Social Navigation systems have demonstrated that the collective wisdom of a community of users can be distilled to produce adaptive behavior. Social navigation systems mainly use visual changes to the environment to shift emphases and organisation of navigational cues, or add navigation cues to help users locate information. Between 1994 and 2000 pioneer research on Social Navigation and other community-based systems such as collaborative filtering systems brought a range of interesting results. Over the last three years socially-based systems has grown from a small research area into a large movement sometimes nicknamed Web 2.0.

The mushrooming growth of social software (including "folksonomy" systems employing social tagging) has brought social navigation techniques out of the backwaters of research environments and created a lot of interest in community-based technologies. The abundance of a wide assortment of social software, including annotation systems, wikis, clusters of blogs, social network visualisations, social recommender systems, and new ways of visualising conversations, creates a unique opportunity to broaden research on community-based adaptation and brings its results into practice. The underlying principle that binds these systems together is that they both affect and are affected by aspects of collective group behaviour. While most of modern community-based systems are not adaptive, a range of old and new community-based adaptation techniques could be applied in the new context and bring interesting results.

The workshop brings together researchers and developers from a range of disciplines and approaches to share knowledge and seek synergies and syntheses that will move the field forward. The focus is on in exploring the potential for interoperability techniques and standards, allowing richer blends and mashups of sociable media, social software and systems using social navigation.