Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities Alexandre Passant Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway COIN@MALLOW - Invited Talk 09/11/2009, Torino, Italy © Copyright 2009 Digital Enterprise Research Institute. All rights reserved.

Introduction Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Postdoctoral researcher at DERI, NUIG   Since September 2008   Research interests   Social Web and Semantic Web   Especially the combination of both   Ph.D. from Université Paris-Sorbonne   Semantic Web technologies for Enterprise 2.0   Industrial collaboration with EDF R&D   The following talk is mainly based on my Ph.D. thesis and its viva presentation   More at http://apassant.net 2 of XYZ

Agenda Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Enterprise 2.0 and corporate online communities   Tools, applications and social implications   Technical issues with Enterprise 2.0 ecosystems   Using semantics to improve Enterprise 2.0   SemSLATES: A social semantic middleware architecture   Socio-structural metadata   Collaborative ontology population   Semantic tagging   Building new applications   Questions and discussion 3 of XYZ

Enterprise 2.0 Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers   [McAfee, 2006]   Introduction of well-known services and practices such as blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, tagging in the professional sphere   Serious usages of Web 2.0 applications   A new Information Ecology   [Davenport & Prusak, 1997]   Users and online communities are as important (sometimes more) than the IT components of such ecosystems

The SLATES acronym Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Search   Mainly plain-text or tag-based   Links   Internal and external   Authoring   Simple user-interfaces (e.g. wiki syntax)   Tags   User-driven annotation   Extensions   Suggesting relevant content   Signals   RSS feeds, microblogging, etc.

Social aspects of Enterprise 2.0 Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   New paradigms with regards to knowledge sharing and communication patterns in organisations   E.g. Anyone can edit / remove content from a senior researcher in a wiki or publicly disagree with him by commenting a blog post   Social aspects are as important as the technical ones   Breaking the “Knowledge = Power” schema   “Enterprise 2.0 is a philosophy”   Success depends on a company’s background   A study by AIIM showed that 41% of companies do not have a clear understanding of what Enterprise 2.0 is while this percentage goes down to 15% in KM-oriented ones

Technical issues of Enterprise 2.0 Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Based on our experience within an Enterprise 2.0 platform deployed at EDF R&D   Information fragmentation   Knowledge modelling and re-use   Tagging issues   Some of these issues are not new per se   But Enterprise 2.0 strengthens them by providing more and more data, voluntary published by end-users   Enterprise 2.0 eases the process of collaboratively publishing information thanks to and within corporate online communities   But efficiently exploiting it is a complex issue

Information fragmentation Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Heterogeneity of people, community, services, needs and practices leads to various services and applications being deployed in organisations   Generally using different APIs, databases structure, etc.   Information is fragmented over the company’s network   E.g. description of a project in a wiki, latest news in blog posts, partners news in RSS feeds, etc.   Getting the global picture of a given object (people, project, etc.) is difficult   Moreover, data integration is a costly task due to heterogeneity issues

Knowledge modelling and re-use Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Most of Enterprise 2.0 applications acts as independent and closed-world data silos and provide only plain-text information   Information is not interoperable   Information is limited to human consumption   Complex queries cannot be answered, even when the information exists !   List all French companies involved in sustainable energies   How many institutes are part of project X   List the latest 10 blog posts written by Bob dealing with a research institute working on Web-based technologies

Tagging issues Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Tag ambiguity   apple: fruit, computer brand, or record label ?   Tag heterogeneity   Semanticweb, semweb, web_semantique, etc.   Lack of organisation   No links between the tags SPARQL and RDF, while there is obviously a link between the two domains   Leads to various issues when searching for information   Noise: content not corresponding to the expected topic   Silence: non-identified content as searched for using a different keyword

Tagging and expertise Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Expertise level in corporate online communities   Based on their individual experience and background, people have different ways to approach a domain and tag related content (basic level [Takana & Taylor, 1991])   Use-case at EDF R&D   194 items tagged with “TF” (= Thin Film, a particular kind of solar cell) –  Only 1% of them tagged with “solar” ! –  < 0.5% of “solar” items tagged “TF” –  Clustering algorithms cannot be efficiently applied   Another issue when searching for tagged content   Valuable information (written and tagged by domain experts) gets lost as non-expert cannot access it

SemSLATES Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   The SemSLATES methodology   A social semantic middleware architecture for Enterprise 2.0 dedicated to solving the previous issues and bringing additional and innovative services to end-users   Middleware   Add-ons to existing Enterprise 2.0 ecosystems, do not require to rebuild the complete architecture   Semantic   Based on Semantic Web technologies [Berners-Lee et al., 2001]   Social   Online communities play a core role in producing and using structured knowledge

