Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Semantic Adaptive Social Web (SASWeb 2011): Preface

Social Web (also called Web 2.0) is growing daily, together with the number of users and applications. In this way, users generate a signifi cant part of Web content and traffic: they create, connect, comment, tag, rate, remix, upload/download, new or existing resources in an architecture of participation, where user contribution and interaction add value. Users are also involved in a broad range of social activities like creating friendship relationships, recommending and sharing resources, suggesting friends, creating groups and communities, commenting friends activities and profiles and so on. At the same time, Semantic Web (also called Intelligent Web), whose main goal is to describe Web resources in a way that allows machines to understand and process them, has started to go out from academies and begins to be exploited in many web sites, incorporating high-quality user contributed content and semantic annotations using Internet-based services as an enabling platform. The recent advances in the Semantic Web area, and specifically the widespread use of weak semantic techniques (the so-called ‘lowercase’ semantic web), such as the use of microformats (e.g. eRDF, RDFa) to attach semantics to content, also provide new standardized ways to process and share information. This approach allows information intended for end-users (such as contact information, geographic coordinates, calendar events) to also be automatically processed by machines, and this obviates other more complicated methods of processing, such as natural language processing or screen scraping. In this workshop we are interested to analyze the benefits adaptation and personalization have to offer in the Web of the future, the so called Social Semantic Web or Web 3.0, that puts together Semantic Web and Social Web. The workshop aims at discussing the state-of-the-art, open problems, challenges and innovative research approaches in adaptation and personalization for the Social Semantic Web. It provides a forum for proposing innovative and open models, applications and new data sharing scenarios, as well as novel technologies and methodologies for creating and managing these applications. Examples of stimulating application fields are social bookmarking environments, publication sharing systems, intelligent cultural guides, collaborative working, social networking sites, digital libraries, e-learning and recommender systems. We would like to thank all the authors for their submissions, and our Program Committee and additional reviewers for their precious work.