A Language-Aware web will give us a bigger and better semantic web

The role of natural language is becoming in these years a more and more acknowledged aspect of the Semantic Web. Not limited to mere modeling and representation proposals, but backed by concrete use-cases and scenarios, the use of natural language is emerging through a plethora of approaches and solutions. Now that we have languages and protocols for modeling and publishing content, for querying, and for efficiently describing datasets and repositories (metadata), it is time for natural language to regain its due space and become a first-class-citizen in the Web of Data. Lexical resources need to comply with standard, unifying vocabularies upon which they can be discovered, chosen, evaluated and ultimately queried upon need. At the same time, NLP systems and components should pull their head out of their esoteric corner and become classifiable, discoverable and interactive elements in the Semantic Web, so that many language related tasks can be carried on more easily thanks to coordinating modules/agents sensible to this information. In this position paper, I will provide by first a quick outlook into the last years of language and ontologies and describe what the community has achieved by the state-of-the-art. I will then discuss open points, and try to draw conclusions, based on my perspective and contributions to this research field, towards the future of a more Language-Aware Semantic Web.