Ontological Dimensions of Semantic Mobile Web 2.0: First Principles

Introduction

Mobile Web 2.0 (MW2.0) can be considered the next revolution in both social networks and digital convergence. Roughly speaking, Mobile Web provides the web experience with ubiquity and agent mobility. These features determine significant differences between Web 2.0 (W2.0) and MW2.0, because users are able to generate content with explicit spatial (geographical), temporal, contextual or personal characteristics, as well as to create or use metadata. This last one is the basic tool used for building the Semantic Web as an envisioned project which consists in a Web where information turns into Knowledge by means of ontologies and data which are trustworthy machine-readable.

In Semantic Mobile Web 2.0 (SMW2.0) frameworks such as Web Engineering, the Semantic Web and W2.0, are joined to create a new paradigm. Novel techniques must add to this new paradigm innovative (formal) knowledge representation methods, e.g. to relate spatial reasoning and context awareness. The new paradigms should solve new problems, as the smart generation of metadata, contextual query/reasoning, geospatial reasoning and different ontological dimensions related to the new SMW2.0. According to Morfeo Ubiquitous Web Applications project (http://uwa.morfeo-project.org/lng/en), two semantic-related tasks to develop are: the design of advanced policies and formalisms (including those based on semantics) that enable adaptation to context, and the achievement of tools for rich device descriptions (based on ontologies) and the meaning of exposing this to Web applications.

This chapter focuses on challenges that emerge from SMW2.0, which are closely related to the ontological nature of knowledge generation, management and transformation. It is necessary to consider SMW2.0 is attempting to combine native Web 2.0 tools and use them with the SW ones, but both are apparently diverging. SW tools are designed for an environment where the system is mainly focused on client-server architectures, where the knowledge owner is the ontology one. Nonetheless, W2.0 users generate their own information, which have to be transformed into knowledge by means of usable applications. Actually this is not a new idea; it is -from a more general point of view- the Metaweb, envisioned by Nova Spivack (2004).

Within this context, the role of ontologies should be analyzed and, therefore, revised. Ontologies are considered as formal theories designed to organize and perform the trustworthy conversion of information into knowledge. In the case of SMW2.0, ontologies can be used in several dimensions of Knowledge Organization and Representation (KOR) and, within this chapter, some of them will be discussed. The reader is warned about the amazing growth of mobile telecommunications, applications and services, which prevent to isolate all of these (some of them are appearing in emerging research and multidisciplinary fields, as, for example, Urban Informatics). Other interesting and controversial applications as contextual advertising or applications on the idle screen in mobile devices (Voulgaris, Constantinou & Benlamlih, 2007 and Constantinou, 2009) are unexplored territories for KOR techniques.