Introduction to the Semantics of People & Culture

Welcome reader, we are excited to present to you four articles in this issue themed around the Semantics of People and Culture. Now that we've piqued your interest with a provocative special issue title, an explanation of what we mean by it is in order. VISION As you'll well appreciate, the original Semantic Web advocacy article put forth by Berners-Lee, Hendler, and Lassila (2001) proved catalyst for a revolution of sorts in information systems science. By deploying age-old artificial intelligence tactics for representation and meta-reasoning to the World Wide Web, their manifesto envisioned a network of service-oriented entities that could access, negotiate, and interoperate all of the Web's treasures as elegantly as human agents can. And their vision was well justified because the Web circa 2001 was still, by and large, dominated by unstructured free texts, the information potential of which could nary be unlocked by computers. Six years later, we find ourselves with a very different Web. With delight and surprise, we find that Web users and formal semantic services have to an extent successfully married. Blogs and news articles are mirrored by their RSS feeds. Online social network participants express themselves and their circle of friends, but their profiles are also semi-structured and their network of friends implies formal link structure that any scientist would eagerly compute. People rate consumer products, Web sites, and other people, jotting down some notes about each for their own edification; and automatically, their notes and ratings are correlated with the judgments of their peers into an impressive landscape of keyword tags and scores. The organic integration of social media , Web services, and semantics derived from information extraction, has been surprisingly seamless. This merger of social, formal, and informal semantics must be retrospected upon from some future moment as the actual lowercase s, lowercase w, Semantic Web revolution that took place. Unlike the original conception of Semantic Web that overvalued architecture and undervalued human creativity