Yahoo7 Open Night Semantic Web presentation by Paul White

1. Semantic Web
Paul White

2. Yahoo!7 Proprietary and Confidential

3. The Problems
● Yahoo!7 is known for having great breadth of content, but not depth

4. The Problems
● Content is silo’d across different sites and knowledge domains
● Users get stuck in these property silos

5. The Problems
● Site structure doesn’t allow for natural human browsing patterns
● Visitors browse by content, not type

6. The Tech
● So, what do we use to solve these problems? It’s all about relationships!
● Resource Description Framework (RDF)
○ Basic building block of the Semantic Web
○ Consistent format for representing data
○ Triples: Subject -> Predicate -> Object
Predicate:Portrays
Predicate:Character In

7. The Tech
● RDF Schema
○ Basic data types
○ Classes/Subclasses
○ Property (Predicates)
● Web Ontology Language (OWL)
○ Ontologies - everything else!
○ What is a TV Show
○ What is an Actor
○ What is a Sporting Event
○ What are their relationships?

8. The Tech
● Graphs
Yahoo!7 TV
Portrays
Character In
Winners and Losers
Melbourne Cup Carnival
is a born in
TV Show
Legend
Predicate
Subject / Object
Sporting Event
Social Event
Yahoo!7 Sport
Yahoo!7 Lifestyle
Derby Day Crown Oaks
spouse
Adelaide Matt Kingston
DBPedia
is a
Attended
is a
an event in

9. The Tech
● Storage
● Built specifically for storing and reading graph data
● Stores everything - data, metadata, schemas, ontologies
● Allows for inferencing - e.g.
○ Sporting Event subclassOf Event
○ Melbourne Cup Festival subclassOf Sporting Event
therefore
○ Melbourne Cup Festival subclassOf Event

10. The Tech predicate
● Query Language
● Designed for querying triples
CONSTRUCT { ?Actor portrays ?Character }
WHERE { ?Actor portrays ?Character }
Results in
Melanie Vallejo portrays Sophie Wong ;
Ray Meagher portrays Alf Stewart ;
Hayden Christensen portrays Anakin Skywalker ;
Hayden Christensen portrays Darth Vader .
Legend
?Variable

11. The Tech
● Named Entity Recognition
● Specialised branch of Natural Language Processing
● Generate annotations that link from this thing to that thing
● Two steps
○ Name Recognition
○ Entity Classification

12. The Results
● Show Silos broken down
X-Factor Content Stream - Luke Jacobz Home and Away Content Stream - Luke Jacobz

13. The Results
● Sites are now structured to surface related content

14. The Results
● Automatic Discovery and hyperlinking of Named Entities

15. Questions?