The document discusses using semantic web technologies like SIOC and FOAF to help journalists integrate user-generated social media content into news stories. It describes how these ontologies can connect disparate online communities and metadata to aid in navigating, verifying, and reusing social data. The project aims to explore customizing SIOC for journalism and extending vocabularies like Schema.org to semantically enrich social content for news gathering and reporting.

1. Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Towards Social Semantic Journalism
Bahareh R. Heravi, Marie Boran, John Breslin
{Bahareh.Heravi, M.Boran, John.Breslin}@deri.org
Workshop on the Potential of Social Media
Tools and Data in the News Media Industry (SocMedNews)
ICWSM 2012 – June 2012, Dublin
Copyright 2011 Digital Enterprise Research Institute. All rights reserved.
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2. About DERI
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
 Largest Semantic Web research centre in the world
 Number one in its core space
 Research Publications > 950
 Participate in 17 standardisation groups (W3C, OASIS)
 Approx 140 members from 30 nations
 Founded June 2003
 Link scientists and engineers / academia and industry
 Fundamental research
 Development of Irish-based technology companies
 Attract industry
 Education & outreach
 Total Research Grants: >€60 million
 SFI, EU Framework, Enterprise Ireland, Industry
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3. Journalism
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
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4. Traditional Journalism
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
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5. Everything is getting Social
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
 User Generated Content is
changing the way news
stories are produced.
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6. Journalism Today
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
 The audience - citizen
journalists - are now a readily
available source of news.
 The UGC comes from variety
of Social Web sources, e.g.
Twitter, Facebook, Google+,
Flickr, YouTube, blogs, etc.
 Vast amount of the UGC could
be produced in the event of a
breaking news.
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7. UGC
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
 The UGC is even more important
when broadcasters have to rely
mostly on the Social Web as
journalists are restricted to work in
certain countries or where there is
a danger for them.
 The UGC producers would have to
spend a considerable amount of
time searching, compiling and
verifying the material received on  Speed is a killer when
the Social Web. there is a breaking news!
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8. Sources to be processed
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
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9. Challenges
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
 Navigation of data: platforms are not connected and
communities are often disparate.
 The manual process of checking through UGC is overwhelming
and inadequate.
 This information lacks exchangeable semantics and thus
is not as usable as it can be for creating trustworthy
news stories.
 Vetting process.
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10. Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
The Social Semantic web
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11. We need a way to connect these islands
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Semantic Web
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12. Semantic Web
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
 The WEB is a network of interlinked Documents
accessed via the Internet.
 Hyperlinks connect these documents
 The SEMANTIC WEB is an extension of the current
Web, which is about interlinking THINGS.
Current Web vs. Semantic Web
Unstructured Data Structured Data
Web of Documents Web of Data
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13. Aims of the Semantic Web
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
 Bridging the gap between a Web of Documents to a
Web of Data, with typed objects and typed relationships.
 Adding machine-readable metadata to existing content,
so that information can be parsed, queried and reused.
 Defining shared semantics for this metadata to allow
interoperability between applications.
 Enabling machine-readable knowledge at Web scale,
making information more easy to find and process.
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14. Social Semantic Web
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Bringing the Social web to
its full potential
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15. Semantic Interlinking Of
Digital Enterprise Research Institute
Online Community Sites www.deri.ie
 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
 Just won the 7-year impact award at Extended Semantic
Web Conference 2012.
 http://sioc-project.org
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16. SIOC
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
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16

17. Friend Of A Friend
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
 An ontology for describing people and the relationships
that exist between them:
 Identity, personal profiles and social networks
 http://foaf-project.org/
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18. SIOC + FOAF
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
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19. Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Social Semantic Journalism
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20. Social Semantic Journalism
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
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21. Focus of the project
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
 Exploring the ways in which Semantic Web technologies
and ontologies, such as SIOC and FOAF, in conjunction
with news representation standards, such as rNews,
could assist in the process of interlinking online user
communities and the UGC for news gathering and
verification.
 Considers extending/customising SIOC for its utilisation
in journalism and the news industry.
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22. Relevant Vocabularies and
Digital Enterprise Research Institute
Initiatives www.deri.ie
 BBC Programmes Ontology
 Press.Net News Ontology
 rNews
 Schema.org
 …
 NewsWhip
 Storyful
 Storify
 …
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23. Future Research
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
 Literature review on the current utilisation of the Social Web within
the news industry.
 Literature review on the ways in which Semantic Web technologies
have been implemented within the news industry.
 Evaluating existing relevant ontologies and data standards within a
journalistic context.
 Determining what existing Semantic Web tools can be integrated
into this project.
 Defining a set of contextual factors for assessing trust levels.
 Proposing a standard for integration and display of semantically
enriched social media content.
 Integration with Schema.org
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24. Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Thank you
Bahareh R. Heravi
Bahareh.Heravi@deri.org
@Bahareh360
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