Introduction

The Web is an extraordinarily flexible and low-cost instrument for communication, commerce, business, entertainment, access to information and services, dissemination of culture, etc. With the help of modern search engines, the WWW is near to becoming a universal repository of human knowledge. The Web also provides support for many daily-life activities with unprecedented convienience, economy, and efficiency.

The size and lack of global organization of the Web is nowadays becoming a hurdle to both users and developers, in terms of the cost of manually achieving tasks. Currently dominating Web standards do not make it easy to overcome this problem, as they provide inadequate support for describing what resources are about, or what services do, which is necessary for automated processing and effective search. New trends are emerging since the end of the 90s towards the development of effective semantic-based technologies which enhance the current Web with explicit, machine-understandable, ontology-based descriptions of Web contents and functionality, in order to enable further and more efficient means for processing, sharing, integrating and reusing of resources across applications, by both humans and machines.

The Networked Semantics Team at the Escuela Politécnica Superior of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid focuses its research and development work in the area of semantic-based knowledge technologies. We are concerned with aspects such as representing, sharing, retrieving, and exploiting knowledge and services on large-scale networked environments, and the impact of these techniques on the way humans interact with such environments and among each other. Our work comprises both basic research and applied experiences with industrial partners.

Our broad research areas comprise information retrieval, personalization, and semantic technologies. Within them, our activities are currently addressing the following topics:

• Personalization in IR
• Recommender systems
• Context modeling
• Performance prediction in IR
• Semantic search
• Social networks
• Semantic knowledge representation