Data Portability with SIOC and FOAF

Data Portability with SIOC and FOAF Uldis Boj ā rs 1 , Alexandre Passant 2 , John Breslin 1 1 Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway 2 LaLIC, Université Paris-Sorbonne / Electricité de France R&D XTech 2008 Dublin, Ireland - 2008-05-09

What’s the problem and how to solve it ?

What if I use multiple services and I want to…
Merge my social networks between various websites
Invite my friends from a social media website to a new service I’ve just registered
Move the stuff I have on one service to another (e.g. move all my blog posts, comments, etc. from WordPress.com to “Acme Blogs”)
And more:
See my stuff on a third-party service providing an aggregate view, like FriendFeed, but in an open way
Archive and preserve my social media contributions
…

So many social media sites… * Source: Smashcut Media, www.smashcut-media.com

Even more services…

It takes a lot of time…

Filling out your profiles, re-adding your friends…

Uploading posts and content items to “stovepipes”!

Social media sites are like data silos * Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

Many isolated communities of users and their data * Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

Need ways to connect these islands * Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

Allowing users to easily move from one to another * Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

Enabling users to easily bring their data with them * Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

Social networking fatigue
How many general or niche SNSs are you willing to register and / or interact with?
“ People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site ” Brad Fitzpatrick (Aug. 2007)
Need for a “social graph” with distributed social networks and reusable profiles
A Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web (Sept. 07)
Ownership
Control
Freedom
The Semantic Web can help !

is
important !

Data Portability
Social network portability
User profiles
Social network relations
User-created content portability
Social media contributions
… and all other kinds of data portability needs that you can think of …

Social Network Portability with FOAF (Friend of a Friend)

The Semantic Web in brief
“ The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning , better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation ” - Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, Ora Lassila, Scientific American, May 2001
A common model to describe data in a machine-readable way:
RDF (Resource Description Framework)
RDF statements are triples (subject predicate object):
XTech2008 isA Conference .
XTech2008 takesPlaceIn Dublin .
Uldis isPresentingAt Xtech2008 .

RDF
Graph-based model for describing:
information about objects
relationships between them
Different mediums for expressing this knowledge:
RDF in XML, JSON, N3 (plain text)
Embedded: RDFa (in HTML)
Extractable using GRDDL (from Microformats, …)

RDF (II)
Large set of tools & libraries
All major programming languages
Standard query language
SPARQL (W3C Recommendation)
Interesting applications built on top of it
SPARQL interfaces to relational DBMSs
Reasoning / inference engines
Web of Linked Data

Vocabularies / Ontologies
Common semantic model for data, using ontologies:
“ An ontology is a specification of a conceptualisation” - Tom Gruber
RDFS (RDF Schema)
OWL (Web Ontology Language)
Lightweight Vocabularies are Good for You :)
FOAF, SIOC, DOAP
The Semantic Web FAQ:
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/SW-FAQ

Lightweight Ontologies
FOAF
Friend Of A Friend - http: //foaf-project .org
Used by Apple Safari, Google Social Graph API, …
DOAP
Description of A Proect - http://trac.usefulinc.com/doap
Used by Apache projects catalogue, …
Consumed by http://doapstore.org/ , …
SIOC
Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities
http://sioc-project.org
Generated by WordPress and other plugins, see: http://rdfs.org/sioc/applications/

The Semantic Web and Web 2.0
Semantic Web and Web 2.0 can benefit from each other to lead to a better Web, with social and machine-understandable data.
Many examples:
Vocabularies: FOAF to describe people, SIOC to describe their data
Semantic Wikis: Semantic MediaWiki, OntoWiki …
Revyu.com: A review website based on SW technologies
Tagging: The Tag Ontology, SCOT, MOAT
“ I think we could have both Semantic Web technology supporting online communities , but at the same time also online communities can support Semantic Web data by being the sources of people voluntarily connecting things together .” Tim Berners-Lee

