Interlinking Online Communities and Enriching Social Software with the Semantic Web

Interlinking Online Communities and Enriching Social Software with the Semantic Web 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 World Wide Web Conference / Beijing, China / 21st April 2008

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Summary
Overview of the SIOC Project
From Disconnected Communities to Interlinked-Online Communities
Creating Semantic Web Data from Social Media Sites
Using SIOC with Other Ontologies
Finding, Reusing and Searching Semantic Web Data Produced by the Social Web
Browsing, Exploring and Consuming Semantic Web Data
Portable Data and Re-Use of SIOC Data
Industry Applications of Semantic Technologies for Online Communities
Leveraging Content Semantics in Social Software

Who are we?
Alexandre Passant
PhD student, Semantic Web researcher
LaLIC, Université Paris-Sorbonne / Electricité de France R&D
John Breslin
Social software researcher, adjunct lecturer
DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway
Uldis Bojārs
Semantic Web researcher, PhD student
DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway

1. Overview of the SIOC Project John Breslin

timbl on the Semantic Web and online communities
“ 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 .”
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, podcast interview during ISWC 2005
http://esw.w3.org/topic/IswcPodcast

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):
WWW2008 isA Conference .
SIOC isA CoolProject .
Common semantics for this data, using ontologies:
“ An ontology is a specification of a conceptualisation” - Tom Gruber
RDFS (RDF Schema)
OWL (Web Ontology Language)
The Semantic Web FAQ:
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/SW-FAQ

The (evolving) Semantic Web layer cake
http://www.w3.org/2007/03/layerCake.png

Vision

The aims of SIOC
To “semantically-interlink online communities”
To fully describe the content and structure of community sites
To create new connections between online discussion posts and items, forums and containers
To enable the integration of online community information
To browse connected Social Web items in interesting and innovative ways
To overcome a chicken-and-egg problem with the Semantic Web
Add a social aspect to the Semantic Web

The steps involved
Develop an ontology of terms for representing rich data from the Social Web
Create a food chain for producing, collecting and consuming SIOC data from open-source discussion systems and popular community sites
As well dissemination via academic papers about SIOC, provide easy-to-read documentation and usage examples at sioc-project.org
SIOC aims to enrich the Web infrastructure:
During the next upgrade cycle, gigabytes of community data become available!

The SIOC ontology
The main classes and properties are:

The SIOC food chain

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
“ A project that started back in 2000 called Friend-of-a-Friend (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

Number of SIOC documents pinged via PingTheSemanticWeb

What SIOC is not?
An ontology to describe the content of social media contributions:
Need to use dedicated ontologies
A way to automagically translate non-semantic social data to RDF:
Need to write and use exporters
A model to describe physical people that contribute to social media websites:
This is the role of FOAF (Friend-of-a-Friend)
An axiomatisation of a domain

2. From Disconnected Communities to Interlinked-Online Communities Alexandre Passant

What are online communities?
People form online communities by combining one-to-one (e.g. e-mail and instant messaging), one-to-many (web pages and blogs) and many-to-many (forums, wikis) forms of communication
Pre-Web and Web 1.0:
BBS services
Mailing lists
USENET
Web-based bulletin boards
Web 2.0:
Multi-forum sites
Online social networks
Weblogs
Wikis
Microblogging
Social tagging services

Evolution of online community sites
Online community sites:
Provide a valuable source of information
May contain rich meta-information
But are isolated from one another:
Many sites discussing complementary topics
How to relate and interlink them?
Next steps:
Connect sites together
Add more value:
Let other sites know more about the structure and contents
Make more use of tagging and semantic metadata

Existing connections using RSS, Atom syndication
First step towards connecting online community sites:
More visibility through aggregation and search
Allow one to subscribe to distributed items
Benefits:
Good tool support:
RSS readers, APIs, etc.
Many consumers
Shortcomings:
Little information about structure of the site or community:
Mainly represent items, not users nor the container
Feeds typically include only last five to 20 items:
How can we access information about the whole site?

Many different kinds of online communities:
Social networks
Discussion groups
Message boards
...
Each community is a closed world / walled garden:
Moving / reusing data from one community on another?
Interlinking networks?
Inviting friends?
Disconnected communities

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

A need for common semantics
Communities should provide their data in a common, machine-understandable way:
RDF (resource description framework) as a data layer
One single format for all the data
Different transport layers (RDF/XML, N3, etc.) ‏
The base of the Semantic Web
Communities should use common semantics to define this data:
Avoiding the use of proprietary APIs
Since this means that they can talk together, exchange information, using the same modelling layer for their data
Using SIOC for representing content and actions
Using FOAF for representing people and networks

What is required to represent a community?
Represent the data, not only documents:
From the WWW to a “GGG”, hyperlinks to semantic relationships
A model for all the aspects of a community:
Users accounts, groups and roles:
Reader, reviewer, moderator
Content and types:
A blog, a blog post, a bulletin board, a wiki page, etc.
Actions between users and content:
Uldis creates a post, Alex comments on it, John moderates it
A model for the entire content:
Any data: RSS 1.0 and Atom limited to syndication / latest posts
Any user and relationship: new user, new post, replies, etc.