The Semantic Web Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

SemSLATES overview Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie Browsing and querying interfaces Semantic mediation architecture (Ontologies, semantic annotations) Enterprise 2.0 information system

Different layers of annotations Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie Socio-structural Ontology population Ontologies Semantic indexing meta-data Energy Company located in Country Ontologies and Semantic annotations is a is a produces EDF located in France has topic Blog post has link Wiki page 2 has author is part of AP Wiki A Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem hyperlink Blog post creates Wiki page 2 contains has tag EDF Wiki A

Socio-structural metadata Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie Socio-structural Ontology population Ontologies Semantic indexing meta-data Energy Company located in Country Ontologies and Semantic annotations is a is a produces EDF located in France has topic Blog post has link Wiki page 2 has author is part of AP Wiki A Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem hyperlink Blog post creates Wiki page 2 contains has tag EDF Wiki A

FOAF Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   FOAF – Friend-Of-A-Friend   [Brickley & Miller, 2000]   http://foaf-project.org   An ontology for describing people and the relationships that exist between them   From online communities to semantically-enriched online communities   Particularly suited for social networking purposes   FOAF in Enterprise 2.0 settings   Model individuals, teams, relations between both, etc.   As well as linking people to their interests and skills   Identity unification across enterprise applications

SIOC Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   SIOC - Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities   [Breslin et al., 2005]   http://sioc-project.org   SIOC - Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities   A model to represent activities of online communities and the related content   Who is writing what, who is answering to who   Relationships between documents (blog posts, wikis pages) and their container   One core ontology, several modules   Published as a W3C Member Submission in 2007

The SIOC Ontology Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Producing FOAF and SIOC data Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Automatically generated from existing Enterprise 2.0 applications   Lots of applications / plug-ins already available   Completely transparent for the end-user   Use-case at EDF R&D: > 20000 instances of sioc:Item created

Collaborative ontology population Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie Socio-structural Ontology population Ontologies Semantic indexing meta-data Energy Company located in Country Ontologies and Semantic annotations is a is a produces EDF located in France has topic Blog post has link Wiki page 2 has author is part of AP Wiki A Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem hyperlink Blog post creates Wiki page 2 contains has tag EDF Wiki A

Defining domain ontologies Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   A need to represent particular objects that are being discussed in corporate online communities   Industrial domains, projects, agents, etc.   Domain ontologies are required to represent these entities   Depend on the use-casebut SemSLATES offers a set of best practices   Re-using existing models from the Web (FOAF, SKOS, geonames …) to benefit from return on experience and build semantic mash-ups   Use-case at EDF R&D   Developed several models, combining lightweight ontology design and knowledge engineering [Masolo & al., 2005]

SKOS skos:Concept Role Ontology Geonames rdfs:subClassOf rdfs:subClassOf Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie geonames:Feature role:Type role:Domain rdf:type rdf:type rdf:type rdf:type http:// sws.geonames.org/ 3017382/ athena:Producteur rdf:type athena:EnergieNucleaire geonames:parentFeature role:hasDomain http:// geonames:locatedIn role:hasType sws.geonames.org/ skos:broader Ontologies 2988507/ athena:Constructeur athena:Role1 athena:CentraleNucleaire Base de connaissances geonames:locatedIn role:hasType role:hasDomain role:hasRole athena:Role2 role:hasRole athena:PierreGadonneix foaf:member athena:EDF partenariat:hasDomain partenariat:hasMember athena:Areva athena:part1 rdf:type rdf:type rdf:type rdf:type foaf:Person foafplus:Company partenariat:Partenariat rdfs:subClassOf rdfs:subClassOf FOAFplus foaf:Agent Partenariat FOAF

Ontology population Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Once the ontologies are provided, the related knowledge base(s) must be created and maintained   Usual applications for ontology population are dedicated to advanced users; not suitable in many contexts   Our approach: Semantic Wikis   Using online communities and wiki philosophy to build and maintain structured knowledge bases   An open, collaborative and evolutive vision of ontology population   No technical nor knowledge engineering skills required   Anyone can contribute

From wikis to structured knowledge Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie hyperlink is a Enterprise EDF France Ontologies and Documents EDF Country produces instances located in Energy is a hyperlink Energy France Wiki Semantic wiki

