Knowledge Publishing and Access on the Semantic Web: A Sociotechnological Analysis

The semantic Web extends the current Web with a semantic layer, which semantic-aware agents can use for reasoning. The idea is to enable a greater degree of task automation and user support than is possible with the current Web. Yet the semantic Web has implications for knowledge publishing and access. An ontology-driven world might lead to the imposition of dominant conceptual viewpoints on formal knowledge production, which might threaten the democratic nature of knowledge publishing on the Web. However, the author argue that this won't necessarily happen, if we fully exploit the inherent flexibility and "smartness" associated with semantic technologies, and we succeed in connecting the semantic Web's construction process to the social dynamics shaping the current Web