Representing community data with SIOC
Using SIOC as an ontology to represent the activities of online communities on the Web:
Namespace: http://rdfs.org/sioc/ns
Five top-level classes: User / Role / Space / Container / Item
A “SIOC Types” module for Social Web content
Action: A user posts an item in a container
A Semantic Web citizen:
Reusing and interlinking existing ontologies
Not reinventing the wheel (connects to DC, FOAF, etc.):
http://www.w3.org/Submission/2007/SUBM-sioc-related-20070612/

Example of SIOC data
Alex wrote a post on his WordPress blog:
:myblogpost rdf:type sioc:Post ;
dc:title “I’m blogging this” ;
sioc:has_creator :alex ;
sioc:has_container :mywpblog .
:mywpblog rdf:type sioc: Forum .

The same model for any website
John wrote a post on his Drupal-powered site :
:myblogpost rdf:type sioc:Post ;
dc:title “Another blog post” ;
sioc:has_creator :john ;
sioc:has_container :mydrupal .
:mydrupal rdf:type sioc: Forum .

Interlinking communities
Since all communities can use the same model to define their data, it is easy to link them from a data point of view
Interlinking:
URIs are used to define things and created objects
A post on blog “A” can be semantically linked to a post on blog “B”
Using SPARQL to query data:
Can perform unified queries no matter where the data comes from
No need to learn new APIs from data providers:
Standard queries for RDF data rather than APIs
SPARQL is a W3C recommendation :
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/

Linking people to user accounts
FOAF is the main vocabulary used to represent people:
http://foaf-project.org
foaf:Person class:
“ The foaf:Person class represents people. Something is a foaf:Person if it is a person.”
foaf:holdsAccount property:
“ The foaf:holdsAccount property relates a foaf:Agent to a foaf:OnlineAccount for which they are the sole account holder.”
Linking people to user accounts:
sioc:User rdfs:subClassOf foaf:onlineAccount
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

Representing users and online accounts
The sioc:User class:
An online user account
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
Users create and manage content:
has_creator and has_modifier properties
:blogpost123 sioc:has_creator :john
A user can have roles on a given container:
(Moderator, Forum 1) ← User A
(Contributor, Blog 2) ← User B

A person and their user accounts

3. Creating Semantic Web Data from Social Media Sites Uldis Bojārs

Producing SW d ata from s ocial m edia s ites
We use SIOC as a common framework / data model for expressing s ocial m edia data on the Semantic Web :
http://rdfs.org/sioc/spec/
http://rdfs.org/sioc/related/
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.

The SIOC ontology
The main classes and properties are:

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 SIOC Exporter, displayed in the SIOC RDF 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/

Overview of vBulletin and phpBB SIOC Exporters
There is a large amount of structured related information contained within message boards, and this can be leveraged in interesting ways by exposing the semantic data for new applications
Exporters have been developed for commercial (vBulletin) and open-source (phpBB) message board systems, bringing these islands together and allowing conversations on topics that are taking place across various sites
vBulletin and phpBB SIOC Exporters are based on the SIOC API for PHP:
http://wiki.sioc-project.org/index.php/PHPExportAPI

Sample export of SIOC data from vBulleti n

Sample export of SIOC data from vBulleti n (2)

SIOC competition with boards.ie
boards.ie has been publishing social graph information online using FOAF since 2004
With its 10 years of discussions, boards.ie can serve as a rich source of SIOC data for the Social Semantic Web:
The data to be “SIOC-ified” is already all publicly viewable, but it is difficult to leverage without any added semantics due to the fact that it is embedded in heavily-styled HTML pages
DERI are sponsoring a competition with prizes (the top prize is €3000) for whoever is judged to have produced the most interesting application(s) that makes use of the SIOC data exported from boards.ie
To enter, go to http://data.sioc-project.org

Creating your own exporters
Use SIOC API(s) if possible:
Or create new APIs to contribute back to the community
Creating RDF data is easy:
Use the plugin API provided by the host system
Collect required information from the host (CMS) system
Create in-memory RDF or object model (optional)
Serialise RDF data (using RDF API or print templates)
Seek help from the SIOC developer community:
http://sioc-project.org/ or SIOC-Dev mailing list or #sioc on IRC (irc.freenode.net)

Things to consider
URIs to use for SIOC concepts:
Developer needs to choose URIs to use and to supply them to SIOC API calls
Linked data from SIOC tools:
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html
Choice of URIs is important
To use HTTP content negotiation or not?
Do you need to use any domain-specific ontologies?
Structured data within content items
Multimedia, etc.
External or embedded metadata?

