Combining the semantic and the social web for intelligent learning systems

Over the last decade, two new facets of the Web emerged. On one hand, the Semantic Web provides data structures in order to break meanings barriers between distributed and heterogeneous data sources presents on the Web. On the other hand, the Social Web helps in clustering Web users into communities, and let them be prosumers of their Web experience. Both visions encompass many online applications, including Education. On the question of what is really the next stage of Web developments for Education, authors usually focus on a single of these two facets of the Web. As few studies have tried to combine them for an educational purpose this paper aims at giving an insight on the pioneers' works and the opportunities raised by mixing the Social and the Semantic Web for education.