In the highly inter-connected world we live in today, a variety of intelligent information technologies are enabling the exchange of information and knowledge to solve problems. Communication technologies and social computing are emerging as the backbone to gather information and execute various tasks from any place at any time. While it is putting significant pressure on the bandwidth that carries much of this communication, it is also pushing the frontiers of innovation on the capabilities of handheld devices. Continued innovations are needed to ensure that mobile intelligent information technologies can continue to meet our needs in an environment, where our ability to make decisions depends on our ability to access a reliable source of information that is real time — something that can be facilitated by tapping into the collective wisdom of a network of people in a community and the knowledge coming together on-demand.
Community networks exist in several disciplines; however, they are generally limited in scope. The content and knowledge created in a community network typically stays within its boundary. One of the main reasons why there is not much connectivity or interaction between various community networks is that each community has its own data and knowledge representation and the content repositories are heterogeneous. Moreover, there are no common standards that facilitate data interoperability between the applications in disparate community networks. Several research efforts attempt to fill this gap through the use of semantic technologies. They focus on developing interoperability mechanisms to support...