Explore more producers of SIOC data
Sioku:
SIOC data from Jaiku microblogging service
http://sioku.sioc-project.org/
SWAML:
Exports mailing list archives in RDF
http://swaml.berlios.de/
OpenLink DataSpaces:
Uses SIOC as a representation format for multiple social spaces
http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/wiki/main/Main/OdsIndex/
Use the Semantic Radar extension for Firefox for detecting / exploring SIOC data:
http://sioc-project.org/firefox

4. Using SIOC with Other Ontologies Uldis Boj ārs

SIOC and its friends

SIOC and FOAF are used together
FOAF is the main vocabulary used to represent people:
http://foaf-project.org
foaf:Person class:
“ The foaf:Person class represents people. Something is a foaf:Person if it is a person.”
foaf:holdsAccount property:
“ The foaf:holdsAccount property relates a foaf:Agent to a foaf:OnlineAccount for which they are the sole account holder.”
Linking people to user accounts:
sioc:User rdfs:subClassOf foaf:onlineAccount
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

A person and their user accounts

Add 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/

… can connect us to other people
Discussions
Bookmarks
Annotations
Profiles
Microblogs
Multimedia
…
Various types of content we create and consume…

The “SIOC Types” module
Ontology m odule :
E xtends the SIOC ontology
SIOC Types:
Defines subclasses and subproperties of core SIOC terms for various types of Social Web content items and containers

Sample classes from the “SIOC Types” module
Weblog:
Describes a weblog (blog), i.e. an online journal
BlogPost:
Describes a post that is specifically made on a weblog
Comment:
Comment is a subtype of sioc:Post and allows one to explicitly indicate that a particular post is a comment
Note that comments have a narrower scope than sioc:Post and may not apply to all types of community site

Sample classes from the “SIOC Types” module (2)
ImageGallery:
An image gallery, for example, a photo album containing exif:IFD instances
AddressBook:
A collection of personal or organisational addresses, e.g. foaf:Person (foaf:Agent) or vCard instances
ReviewArea:
An area where reviews are posted, using the Rev or Review vocabularies
ResumeBank:
A collection of resumes, e.g. as defined using Resume-RDF

Extending the SIOC data model with SIOC Types
John wrote a post on his Drupal-powered blog:
:myblogpost rdf:type sioct:BlogPost ;
dc:title “Another blog post” ;
sioc:has_creator :john ;
sioc:has_container :mydrupal .
:mydrupal rdf:type sioct:Blog .

Using SIOC Types to represent Flickr data
Uldis owns a photo gallery on Flickr:
:myitempost rdf:type exif:IFD ;
dc:title “Another posted picture” ;
sioc:has_creator :uldis ;
sioc:has_container :myflickrgallery .
:myflickrgallery rdf:type sioct:ImageGallery .
Reusing external vocabularies (e.g. EXIF) to define item types

FlickrRDF using SIOC, FOAF, SIOC Types, Geo

Reviews (structured blog posts) described with linked data from SIOC and other ontologies
Mapping from the hReview microformat to RDF ontologies:
Dublin Core, SIOC, SIOC Types, Review, Creative Commons
cc:license licence sioc:link, URL permalink sioc:topic tags sioc:content, rev:text description rev:rating rating dcterms:created dtreviewed foaf:maker, foaf:Person, rev:reviewer reviewer sioc:about item info Classes linked from SIOC Types item type dc:title summary RDF field(s) hReview field

5. Finding, Reusing and Searching Semantic Web Data Produced by the Social Web Alex andre Passant

There is a lot of Social Semantic Web data available:
From services
Via exporters
Hand-crafted
But it is scattered all around the Web:
How do we find, browse, query, reuse it?
These need to be addressed:
To provide novel applications that can leverage the interlinked nature of this data from the Social Web
To show the benefits of RDF and the Semantic Web
Motivation for finding and reusing semantic data

Finding data from the Social SW
PingTheSemanticWeb:
http://pingthesemanticweb.com
A ping service for SW documents
REST or XML/RPC
Accepts, reads different formats:
RDF/XML, N3, Turtle
The “blo.gs” of the Semantic Web
Various ontologies detected by PTSW:
FOAF, DOAP, SIOC, etc.
About 1M documents, 3.7M pings
“ A Scripting Architecture to Discover and Query Decentralized RDF Data”, The 3rd Workshop on Scripting for the Semantic Web (SFSW 2007), Innsbruck, Austria, June 2007

Direct ping to PingTheSemanticWeb:
Blog engine s : WordPress, Drupal, etc.
Services: Revyu, TalkDigger
“ 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>
Advertising RDF data to PTSW

Semantic Radar in action, sending pings to PTSW Click to view SW data.