UfoWiki Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Various semantic wikis prototypes dedicate to ontology population available as open-source apps   However, none fulfilled all our requirements, especially in terms of user-friendliness (i.e. not dedicated to SW-people)   UfoWiki   Ontology-based information modeling   Simple form-based user-interfaces   Modeling both domain and structure metadata   Immediately using created knowledge   Using public data to improve browsing interfaces   Use-case at EDF R&D   About 25 users, > 350 instances collaboratively maintained

Maintaining ontology instances Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie Simple autocomplete ﬁeld Complex instance ﬁeld

Semantic tagging Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie Socio-structural Ontology population Ontologies Semantic indexing meta-data Energy Company located in Country Ontologies and Semantic annotations is a is a produces EDF located in France has topic Blog post has link Wiki page 2 has author is part of AP Wiki A Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem hyperlink Blog post creates Wiki page 2 contains has tag EDF Wiki A

MOAT Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   MOAT – Meaning Of A Tag [Passant & Laublet, 2008]   http://moat-project.org   Using ontologies to support free-tagging activities   Using Semantic Web resources (from internal knowledge bases and from the Web) to represent the meaning of tags   From free-tagging to ontology-based semantic indexing   A model and a framework   A model to link each tag to its local and global meaning(s)   A framework to collaboratively manage these meanings in online communities   Use-case at EDF R&D   1176 tags linked to 715 resources, 39 URIs w > 4 related tags!

MOAT: Example data Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie tag:RestrictedTagging http://example.org/tag/ apple rdf:type tag:associatedTag http://example.org/ tagging1 tag:taggedBy tag:taggedResource Tag Ontology moat:tagMeaning http://example.org/ http://dbpedia.org/ post/1 resource/Apple_Inc. foaf:maker dct:title rdf:type MOAT + DBpedia http://apassant.net/alex/ Nouvel iPhone disponible sioct:BlogPost FOAF SIOC + DC

MOAT: Framework Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie User creates content and tag it Client queries the MOAT server <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple> Server returns the set for global meaning URIs User chooses local meaning URI <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple_Inc.> <http://example.org/id/myappleresource> tags:associatedTag User saves the content http://example.org/ http://example.org/tag/ tagging1 apple moat:tagMeaning Content enters tags:taggedResource http://dbpedia/org/resource/ the Web of Data Apple_Inc. tags:taggedBy http://example.org/ post/1 http://apassant.net/alex

Building new applications Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Use all the annotations created from different tools Browsing and querying interfaces   Blogs, wikis, RSS feeds …   Combine ontologies, socio- structural metadata and knowledge bases Semantic mediation architecture (Ontologies, semantic annotations)   For advanced querying capabilities   Hide the complexity of tools to the end-users   So that everyone can benefit from it Enterprise 2.0 information system

UfoWiki macros Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Embedding SPARQL query results in wiki pages without the complexity of such queries   Mapping between macro syntax and SPARQL (inspired by Semantic MediaWiki)   E.g. [onto|members] to list all members of a company   Taking context into account   E.g. Listing related blog posts from a wiki page (via MOAT)   Support a subset of RDFS inference   E.g. Listing enterprise and research institutes when asking for organisations in general   Different ways of browsing the results   XHTML snippets, Geolocation, Faceted browsing

Semantic mashups Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Re-using RDF data from the LOD cloud internally   Low-cost Semantic mash-ups   E.g. Geolocation of internal wiki data using Geonames

Semantic Search Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Solving the information fragmentation issue   Delivering all information about a particular object in a single page   Using different level of annotations   Hiding RDF(S)/OWL and SPARQL to the users

Solving the Expertise Gap Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Defining rules to extend information retrieval by suggesting nearest entities for a given search   Solving the issues of free-tagging related to heterogeneous expertise levels in online communities Ontologies skos:Concept sioc:Post foaf:Person rdf:type rdf:type rdf:type athena:Solaire moat:taggedWith :post1 foaf:maker :NonExpert Non-expert level skos:broader athena:TF moat:taggedWith :post2 foaf:maker ::Expert Expert level

Conclusion Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Enterprise 2.0 enables interactions in corporate online communities and ease content-generation   But introduces new issues / emphasizes existing ones   Semantic Web technologies can help   Various ontologies for distinct levels of representation   Lightweight software add-ons for semantic annotations   New applications can be build on the top of it   Consuming RDF(S)/OWL data to solve the initial issues   And bring new services to online communities   Some more challenges need to be solved …   Trust, context-awarness, privacy, etc.

Thank you ! Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie   Questions and discussion   Contact   alexandre.passant@deri.org   http://apassant.net (blog, papers, etc.)

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Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

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