Web Wisdom: An essay on how Web 2.0 and Semantic Web can foster a global knowledge society

Admittedly this is a presumptuous title that should never be used when reporting on individual research advances. Wisdom is just not a scientific concept. In this case, though, we are reporting on recent developments on the web that lead us to believe that the web is on the way to providing a platform for not only information acquisition and business transactions but also for large scale knowledge development and decision support. It is likely that by now every web user has participated in some sort of social function or knowledge accumulating function on the web, many times without even being aware of it, simply by searching and browsing, other times deliberately by e.g. adding a piece of information to a Wikipedia article or by voting on a movie on IMDB.com. In this paper we will give some examples of how Web Wisdom is already emerging, some ideas of how we can create platforms that foster Web Wisdom and a critical evaluation of types of problems that can be subjected to Web Wisdom.