Reusing data from PTSW
PTSW acts as a central access point for RDF data:
Subscribe to the service
Ask for recent updates
Apply namespace restrictions (e.g. export FOAF only)
Get fresh Semantic Web data
Concentrate on your tools, rather than on finding the data

Sindice:
Lookup service for Semantic Web documents
doap:store:
DOAP-based projects directory
SWSE, Zitgist, Swoogle:
Semantic Web search engines
You should be able to write a service after this tutorial 
Existing services that can make use of PTSW

doap:store

Write your own Social Semantic Web application
Requirements for applications that store RDF data
Find data:
Subscribe to PTSW
Make a crontab script to regularly fetch new data
Store data:
Plain-text files
RDF stores
Query the data:
SPARQL query language and protocol, a W3C recommendation
“ Trying to use the Semantic Web without SPARQL is like trying to use a relational database without SQL” - Tim Berners-Lee

Storing RDF data
RDF stores:
Storage systems for triples
Better performance that distributed queries
Some support inference engines (OWL, RDFS)
Many provide an open SPARQL endpoint to let people use data
Various implementations:
YARS (Java)
ARC2 (PHP)
3Store (C)
Virtuoso, etc.

Querying RDF data
SPARQL language:
A language to query a set of triples
REST-protocol between clients and endpoint
Results in standard formats (XML or JSON)
http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/
SPARQL endpoint:
Remotely accessible data
Data openness
Easy to use , e.g. ARC2 requires just three lines of code:
include_once('path/to/arc/ARC2.php');
$ep = ARC2::getStoreEndpoint(array(...));
$ep->go();

Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE)
A large-scale Semantic Web search engine developed and run by DERI Galway :
http://swse.deri.org/
Andreas Harth, Jürgen Umbrich, Aidan Hogan, Stefan Decker , “ YARS2: A Federated Repository for Querying Graph Structured Data from the Web”, The 6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2007) , pp. 211-224, Busan, Korea, 2007
A SPARQL endpoint f or today’s tutorial:
http://swse.deri.org/boards/yars2/

What does SWSE do?
SWSE searches and navigates factual entities collected from over 200,000 data sources
Components:
Web-scale crawling and object consolidation
Fully-distributed RDF storage and SPARQL query processing using YARS2 (already achieved 7 billion synthetically generated triples) ‏
Advanced schema agnostic ranking
User interface with guided navigation
Features:
Ability to handle various entity types (such as people, places, proteins) and various media types
Tracking provenance of triples using context / named graphs
Search and explore the Semantic Web at:
http://swse.deri.org/

SWSE™ data flow Query Processor Index Crawler User Interface

The Sindice lookup index

The Sindice SIOC widget

SPARQLing Social Semantic Web data
Find all posts and their titles by John, using SELECT, and combining vocabularies (DC, SIOC, SIOC Types):
SELECT ?post ?title
WHERE {
?post rdf:type sioct:BlogPost ;
dc:title ?title ;
sioc:has_creator <$johns_URI> .
}

SPARQLing Social Semantic Web data (2)
Find all users that posted replies to John’s blog since January 2008, introducing the FILTER clause:
SELECT ?who
WHERE {
?post rdf:type sioct:BlogPost ;
dc:title ?title ;
sioc:has_creator <$johns_URI> .
?post sioc:has_reply ?reply .
?reply sioc:has_creator ?who ;
dcterms:created ?date .
FILTER (?date > "2008-01-01T00:00:00Z"^^xsd:dateTime)
}

SPARQLing Social Semantic Web data (3)
Find all content created by someone with a given OpenID URL:
Browse someone’s social media contributions posted on various websites using different account names, but for the same person
SELECT ?item
WHERE {
?person foaf:openid <$openid> ;
foaf:holdsAccount ?user .
?user sioc:creator_of ?item .
}

Parse SPARQL results
SPARQL XML
JSON:
Easiest
Many extensions
PHP5: json_decode() : json data to PHP array
Many examples
Most SPARQL endpoints support JSON output
Can be easily used in JavaScript applications

Querying RDF files
Redland: http://librdf.org
Bindings:
Available for PHP, Python, etc.
SQL2RDF bindings include D2RQ and Triplify
Example in Python:
Import RDF m = RDF.Model() m.load(‘http://apassant.net/foaf.rdf’) q = RDF.Query("SELECT ?s WHERE { ?s ?p ?o .}") results = q1.execute(model) for result in results: print result[’s']

Need more data?
Translate any data to SIOC:
Re-use SIOC tools for non-SIOC data
Semantic Pipes:
http://pipes.deri.org/
Remix your RDF data
SPARQL constructs:
The “XSLT” of RDF
Translate a set of RDF data from one graph format to another
For example:
CONSTRUCT { ?x a sioc:Post . ?x sioc:has_creator ?y }
WHERE { ?x a myont:BlogElement . ?x myont:created_by ?y }

6. Browsing, Exploring and Consuming Semantic Web Data Uldis Bojārs

Consuming SIOC as Semantic Web data
SIOC = RDF data
Generic Semantic Web applications can be used:
RDF APIs (Jena, Redland, etc.)
RDF c rawlers
RDF b rowsers (Tabulator, Zit g ist, SIOC RDF Browser, etc. )
M ore apps : http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/SW-FAQ#tools
Customi s ed applications can provide more added value and / or better user interface s :
SIOC Explorer (faceted browsing of SIOC data) :
https://launchpad.net/sioc-ex
Buxon, etc.

