art more than a science. In this talk we will look into fundamental design issues of semantic-content authoring technology - and of the applications deploying such technology - in order to find out which incentives speak to people to collaboratively create knowledge, and to determine the ways these incentives can be transferred into technology design. We will present case studies on the topics of enterprise knowledge management, media and entertainment, and IT ecosystems, in which combining human and computational intelligence has led to increased user participation in creating useful semantic descriptions of various types of digital resources - text documents, images, videos and Web services and APIs.