Thematic Oases - Towards a social Semantic Web

A few years have passed from the first alarming yells about the unmanageable growth of data which is literally exploding from the Web. While Web2.0 technologies, born and grown from the crowd of the web community, are reaching their full maturity, and with W3C eventually managing to give concreteness to Berners-Lee Semantic Web Vision through a plethora of new languages and protocols, the same problem is still a living matter. Lots of vendors and providers offer social services with more-than-overlapping aspects, but with no intentions of sharing their data. RSS aggregators as well as blog and mailing list scrapers, erupt tons of data which are irritatingly replicated by search engines indexes. At the same time, most of the information services (wikis, blogs, mailing lists, forums, newsgroups etc...) still maintain their traditional functionalities and move no step forward reaching any kind of interoperability. In this paper we analyze the current scenario and propose our personal view on how new Semantic Web technologies could be employed to give life to a new generation of social, heterogeneous and coordinated informative services: Thematic Oases.