How can SIOC data be used?

Browsing SIOC

SIOC RDF Browser
http://sparql.captsolo.net/browser

SIOC Store Browser
http://apassant.net/home/2006/06/sioc-browser

SIOC S tore Browser ( 2 )

Demonstration of SIOC Explorer

Accessing SIOC content from multiple sources Browsing SIOC content from one source Filter by “facet” from all sources
Facet can be a direct or indirect property:
Direct
The topic of the content item
The creator of the item
The date created
…
Indirect
A geographic location of the person who created it
The gender of the person
An interest shared by many creators

Exploring i mplicit s ocial n etwork c onnections

Social SIOC Explorer

Browsing SIOC with Piggy Bank

Browsing SIOC with Tabulator

Browsing SIOC with TimeLine

Browsing SIOC with TimeLine (2)

Weaving microblogging into the Semantic Web
Producing AND consuming data
Interlinking with existing RDF data (e.g. GeoNames)
Faceted browsing

Screenshots

Reviews using SW technologies
Revyu:
http://revyu.com
Review website combining Web 2.0 / SW technologies

7. Portable Data and Re-Use of SIOC Data John Breslin

What if I use multiple services and I want to…
Move the stuff I have on one service to another (e.g. move all my blog posts, comments, friends, etc. from WordPress.com to “Acme Blogs”)
Move all my stuff from multiple services to one third-party service
Centralise my stuff on my own service, e.g. my blog
See my stuff on a third-party service providing an aggregate view, like FriendFeed

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 search engine and aggregation sites are now appearing to compensate:
SocialURL – organise your online identities
PeekYou – matching web pages with their owners
Spock – organising information around people
Rapleaf – reputation lookup and email search
Wink – free people search engine
FriendFeed – subscribe to all of your friends’ feeds

Social network portability and reusability
Need distributed social networks and reusable profiles
Users may have many identities and sets of friends on different social networks, where each identity was created from scratch
Allow user to import existing profile and contacts, using a single global identity with different views (e.g. via FOAF, XFN / hCard, OpenID, etc.)
See also:
http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/
http://danbri.org/words/2007/09/13/194
http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/

Identity management across networks
Social media sites (or RDF exporters) create a new foaf:Person instance when they export their data:
TalkDigger, Revyu, Flickr exporters, etc.
There is a need to unify URIs 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
rdfs:seeAlso: “More information about this resource can be found here”, can be used by Semantic Web tools such as Tabulator
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 sioc:User accounts may be related to one foaf:Person

:alex owl:sameAs flickr:33669349@N00 ;
owl:sameAs twitter:terraces
URI unification for a foaf:Person

FOAF and social network connections
FOAF allows us to represent the connections between people:
A machine-readable format for social-networking
Using the foaf:knows property:
:John foaf:knows :Alex
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

Distributed social networking with FOAF
Combining networks from multiple FOAF URIs via owl:sameAs:
Decentralised social networks can represent connections for the same person
A person’s networks can be merged together
Any sub-network in the social graph can be reached from a single entry point, via the person’s URI

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

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/

Aggregation of semantic social networks
Browse / re-use your social graph in personal applications
Merge identities with pre-defined rules
Tools:
Beatnik
Knowee
SPARQLpress
Nepomuk

Using OpenID with FOAF
Can link to your FOAF profile from your OpenID URL, so that services can browse your machine-readable profile when you log-in:
<head>
<link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" href="foaf.rdf" />
</head>

Example of OpenID used with FOAF
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

The DataPortability initiative
http://dataportability.org
Existing technologies
Inventing no new ones

Other initiatives “near” DataPortability

Semantics can help
By using agreed-upon semantic formats to describe people, content objects and the connections that bind them all together , social media sites can interoperate by appealing to common semantics
Developers are already using semantic technologies to augment the ways in which they create, reuse, and link profiles and content on social media sites (using FOAF, XFN / hCard, SIOC, etc.)
In the other direction, object-centered social networks can serve as rich data sources for semantic applications

Using SIOC and FOAF to represent portable data

Porting social media contributions from data providers to import services
Importing SIOC data:
A Semantic Web “building block” for portable data

SIOC i mport t ools
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
Can use SIOC APIs to hold the data model
Store data in the target application :
T he most difficult part 
More info:
Uldis Bo jā rs, Alexandre Passant, John Breslin, Stefan Decker, “Social Network and Data Portability using Semantic Web Technologies”, Accepted for the 2nd Workshop on Social Aspects of the Web (SAW 2008), Innsbruck, Austria, May 2008

WordPress SIOC Importer
We have lots of producers of SIOC data, but now we need more applications that can consume it, like the WordPress SIOC Importer:
http://wiki.sioc-project.org/w/SIOC_Import_Plugin
Just as WordPress can import blog entries from various blogging systems, the WordPress SIOC Importer can import any discussion posts (and comments) represented in SIOC (forum posts, mail messages, IRC chats, etc.)