Discovering the “invisible” web of data
“ Semantic Radar” extension for Firefox:
http://sioc-project.org/firefox
Easy to setup and use (Firefox extension, auto-update)
Support for RDFa!
Architecture of participation: just browse the Web
Discover Semantic Web documents using RDF autodiscovery links (a popular practice for advertising Atom/RSS and FOAF ):
<head>
<link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" href="http://example.com/people/~you/foaf.rdf"/>
</head>
RDF Browsers:
Tabulator, Disco, Zitgist, …

Representing people and their relationships
FOAF is the main vocabulary used to represent people:
Friend Of A Friend - http: //foaf-project .org
foaf:Person class:
“ The foaf:Person class represents people. Something is a foaf:Person if it is a person.”
Give yourself a URI:
http: //apassant . net/alex
Relationships = foaf:knows property
:John foaf:knows :Alex .

Enriching FOAF data
Extensions using the RELATIONSHIP vocabulary:
http: //vocab .org/relationship/
All rel:* properties are subproperties of foaf:knows
:John rel:worksWith :Uldis
RDFS inferencing allows tools to answer queries using foaf:knows when people use rel:* alternatives
Can mix together with information in many different vocabularies (as necessary):
DOAP (Description of a Project) - for software projects
SIOC - for user-created content
… .

Integrating social networks with FOAF Common formats, unique URIs Source: Sheila Kinsella, Applications of Social Network Analysis 2007

A common semantics for existing services
Existing FOAF exporters for Facebook, Flickr, Twitter…
Run unified queries using SPARQL

Social Network data from multiple sources
Flickr: http://apassant.net/home/2007/12/flickrdf/data/people/33669349@N00
Twitter: http://tools.opiumfield.com/twitter/terraces/rdf
FaceBook: http://ext.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~u0057/FoafGenerator/files/foaf-607513040.rdf

Some more FOAF
LiveJournal
MyBlogLog
http://kentbrewster.com/foafster/
CPAN Net::Flickr::Backup
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Net-Flickr-Backup-1.2/lib/Net/Flickr/Backup.pm
Pownce
… .

Identity management across networks
A need to unify URIs from different services so as to represent one's unified identity. Linked-data principles are to use owl:sameAs and rdfs:seeAlso:
See: http://www4. wiwiss . fu-berlin . de/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/
owl:sameAs: Used to identify two resources with different URIs as being the same resource
:alex owlSameAs flickr:33669349@N00 .
rdfs:seeAlso: “More information about this resource can be found here”, can be used by Semantic Web tools such as Tabulator
http://apassant.net/blog/2008/01/12/one-foaf-fits-all/
Inference using owl:InverseFunctionalProperty:
foaf:mbox, foaf:openid, etc. can be used to identify uniqueness for a foaf:Person
Unifying aspects of a foaf:Person across networks:
All relevant relationships are related to one foaf:Person
Social Network unification

Distributed social networking with FOAF

Applications for browsing the social (semantic) graph
FOAFnaut, FOAF Explorer, etc.
FOAFGear: thanks to common semantics, only 100 lines of code: http: //apassant .net/home/2008/01/foafgear/

Semantic social networks tools and services
Browse / re-use your social graph in personal applications
Merge identities with pre-defined rules
Tools:
Beatnik
Knowee
SPARQLpress
Nepomuk

Combining FOAF and OpenID
Link to your FOAF profile from your OpenID URL, so that services can get your machine-readable profile when you log-in:
<head><link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" href="foaf.rdf" /></head>
FOAF + OpenID Scenario
Bob creates an account on Networkr, a new social networking website, using OpenID
Networkr retrieves the FOAF URI thanks to an auto-discovery link
From the FOAF file, it identifies if there are any people already subscribed to Networkr who are listed in Bob’s defined relationships
If that is the case, Bob can add them as “local connections”, share data with them, etc. without having to once again search for / add his friends
Specific rules:
If I know X from Flickr, he / she can see my pictures on Networkr

