Semantic Web For Distributed Social Networks

Semantic Web for
Distributed Social
Networks
http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthewfield/

David Peterson
BoaB interactive
http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthewfield/

Semantic Web

• What?
• Hype - Scientiﬁc American 2001
• “... will unleash a revolution of new
possibilities... ”

• Reality - Scientiﬁc American 2007
• “The Semantic Web In Action”

http://www.ﬂickr.com/people/davidsethp/

Shared
Meaning


Information is object &
collection based

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/mcbeth/

Distributed Social Network

• You own the data
• You control access
• You can pull it/change it
• You can delete it
• You can decide what is best
• “YOU”
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/tychay/

Ingredients

• Shared Understanding
• Central Identity
• Global Graph

Shared

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/belmore/

Tagging

• Labelling our stuff
• Now what?
• What does ‘Paris’ and ‘Paris’ *really mean*?

Shared linking != shared
understanding
• technorati tags
• Drupal, Wordpress, Live Writer, etc...
• Creates some sort of emergent meaning,
but still we are just talking about
matching strings of characters :-(

Concept Tagging

• Freebase

microformats to the
rescue

• Organic formation
• Actual meaning is being encoded
• Structure emerges

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/samoube/

Now we are
cooking with
gas... shared
meaning
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/eole/

But wait. What happens
when I want
more...
• hCard
• hCalendar
• hReview
• hListing
• hResume
• XFN
• rel-license
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/jcocinero/

Vocabularies

• Now we can describe anything but what do
we name it?
• Roll your own
• Or better yet, re-use
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/sir_ﬁsh/

Ontologies

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/iskanderstruck/

Ontologies

• Umbrella Ontologies help create strong
and weak ties


Ontologies

and weak ties
• UMBEL


Ontologies

and weak ties
• UMBEL
• Dbpedia


Ontologies

and weak ties
• UMBEL
• Dbpedia
• OpenCyc


• http://www.visuwords.com/search.php

FOAF
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/beija-ﬂor/

FOAF
It’s all about who you know ...
http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/beija-ﬂor/

and who you don’t want to ...

• OpenID
• RDFauth

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/dan_dan/

http://www.ﬂickr.com/people/hotmeteor/

GLOBAL
http://www.ﬂickr.com/people/19877537@N00/

GRAPH
image: Cognitive Science Research Unit - Universite
Libre de Bruxelles

“It's not the
documents, it is
the things they are
about which are
important.
Obvious, really.”

Tim Berners-Lee

http://www.ﬂickr.com/people/tscarlisle/

From the web of documents to the web
of things

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/vardhana/

“If the graph of people
is cool, imagine a graph
of everything”
Dries Buytaert

http://www.ﬂickr.com/people/mk1971/

“the value of your information
grows exponentially with your
ability to combine it with new
information”

– Henry Story, Sun Microsystems

Linked Data

image: Richard Cyganiak - http://dowhatimean.net/

it's all coming together
now

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/m500/

How can we build this thing?

Tools
• Semantic Mediawiki

• Drupal

• Simile Exhibit & Timeline

• D2RQ

• PHP - ARC & Triplify

• .Net - linq2RDF

• Java - Sesame & Elmo

SMW

• Structured data
• Linked data
• SPARQL querying
• Semantic forms
• Semantic maps

Chickipedia is the world's largest web-based,
women-based, wiki-based database of hot chicks
on the planet. It is entirely user generated, making
it the ﬁrst female-only encyclopedia of the
people, by the people, and for the people ext

The Trouble with SMW



• Why not use this as the only thing?



• Permissions, or actually, the lack thereof



• Almost impossible to really lock it down



• lots of hacking and then patching



• lots of hacking and then patching
• and still things come through


Drupal 5
• FOAF
• Neologism

Drupal 5
• FOAF
• Neologism
• RDFCCK

Drupal 5
• FOAF
• Neologism
• RDFCCK
• Open Calais

Drupal 5
• FOAF
• Neologism
• RDFCCK
• Open Calais
• MOAT

The trouble with Drupal 5



• It’s not 6



• It’s not 6
• Weird to-and-fro, confusion



• It’s not 6
• Some modules no longer maintained



• It’s not 6
• Some modules no longer maintained
•A lot of the good stuff is in 6 & 7


Drupal 6


Drupal 6
• Way better than 5


Drupal 6
• RDF API


Drupal 6
• RDF API
• SPARQL


Drupal 6
• RDF API
• SPARQL
• Open Calais


Drupal 6
• RDF API
• SPARQL
• Open Calais
• RDFCCK


Drupal 6
• RDF API
• SPARQL
• Open Calais
• RDFCCK
• Exhibit

The trouble with 6!!

http://www.ﬂickr.com/people/psmithson/

• It is not 5!


• It is not 5!
• Core features are still in RC and beta
stages??? WTF


• It is not 5!
stages??? WTF
• Some important modules are still 5 only


• It is not 5!
stages??? WTF
• Panels, FOAF, MOAT


• It is not 5!
stages??? WTF
• Panels, FOAF, MOAT

• A lot of the good stuff is coming in 7
(sound familiar?)

Why can’t we be
friends...

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/greentea/

SPARQL queries

• Federated / distributed search
• Structured search
• Security via HTTP auth

http://www.ﬂickr.com/photos/girl-inchoate/

RDFa and microformats

• Indexed by Sindice and Search Monkey
• Sindice is the global query engine of the
Structured Web (aka Semantic Web)

Some RDFa users

• Creative Commons
For instance, Creative Commons has recently
started to deploy RDFa across the web in the
form of copyright and licensing information
Every time a Creative Commons user selects

• DIGG
CC license, the generated HTML badge
contains RDFa markup indicating the nature
of the license. The Creative Commons Infobar
uses this data to selectively trigger on pages
that declare their license using structured
markup: DIGG

RDFa

• What does it look like?

• Web links for presentation can be found at
http://davidseth.net/


Semantic Web For Distributed Social Networks

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