SIOC import process for WordPress
Parse RDF data (using the open-source RAP RDF parser)
Find all posts, i.e. instances of sioc:Post, which exhibit all of the properties required by the target site
For each post found, it creates a new post using WordPress API calls
To do:
Multiple sources
Authentication
Synchronisation
SIOC import APIs

8. Industry Applications of Semantic Technologies for Online Communities Alex andre Passant

Enterprise 2.0
Web 2.0 includes applications such as blogs, wikis, RSS feeds and social networking, while Enterprise 2.0 is the packaging of those technologies in both corporate IT and workplace environments
“ Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies , or between companies and their partners or customers”, Harvard Business School’s Professor Andrew McAfee
“ There are direct enterprise equivalents [to Facebook]. You can ask people the status of their projects, what they’re working on, are they travelling, things they’ve learned . All of these things would be very valuable inside an enterprise.”

Social media services that people have been using in everyday life on the Web are now entering organisations:
Blogs
Wikis
Social networking
Tagging
Lots of companies and products in this space:
Awareness, Mentor Scout, Contact Networks, Microsoft SharePoint, IBM Lotus Connections, SelectMinds, introNetworks, Tacit, Illumio, Jive Software, Visible Path, Leverage Software, Web Crossing, SocialText
These new deployments also face the same issues that are on the Web
Enterprise 2.0 (2)

Semantic Web technologies can be leveraged in organisations for:
Knowledge management
Data integration
Reasoning
Augmented search
See the SWEO use cases document:
http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/
More than 25 case studies and use cases
Vodafone, NASA, Renault, etc.
Semantic Web in organisations

Distributed Web 2.0 corporate information systems
McAfee’s “SLATES” requirements for Enterprise 2.0:
Search
Links
Authoring
Tagging
Extension
Signals
The Semantic Web can offer enhanced functionality by interlinking Enterprise 2.0 data with common semantics:
Use back-end domain ontologies to extend search
Search by type (i.e. restrict to wiki pages)
Provide semantic links between documents

Interconnecting Enterprise 2.0 services
RDF bus architecture (Tim Berners-Lee):
Add-ons to produce RDF data from existing Web 2.0 applications
Store distributed data using RDF stores
Create new applications:
Semantic mashups
Semantic search
Open architecture thanks to a SPARQL endpoint, services as plugins to the architecture

SIOC use case for Enterprise 2.0
EDF R&D:
Enterprise 2.0 systems: blogs, wikis, RSS, etc.
Interconnecting data with SIOC:
Exporters for blogs and wikis
Translation of RSS items to SIOC data
Maintaining ontology instances:
Using a semantic wiki for ontology population
Using MOAT to link data to those instances
New usages:
Semantic search engine: based on type and instances rather than plain text
Geolocation mashups, by interlinking the GeoNames ontology with internal data thanks to a common modelling scheme

SIOC use case for Enterprise 2.0 (2)
Statistics over 2 ½ years:
> 500k SIOC triples
12852 sioc:Post(s)
11954 sioct:BlogPost(s)
876 sioct:WikiArticle(s)
79 sioc:User(s)
Search:
Plain text to ontology
MOAT for identifying instances
Retrieves blog posts, wikis, etc.
SPARQL-based queries

Suggesting related content
Using sioc:Post(s) and the sioc:topic property

Using SIOC in collaborative working environments

OpenLink DataSpaces
ODS provides access to SIOC instance data from a range of ODS application instances including blogs, wikis, aggregated feeds, shared bookmarks, discussions, photo galleries, briefcases, etc.

Talis Engage

Seesmic

9. From Blogs and Wikis to Semantic Blogging and Semantic Wikis John Breslin

Structure-enhanced blog posts
Sometimes you have a burning need for more structure, at least some of the time
When you know a subject deeply, and your observations or analysis recur, you may be best served by filling in a form
The form will have its own metadata and its own data model
Uses:
People get to express themselves, and
Blogs start to interoperate with enterprise applications

Soccer coach example
An after-game soccer report typically includes:
which teams played
where and when
officials, and
a list of game events:
who scored (and when and how)
who received penalties (when and for what), etc.
Wouldn't it be handy for the coach’s blogging tool to understand this structure, present an editing form, render the form in HTML to their blog, and render the post (including the form) to their RSS feed?
Great for the World Cup!

