Semantic Need: Guiding Metadata Annotations by Questions People #ask

In its core, the Semantic Web is about the creation, collection and interlinking of metadata on which agents can perform tasks for human users. While many tools and approaches support either the creation or usage of semantic metadata, there is neither a proper notion of metadata need, nor a related theory of guidance which metadata should be created. In this paper, we propose to analyze structured queries to help identifying missing metadata. We conduct a study on Semantic MediaWiki (SMW), one of the most popular Semantic Web applications to date, analyzing structured "ask"-queries in public SMWinstances. Based on that, we describe Semantic Need, an extension for SMW which guides contributors to provide semantic annotations, and summarize feedback from an online survey among 30 experienced SMW users.