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Humanities, and the more qualitative aspects of the social sciences, are often seen as fields in which Semantic Web applications are problematic. The complex, highly contextualized nature of its source material raises considerable challenges for machine readability and automated processes. Some early accomplishments of Digital Humanities projects show that these are not necessarily insurmountable obstacle, however. In data aggregation and discovery the RDF data model can be very effective for linking online data and documents from extremely heterogeneous contexts. Knowledge Organization vocabularies such as SKOS and meta-ontologies like OWL have proved very useful for large-scale conceptual sightings and data-mining. Even the FOAF vocabulary can be helpful for expressing the complexity of academic and authorship graphs relations, both globally and across disciplines.

Yet the unique demands of the Humanities and Social Sciences must not be ignored and form the principle topic of this panel. The issue of re-use of data, of collectively building new research projects, must be refined and discussed. Will the Semantic Web provoke new innovation beyond discovery and presentation and give rise to new problems from new hypotheses, eventually generating new heuristics? The status of logical inference (or description) will be a crucial issue in this context: is the underlying first order logic sufficiently powerful to deal with the more than often non-deterministic reasoning scenarios in the Humanities? Are there means to extend the signification modes of RDF and RDFS beyond mere denotation in such a way as to deal with connotation, ambiguity, similarity and the like? Will Semantic Web technologies permit functionality beyond semantic annotation? And to what extent will it be possible to ontologically model what has been discussed in the literature as “scholarly primitives” (Unsworth, 2000 and Blanke/Hedges, 2011)?

In addition to the technical challenges are the social ones: How do we encourage participation amongst a Humanities community that historically has low technical literacy and limited interested in complex data modelling? To what extent does the Semantic Web require and/or benefit from open access and decentralisation and how well will that fit with the expectations and rewards structures based on traditional modes of Humanities publication and dissemination? Are Semantic technologies the ultimate digital divide – powerful tools for those who can make use of them but computational voodoo to everyone else? Finally, what might the Humanities themselves have to say about this new medium and what light does it shed on the way humans communicate and interact?