Integrating readers with structured blogging
And in the future, news aggregators and news readers should be able to:
Auto-discover an unknown structure
Notify the user that a new structure is available
Learn the structure, including entry forms, pick list sources, rendering guidance, and default style sheet
Make it available when the blogger is ready to write

Structured blogging using WordPress

Making use of structured blog posts

Why semantic blogging?
Traditional blogging:
Little or no query possibilities (except keyword and flat tags)
Little or no reuse of data (except textual copy and paste)
Little or no linking between posts (except simple hrefs and trackbacks)
Semantic blogging:
Facilitates better querying :
More precise
Allows aggregation from various sources
Better reuse potential
Richer links

Why semantic blogging? (2)
Users collect and create large amounts of structured data on their desktops
This data is often tied to specific applications and locked within the user's computer
Semantic blogging can lift this data into the Web

Releasing your data to the Web scenario Ina John Ina‘s Computer John‘s Computer Blog Post Blog Post Blog Post Blog Post Metadata Metadata Metadata writes Post annotates Post publishes Post reads Post imports metadata Web

Positioning of the metadata
Where in the blog will the semantic metadata go?
Directly in the HTML ?
Validity problems, parsing, restrictions on use of RDF...
Put it in the newsfeed (RSS 1.0)?
Would have to change blogging platforms, hard to get accepted
Newsfeed items disappear over time
Externally?
Just add a link to HTML
á la:
<a type=“application/rdf+xml“ href=“http://bresl.in/foaf/foaf.rdf“>John</a>

How is this related to structured blogging?
Structured blogging is mainly based on “Microformats” (http://www.microformats.org/)
Therefore restricted to specific schemata, not open
Positioned inline on HTML page (and in feed)
Can be directly rendered using CSS
Structured and semantic blogging do not compete
Metadata can be added as RDF and using Microformats
Web-based implementations for generating structured blogging metadata
e.g. for WordPress and Movable Type

Creating the metadata
Structural metadata :
Relations within the blogosphere: what relates to what and how (replies, follow-ups or trackbacks, blogroll links and bookmarks, topics, etc.)?
Closed domain, suggested vocabulary: SIOC
Plugins for blogging platforms, e.g. WordPress, Drupal
Produced automatically from a blog’s database

Creating the metadata (2)
Content related metadata :
What do blog posts talk about (e.g. books, individuals, meetings)?
Keep open domain – so that can use any vocabulary / ontology (BibTeX, FOAF, iCal, ...)
Web-based approach (á la structured blogging) - user fills in an HTML form
Desktop-based approach (á la semiBlog) - user selects existing data on their computer, this gets converted into RDF

Creating a semantic blog post with semiBlog Annotating a blog entry with an address book entry. < foaf:Person rdf:ID="andreas"> < foaf:homepage > http://sw.bla.org/~aharth/</ foaf:homepage > < foaf:surname >Harth</ foaf:surname > < foaf:firstName >Andreas</ foaf:firstName >  < rdf:value >Andreas Harth</ rdf:value > </ foaf:Person >

Using the metadata
Once a blog has semantic metadata, it can be...
Used to query : “Which blog posts talk about papers by Stefan Decker?”
Used to browse across blogs and other kinds of discussion methods:
Imported into desktop applications of blog readers (AKA “The Web as a Clipboard“)

The Web as a clipboard using a suitable reader
A user can import metadata from here into his / her own applications

Structural metadata:
Relations between blogs, posts, comments, etc.
More than just “A links to B“ - what kind of relationship?
Approval? Criticism? Mentions? Is about?
… relations within the blogosphere
Content-related metadata:
What is this post about, what is its topic?
Anything a blog author wishes to discuss
...relations between the blogosphere and everything else
Structural versus content-related

Argumentative discussion topics similar to IBIS

Closed-domain metadata:
The domain is restricted to a certain set of real-world entities or concepts, e.g. blog structure or scientific publications.
Allows the definition of one specific domain ontology (e.g. SIOC)
Open-domain metadata:
The domain is not restricted, e.g. as in blog content
Hard to define one all-embracing ontology, very unwieldy, hard to convince people to use it
Instead divide into closed subdomains , use small, vertical domain ontologies (e.g. FOAF, BibTeX, etc.)
Closed domain versus open domain

Client-side metadata:
Data to be used resides client-side
Implementation can best be realised client-side (e.g. harvesting desktop data with semiBlog )
Server-side metadata:
Data to be used resides server-side
Implementation can best be realised server-side (e.g. harvest WordPress database tables with WordPress SIOC plugin )
Client side versus server side

Describing structure and content

Tagging and the Semantic Web
Tags are powerful but:
Heterogeneity: different tags, one meaning
Ambiguity: one tag, different meanings
Unrelated: may be no relationship between tags
A common semantic for tags and tagging actions:
The “Tag Ontology” by Newman from 2005
tags:Tag rdfs:subClassOf skos:Concept
A “Tagging” class describes relationships between:
A user
An annotated resource
Some tags

