Enhancing the Web Experience

Enhancing the Web Experience: DERI, Social Semantic Web and SIOC John Breslin, Digital Enterprise Research Institute College of Engineering and Informatics, NUI Galway Engineers Ireland Annual Conference / Tullamore / 23 rd April 2009

The world’s largest Semantic Web research institute
Founded June 2003 with 1 fulltime member (green field)
Members as of April 2009:
About 120 people (from 27 nations)
Total research grants of about €38M
Over a hundred research partners
More than 500 research publications:
Number 1 organisation in its core space
Participates in 12 standards groups
Prominent technologies:
Semantic Digital Libraries, Social Semantic Desktop (in Linux), Semantic Web Search Engine, Global Sensor Network, SIOC
DERI in brief

Some of our SFI and EI-funded research projects
Líon II:
SFI CSET
Core industrial partners include Nortel, Ericsson and Cisco (supported at headquarters level)
eLite:
EI ILRP
€ 3 million over three years
8 eLearning companies
Clique:
SFI SRC
Graph and network analysis
Widgelix:
Widget platform (with Cyntelix)
Firefly:
EI Technology Development (commercialisation planned)
Time-based eLearning environment
Sedici:
EI Proof of Concept
Zero-knowledge proof
Pegasus:
Semantic search in MS SharePoint (with Storm Technologies)
TagBuilder:
EI Innovation Partnership (with a start-up company)

Research units and streams in the DERI house

The Social Web lets like-minded people connect through shared photos, slides, books, whatever…

Explosion of social / collaborative websites (disconnected)

Social websites are like data silos * Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com Need ways to connect users / data on 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

What is the Semantic Web?
Sir Tim Berners-Lee et al., Scientific American, 2001:
“ An extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.”
“ Entrepreneurs see a Web guided by common sense”, John Markoff, New York Times, 2006 :
“ Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable vision. But the underlying technologies are rapidly gaining adherents, at big companies like IBM and Google as well as small ones.”
Requires web pages to have metadata with underlying ontologies

It’s all a big graph of triples! #Bob #Alice dbpedia.org/ resource/ Guitar Alice Cooper knows interest name interest Metadata Ontology xmlns.com/ foaf/0.1/ Person xmlns.com/ foaf/0.1/ Person www.w3.org/ 1999/02/ 22-rdf-syntax-ns# resource www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#Literal knows interest name interest type type type

Towards a Social Semantic Web

Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC)
An effort from DERI to discover how we can create and establish ontologies on the Semantic Web
Goal of the SIOC ontology is to address interoperability issues on the (Social) Web
SIOC has been adopted in a framework of 50 applications or modules deployed on over 400 sites
http://sioc-project.org

The steps taken
Develop an ontology of terms for representing rich data from the Social Web
Create a food chain for producing, collecting and consuming SIOC data
As well dissemination via papers about SIOC, provide docs and examples at sioc-project.org
SIOC aims to enrich the Web infrastructure:
During the next upgrade cycle, gigabytes of semantically-enriched community data become available!

1. The SIOC ontology
The main classes and properties are:

2. The SIOC food chain

Navigating across SIOC-enabled sites via Sindice

Collaborative workspace interoperability with SIOC

3. Dissemination

Quotes about SIOC
“ I […] think the concept is HOT” – Robert Douglass, Drupal Developer
“ It just dawned on me that the burgeoning SIOC-o-sphere (online communities exporting and exposing content via SIOC Ontology) is actually: Blogosphere 2.0” – Kingsley Idehen, Founder and CEO of OpenLink Software
“ SIOC has the potential to become one of the foundational vocabularies that make Semantic Web applications useful” – Ivan Herman, W3C / ERCIM
“ FOAF represents relationships between people, as well as basic contact details. SIOC does this for groups: it extends the FOAF idea to being able to talk about whole groups of people. I am excited about SIOC because you can use that information to determine trust, to let people in.” – Tim Berners-Lee, Creator of the World Wide Web
“ I think SIOC is the kind of data model we want that tracks the dollar instead of the person across disparate web sites” – George Thomas, Chief Architect, General Services Administration, US Government

Obama SIOC!

Some examples of where SIOC is already in use

Networking knowledge via a Social Semantic Web

For more, read our Social Semantic Web book:
Autumn 2009, available to pre-order on Amazon.com
www.socialsemanticweb.net
www.deri.ie
Thanks!

Enhancing the Web Experience

by John Breslin

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