The daily growth of social media, together with the number of services and applications, reveals a significant change in information sharing. Unlike a traditional push-and-receive scenario, social media provides a more appealing environment in which the user acts as both an information transmitter and receiver — creating, commenting on, and remixing new or existing information — and adding extra value to the content in its ordinary form.
Although social media is a relatively new phenomenon, its roots can be traced to well-established and mature technologies and social behaviors that have underpinned information exchanges. What distinguishes social media from existing forms of online communication and interaction is the ability of users to easily create and share information with their networks in real time, using not just computers, but also smart devices (e.g., mobile phones, sensors, etc.). This leads to a dramatic implication, as information can reach wider audiences much faster, capturing their attention even when they are away from their computer screens. The success of online services such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube is testimony to the importance of social media and the impact they have had on both individuals and businesses.
Giving a quick glance at the history of the Web, the fundamentals of the information service explosion today were laid with Web 1.0, which is the read-only Web. The initial system created a constantly growing library for the publishing of information on static websites where users could access it directly via browsers. Then there’s Web 2.0, which we often refer to as the read-and-write Web, or the Social Web in essence, which makes it simple for regular users to interact with, and encourages them to participate in creating and publishing information as well.
Following the evidence, Web 3.0 is envisioned to be associated with the evolution of an “Intelligent Web.” It is anticipated that the Intelligent Web will address the lack of structure and organization in the Web 2.0 era by linking the information from disparate sources and systems to ensure a more easy-to-use, efficient, and valuable scenario. It also implies a derivative of the Semantic Web (or Knowledge Web) that interprets searchable content and thus delivers appropriate and relevant information according to the understanding of the needs of users.
With more results coming up, we believe that a more appropriate term will be given to explain such a promising and exciting phenomenon. But all in all, the evolution of the Web is just in its beginning stages, and the Web updates itself at a tremendously fast speed. New theories, techniques, and challenges will be discovered to best explain the phenomenon.
This special issue is taken as a pioneer in exploring the meaning of Web 3.0. We totaled twenty submissions from ten countries, where the corresponding authors were majorly counted by the deadline for submission. All these submissions were found to have significant contributions in the fields of web research and social network analysis. However, only 12 high-quality papers were accepted after a two-round strict and rigorous review process. These accepted papers mainly look at our issue from the perspectives of social network analysis, knowledge discovery, big data mining, recommender systems, multimedia, machine learning, information retrieval, security, human modeling, cognitive science and engineering, human-computer interaction, ubiquitous computing, e-learning, e-government, and their union, which brought lively discussions to the public readers.
The first paper, entitled “Multi-Dimensional Attributes and Measures for Dynamical User Profiling in Social Networking Environments” by Xiaokang Zhou et al. [12], addresses a promising issue with regard to the individual information seeking process in an open social network. A universal user model, namely, dynamically socialized user networking, is proposed to well describe multidimensional and correlated user characteristics and properties. A set of profiling and mining techniques are applied to analyze the shared information, such as posts, comments, etc., from users’ social media. With the understanding of user behaviors on social media, this model is then applied to provide users, or soon to be users, with more adaptive information services that can better fit the needs of individuals in their own social scenarios.
The last paper, entitled “Watermark with DSA signature using Predictive Coding” by Cheonshik Kim and Ching-Nung Yang [9], then considers the issue of the enhancement of online security through the information hiding technique. Authors present a predictor-based watermark scheme that embeds secret bit streams and a DSA signature into an image. The proposed scheme conceals secret messages by using the divergence between current pixel values and predictive pixel values. Experimental results show that the newly proposed method receives low complexity and achieves higher embedding performance with good perceptual quality compared to the conventional techniques.
The era of the growing web and its evolution has begun, which promises to enhance the way information is retrieved, managed, and delivered, and thus provide better support, in the form of services, applications, and so forth, to our daily lives. With the success of the special issue on “Social Media Services and Technologies towards Web 3.0” in Multimedia Tools and Applications, it becomes possible for researchers (and interesting readers as well) who have been engaged in this or related areas to receive state-of-the-art information, gain experience, and further bring about the benefits of this promising area of study. We, the guest editors, also think that the web will become more advanced in the next few years.
Our special thanks go to Dr. Borko Furht, the Editor-in-Chief of Multimedia Tools and Applications, and all the editorial staff for their support throughout the preparation and publication process of this issue. We also thank all the authors who have helped a lot to advance this emerging field of study by submitting their outstanding research results. External and international referees are very much appreciated for their great work in reviewing the manuscripts.
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