Going further with tagging
SCOT (Social Semantic Cloud of Tags):
A model to describe tagclouds (tags and co-occurrence)
Ability to move your own tagcloud from one service to another
Share tagclouds between services, and between users
“ Tag portability”
MOAT (Meaning of a Tag)
A model to define “meanings” of tags using existing URIs
e.g. SPARQL -> http://dbpedia.org/resource/SPARQL
Tagged content enters the “Linked Data” web
Collaborative approach:
Anyone can define a new meaning for a tag
Meanings are shared inside a given community

Problems with traditional wikis
Structured access
Information reuse
JohnGrisham He is the author of PelicanBrief . He lives in Mississippi. He writes a book each year. He is published by RandomHouse .
Structured access:
Other books by JohnGrisham (navigation)
All authors that live in Europe? (query)
Information reuse:
The authors from RandomHouse (views)
And what if I don't speak English? (translation)

What are semantic wikis?
A wiki that has an underlying model of the knowledge described in its pages:
Semantic wikis allow to capture or identify further information about the pages (metadata) and their relations
Knowledge model available in a formal language, so that machines can (at least partially) process and reason on it
A semantic wiki would be able to capture that an "apple" article is a "fruit" (through an inheritance relationship) and present you with further fruits when you look at apple
Some are used for personal knowledge management, others aimed at KM for communities
http://wiki.ontoworld.org/wiki/Swikig
http://www.semwiki.org/

Structural and content metadata in semantic wikis

Information reuse in SemperWiki

Semantic MediaWiki
Semantic MediaWiki is an extension of MediaWiki, the open-source wiki system powering Wikipedia:
Allows users to add structured data to the entries, turning it into a semantic wiki
Users can classify the “type” of links, e.g. making a relationship such as “capital of” between Berlin and Germany explicit:
... [[capital of::Germany]] ... resulting in the semantic statement "Berlin" "capital of" "Germany"
On the page about Berlin, users can explicitly define its population by writing:
... the population is [[population:=3,993,933]] ... resulting in the semantic statement "Berlin" "has population" "3993933"
Currently the most widely-deployed semantic wiki, Semantic MediaWiki is also being used by various organisations, and is being deployed as a service by Centiare and Wikia

10. Conclusions John Breslin

Some examples of where SIOC is already use (about 50 implementations / applications)

A list of some these SIOC implementations
Creating SIOC data
SIOC APIs
SIOC Export API for PHP
SIOC API for Java
Weblog, forum and CMS exporters
WordPress SIOC Exporter
Dotclear SIOC Exporter
b2evolution SIOC Exporter
Drupal SIOC Exporter
phpBB 2.x SIOC Exporter
Triplify
Other exporters
OpenLink DataSpaces
TalkDigger
SWAML
Mailing List Archives
Mailing List Exporter
Twitter2RDF
IRC2RDF
Sioku (Jaiku2RDF)
gnizr
OpenQabal
BlogEngine.NET
Using SIOC data
SPARQL endpoints, querying SIOC data
ODS demo server and MyOpenLink.net
#B4mad.Net SPARQL endpoint
Crawling SIOC data
SIOC Crawler
SIOC Browsers
Buxon
SIOC Explorer
Using SIOC for new data
Fishtank
BAETLE
RDFa on Rails
IkeWiki
int.ere.st
OpenLink Virtuso AMI
Talis Engage
Reusing SIOC data
IKHarvester
notitio.us and JeromeDL
SIOC utilities
Finding and indexing SIOC data
Semantic Radar
PingTheSemanticWeb.com

A vocabulary onion, building on FOAF, SKOS, SIOC, SIOC Types, DC

Disconnected sites on the Social Web / Web 2.0 can be linked using Semantic Web vocabularies

Find people experienced in using SIOC / suggest improvements / participate in SIOC development
The SIOC project page and wiki:
http://sioc-project.org and http://wiki.sioc-project.org
The SIOC W3C member submission:
http://www.w3.org/Submission/2007/02/
A SIOC developer mailing list:
http://groups.google.com/group/sioc-dev
Real-time IRC chat channel about SIOC:
irc://irc.freenode.net/sioc
A comprehensive list of SIOC applications:
http://rdfs.org/sioc/applications/
The SIOC RDF Browser prototype:
http://sparql.captsolo.net/browser/
Semantic Radar extension for Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3886

Contact i nformation / thanks
Alexandre Passant
[email_address]
http://apassant.net/
John Breslin
[email_address]
http://www.johnbreslin.com/
Uldis Boj ā rs
[email_address]
http://captsolo.net/
Thanks to Thomas Schandl, Tuukka Hastrup, Sergio Fernandez for help with slides
The SIOC project is supported by Science Foundation Ireland under grant number SFI/02/CE1/I131

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Interlinking Online Communities and Enriching Social Software with the Semantic Web

by John Breslin

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Interlinking Online Communities and Enriching Social Software with the Semantic Web Presentation Transcript