Theory and Applications of Web 3.0 in the Media Sector

Dear Colleagues,

In today’s exploding Web landscape, where vast amounts of information (documents, images, audio, videos, etc.) are produced every day from various sources across the world, professional journalists often find it difficult to retrieve specific and detailed information or form a comprehensive view about a complicated topic. This occurs because most of the content today is published in an unregulated way, and they have to navigate a network of unstructured interconnected forms of data. The lack of an efficient infrastructure in which they could easily discover, acquire, and analyze the information needed limits the exploitation prospects. The solution to this problem can be given by the advancement of Web 3.0 or Semantic Web (SW).

Web 3.0 stands as the physical extension of the current Web, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. It can be seen as an Internet service with advanced technological features, in which proper/standardized documentation and semantic tagging of all content will be delivered semi-autonomously, with the help of algorithms. These features attempt to form a Web environment in which both humans and machines will understand and interpret the Web information in the same way. The technologies that support this attempt form the so-called SW services, and their role is to complete the transition from today’s Web of documents to a Web of well-documented data, where every piece of information will be accompanied by its semantics and its relations with the others, i.e., fully clarified and structured. Such content will be used by computers not only for display purposes but also for interoperability and integration between systems and applications. Thus, journalists will be able to discover, integrate, and reuse pieces of information from various sources efficiently. Overall, the interconnection of concepts rather than just documents will be feasible. This is the point where the Journalism and News industry intersects with Web 3.0, towards the transition to Journalism 3.0 Within this concept, enhanced cooperation between humans and machines is taking place, and well-established journalistic practices/workflows are challenged by more sophisticated semantically-enhanced procedures. As a result, Journalism is led to a higher functional level, unlocking various capabilities of data exploitation provided by an advanced technological framework.

This Special Issue is soliciting theoretical and case study contributions, discussing and treating challenges, state-of-the-art, and solutions on Web 3.0 application in the media sector, including but not limited to: Theory of Web 3.0 in relation with media organizations, application of Web 3.0 in the media sector, Journalism 3.0 practices and procedures, semantically enhanced news validation and management, etc.

Prof. Andreas Veglis
Dr. Charalampos Dimoulas
Guest Editors

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