The web of data has continued to expand thanks to the principles of Linked Data outlined by Tim Berners-Lee, increasing its impact on the semantic web both in its depth and range of data sources. Meanwhile traditional web applications and technologies, with a strong focus on user interaction, such as blogs, wikis, folksonomies-based systems, and content management systems have become an integral part of the World Wide Web. However the semantic web has not yet managed to fully harness these technologies, resulting in a lack of linked data coming from user-generated content. The high level aim of this thesis is to answer the question of whether semantic web applications can be configured to use existing technologies that encourage usergenerated content on the Web. This thesis proposes an approach to reusing user-generated content from folksonomybased systems in semantic web applications, allowing these applications to be configured to make use of the structure and associated reasoning power of the semantic web, but while being able to reuse the vast amount of data already existing in these folksonomy-based systems. It proposes two new methods of semantic web application development: (i) a reusable infrastructure for building semantic mashup applications that can be configured to make use of the proposed approach; and (ii) a approach to configuring traditional web content management systems (CMS) to maintain repositories of Linked Data. The proposed approach allows semantic web applications to make use of tagged resources, while also addressing some limitations of the folksonomy approach by using ontology reasoning to exploit the structured information held in domain ontologies. The reusable infrastructure provides a set of components to allow semantic web applications to be configured to reuse content from folksonomy-based systems, while also allowing the users of these systems to contribute to the semantic web indirectly via the proposed approach. The proposed Linked Data CMS approach provides a configurable tools for semantic web application developers to develop an entire website based on linked data, while allowing ordinary web users to contribute directly to the semantic web using familiar CMS tools. The approaches proposed in this thesis make use of lightweight ontology reasoning, which is both efficient and scalable, to provide a basis for the development of practical semantic web applications. The research presented in this thesis shows how the semantic web can reuse both folksonomies and content management systems from Web 2.0 to help narrow the gap between these two key areas of the web.