Data Portability = SIOC + FOAF

Social Media Contributions
Lots of user-created content posted on the Web:
Blog posts, wiki pages, bulletin board threads
Called « Social Media Contributions » or SMC
Distributed content
Blogging platform, photos-sharing website, social bookmarking service ….
A need for common semantics to
Provide a single model for any SMC, wherever it comes from
Enables the use of SPARQL queries instead of proprietary APIs
Interlink data and find relationships between content
From documents to resources, from WWW to GGG

SIOC
(pron. as “shock”)

SIOC
Social Web + Semantic Web
Vocabulary for expressing the Social Web (user-created content) on the Semantic Web (web of data)

Modeling Social Media Contributions
SIOC - Semantically-Interlinked Social Communities
http: //sioc-project .org
A vocabulary to represent the activities of online communities
More than 40 applications, mainly open-source
W3C Member Submission, June 2007
http://www.w3.org/Submission/2007/02/
Namespace: http: //rdfs . org/sioc/ns
Five top-level classes:
User / Role / Space / Container / Item
Items, created by User(s), organized in Containers

The SIOC ontology
The main classes and properties are:

Connecting people and their user accounts
The sioc:User class:
Can be thought of as a virtual representation of any person online, within the context of a given social media website or community
A subclass of foaf:OnlineAccount
foaf:holdsAccount property:
“ The foaf:holdsAccount property relates a foaf:Agent to a foaf:OnlineAccount for which they are the sole account holder.”
Links a foaf:Person to various sioc:User(s)
As many sioc:User(s) as required can be linked to a single person
One people, various identities
Users create and manage content:
has_creator and has_modifier properties
:blogpost123 sioc:has_creator :john

A person and their user accounts

+ SKOS for topics and categories
Interlinking using common categories:
Share tags and topics across different content
SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organisation System):
http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/
A vocabulary to describe controlled vocabularies
Used in the “Tag Ontology”: http://www. holygoat .co. uk/projects/tags/

Interlinking content with SKOS
skos:isSubjectOf
sioc:topic

Interlinking content items
Can create direct links between instances of sioc:Item:
Link from a blog post to a bulletin board page
sioc:related_to, sioc:links_to
Interlinking using common categories:
SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organisation System):
http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/
Interlink using existing URIs as topics:
geonames.org, DBpedia, Revyu
MOAT (Meaning of a Tag) simplifies linking content to such URIs:
http://moat-project.org/

Producing SW d ata from s ocial m edia s ites
We can use SIOC as a common framework / data model for expressing s ocial m edia data on the Semantic Web
The “ SIOC Types ” module:
Additional classes and properties for expressing different kinds of s ocial m edia / Web 2.0 content
Connects SIOC with domain-specific ontologies
Reus e existing ontologies:
Dublin Core, FOAF, SKOS, etc.

SIOC d ata p roducers
SIOC a pplications l ist :
http://rdfs.org/sioc/applications/
> 20 a pplications for p roducing SIOC d ata :
F ree and o pen s ource
SIOC e xport t ools for:
Blogs and forums: WordPress, phpBB, Drupal, b2evolution
“ Legacy” applications: m ailing lists, IRC
New media: Twitter, Jaiku , Facebook, Flickr
Enterprise applications: CWE (collaborative work environments)

Case studies
WordPress SIOC exporter:
http://sioc-project.org/wordpress
First SIOC plugin created, custom built
vBulletin and phpBB SIOC exporters:
http://wiki.sioc-project.org/index.php/VBSIOC
http://sioc-project.org/phpbb
Uses SIOC API for PHP

Overview of WordPress SIOC exporter
Installation:
Download from http://sioc-project.org/wordpress
“ Drop” two files into the WordPress plugins folder
Go to the administrator’s user interface
Plugins -> SIOC Plugin -> “Activate”
SIOC data created for every page:
Data describing all blog posts, comments, users, etc.
SIOC data can be discovered via RDF autodiscovery links:
<link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="SIOC" href="http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/index.php?sioc_type=site" />
Data can be explored or crawled using existing Semantic Web applications

