Semantic Web in Social Media

In the last decade there has been a trend towards the Semantic Web or Web 3.0, which is focused on making the information contained in web pages machine interpretable and not only human readable. In parallel, the potential of Social Web, or Web 2.0, including social networks, wikis, blogs, folksonomies and all the sites where user is content-provider not only content-consumer, still capture attention and interest of millions of users as well as researchers and developers. Because Social Web is "growing" bigger and bigger and more diverse, methods are needed for representing web content for easy navigation and easy access of information within and especially between social web sites. An important issue relative to the huge amount of information user generated content is that knowledge coming from different communities of users in social media can not be linked or shared because user generated content, in general, doesn't have machine interpretable metadata that can be "understood" by computers. The idea is to facilitate the retrieval and exchange of whatever it is on the Web in order to connect communities of social media users. The connection can be done assigning meaning to web content with the help of the Semantic Web standards. The paper presents a study about role and uses of Semantic Web technologies within the framework of social media. A case study about the effective use of these technologies in a web application that lists the posts introduced by users, which can be found in different social sites is provided. The application was meant for usage within the research team from the Vasile Alecsandri University of Bacau, Romania.