Sample export of SIOC data from WordPress

RDF data from the WordPress export plugin, displayed in the SIOC Browser

SIOC export APIs
Benefits:
Hides the complexity from application developers
Can be used by people who are not Semantic Web experts
Automatically updated according to changes in the SIOC ontology and best practices documents
Existing SIOC APIs:
Java
Perl (new!)
PHP (most used)
RDFa on Rails
See “2.1 SIOC APIs” in http://rdfs.org/sioc/applications/

Using SIOC and FOAF to represent portable data

WordPress SIOC Import plugin
http://wiki.sioc-project.org/w/SIOC_Import_Plugin
see the wiki for a detailed information
Download, unzip, activate
Import some data (Admin -> Options -> SIOC Import)
SIOC data (external) from http://johnbreslin.com/blog/
SIOC data (embedded RDFa) from http://www.wikier.org/blog/talk-in-deri#post

Moving SIOC data between sites
Importing SIOC data is easy:
Parse SIOC RDF data (e.g. using ARC2 or RAP for PHP)
Convert SIOC data to the content model of the target system :
e.g. content and other properties of blog posts and comments
Store data in the target application :
T he most difficult part 
Wordpress plugin

How can you use and extend it?
Horizontal scaling
Import / copy / move whole sites
More intelligent import
Matching categories, users to those already on the site
Combine with messaging / pubsub
Use RDF (SIOC+FOAF+…) for data transferred via XMPP
How would you use it?
This demo was just a proof-of-concept
More exciting use cases are ahead

Summary

Summary
Data portability is an important issue
Many networks, many friends, many contributions
Distributed in proprietary data silos
Open up the silos, open your data
Use standards API and languages to get your data
SIOC + FOAF = a part of the Data Portability toolbox
Combination of open, lightweight data formats
Extensible with domain specific ontologies
Linked Data

Future Events
Scripting for the Semantic Web (SFSW 2008)
Workshop with many interesting contributions
Full papers already available online
E.g., “Microblogging: A Semantic Web and Distributed Approach”
Date / Location: June 2008 - Tenerife, Spain
http://www.semanticscripting.org/SFSW2008/
Social Data on the Web (SDoW 2008)
Workshop combining the Social Web and Semantic Web
Awaiting contributions, paper submission open
Date / Location: October 2008 - Karlsruhe, Germany
http://sdow2008.semanticweb.org/

Towards a Social Semantic Web !
Vocabularies and tools (APIs, producers…) already exist
http://esw.w3.org/topic/SemanticWebTools
http://sioc-project.org/applications
There must be something you can use
Join us and contribute !
#sioc on irc.freenode.net
sioc-dev on google-groups http://groups.google.com/group/sioc-dev

Contacts
Uldis Boj ā rs
[email_address] // http://captsolo.net/info/
Alexandre Passant
[email_address] // http://apassant.net
John Breslin
[email_address] // http://johnbreslin.com
Thanks to:
Dan Brickley (FOAF) for his valuable comments
Tuuka Hastrup and Thomas Schandl for work on evolving the SIOC Import plugin

http://inao.blogspot.com	7
http://warehouse-it.blogspot.com	6
http://www.slideshare.net	6
http://www.inao.blogspot.com	5
http://herediah.wordpress.com	4
http://deltablog.ru	3
http://dookieweb.blogspot.com	2
http://dookieweb.blogspot.com.es	2
http://localhost	1
http://viaspire.blogs.com	1
http://ciep.cga.udg.mx	1

Data Portability with SIOC and FOAF

by Uldis Bojars on May 09, 2008

Accessibility

Categories

Upload Details

Usage Rights

11 Embeds 38

Statistics

Data Portability with SIOC and FOAF Presentation Transcript