John Breslin is a lecturer and researcher at NUI Galway, known for founding Ireland’s largest discussion forum, boards.ie, and the SIOC project for semantically-interlinked online communities. His work focuses on enhancing interoperability on the social web using semantic technologies, exemplified by tools like FOAF and the SIOC ontology. Breslin emphasizes the importance of 'object-centered sociality' in connecting users through shared interests and addresses challenges of information overload through innovative applications across social platforms.

1. John Breslin
National University of Ireland, Galway
@johnbreslin / johnbreslin.com

2. Lecturer at NUI Galway
College of Engineering and
Informatics

3. • Researcher at DERI, NUI Galway

4. Social, semantics and me

5. 1990/1991: VAX/VMS
“MAP.COM”

6. VMS BULLETIN redux

7. 1998: Set up a gaming forum
2000: Co-founded boards.ie from this
• Ireland’s largest
discussion forum site
• 2.25 million
visitors/month (~40%
of Irish population)
• Irish people seeking
information, or just
chatting about sports,
TV, politics, health,
whatever

8. Via Kerstin
xkcd.com/802

9. 2004: Joined DERI, founded the SIOC
project
• Semantically-
Interlinked Online
Communities
• Enables
interoperability and
exchange of social
content:
– Blogs, forums, wikis...

10. 2011: Co-founder of StreamGlider, Inc.
• Real-time streaming
newsreader
• Supports social,
multimedia, news
• Can be used as an
enterprise dashboard
• With Nova Spivack
and Bill McDaniel

11. Social platforms are like data silos
image from pidgintech.com

12. Many isolated communities of users and
their data
image from pidgintech.com

13. Need ways to connect these islands
image from pidgintech.com

14. Allowing users to easily travel from one to
another
image from pidgintech.com

15. Enabling users to easily bring their data with
them
image from pidgintech.com

16. Object-centred sociality (AKA social
objects)
• Users are connected via a common object:
– Their job, university, hobbies, interests, a date…
• “According to this theory, people don’t just connect to
each other. They connect through a shared object.
[…]Good services allow people to create social objects
that add value.” – JyriEngestrom
– Flickr = photos
– del.icio.us = bookmarks
– Blogs = discussion posts

17. It’s the social objects we create…
• Discussions
• Bookmarks
• Annotations
• Profiles
• Microblogs
• Multimedia

18. …that connect us
to other people

19. Semantics

21. image from richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/lod-datasets_2011-09-19_colored.png

22. Social semantic representation
models
Using ontologies to model social data

23. Two-way street: the Semantic Web can help
social spaces, vice versa
• Can use the Semantic Web to describe people, content
objects and the connections that bind them all together
so that social spaces can interoperate via semantics
• In the other direction, object-centered social spaces can
serve as rich social data sources for semantic
applications
image from tinyurl.com/highway2

24. The Social Semantic Web

25. FOAF
Friend Of A Friend

26. What is FOAF?
• An ontology for describing people and the relationships
that exist between them:
– http://foaf-project.org/
– Identity, personal profiles and social networks
– Can be integrated with other SW vocabularies
• FOAF on the Web:
– LiveJournal, MyOpera, identi.ca, MyBlogLog, hi5,
Fotothing, Videntity, FriendFeed, Ecademy, Typepad

27. FOAF at a glance

28. Distributed identity with FOAF

30. SIOC, pronounced shock
image from tinyurl.com/siocshock

31. Semantically-Interlinked Online
Communities (SIOC)
• Goal of the SIOC ontology is to address interoperability
issues on the Social Web
– sioc-project.org
– W3C member submission in 2007
– SIOC has been adopted in a framework of applications
or modules deployed on hundreds of sites
– Web 2.0, enterprise information integration, HCLS, e-
government
image from tinyurl.com/friendship2

33. Some of the SIOC core ontology classes
and properties

35. Some applications using SIOC

36. RDFa on newsweek.com

37. RDFa in Drupal 7
• Drupal CMS used by 2% of all sites (7% of CMS)
– 24% of .gov sites
• Drupal 7 release has Semantic Web support built-in
• RDFa (SIOC, FOAF, Dublin Core, SKOS) data for blog
posts, forums, etc.
• Video at www.semantic-drupal.com
image from tinyurl.com/drupaper

40. SIOC can be used to...
• ...provide a layer of rdfa metadata from a social website,
e.g. to enhance search results>> superceded by
schema.org?
• ...get a complete representation/XML dump of a social
website (export, import)
• ...be a native format for social websites
• ...do other stuff; just imagine!
image from tinyurl.com/orionw

41. How much SSW data is out there?
images (this one and later backgrounds) from publicdomainpictures.net

42. CommonCrawl
• Muehleisen and Bizer • Results published on
– LDOW @ WWW 2012 Monday 2 July 2012
• 1.5 billion web pages at:
• 3 billion RDF quads • webdatacommons.org
/vocabulary-usage-
• SIOC available from analysis/index.html
at least 22k PLDs
(pay-level domains)
• FOAF on 27k PLDs

44. We have made all this SSW data,
now let us dream about build the
useful applications!

45. Make a giant brain(-storm!)
• Distributed conversation navigator
• Comment search engine for the A in Q&A
• Expert finding applications galore
...
– Be cognisant of the huge growth in Social Semantic
Web data being provided by the adopters of
schema.org and its new terms

46. OPO (online presence ontology)
• Aims to unify presence information and status
notification processes across different services:
– Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc.
• Help solve the information overload issue at the same
time, by providing a means to identify who / which
community the information should reach: sharing
spaces

47. MOAT (meaning of a tag)
• moat-project.org
• A model to define "meanings" of tags
– SPARQL →dbpedia.org/resource/SPARQL
• User-driven interlinking
• Tagged content enters Linked Data web
• Collaborative approach towards the sharing of
meanings in a community
image from tinyurl.com/whichapple

48. An ontology stack for the Social Semantic
Web

50. Use case: Boeing inSite

51. Summary
• Object-centred sociality refers to how we really use
social spaces:
– Can use semantics to describe this usage, by
representing objects for linkage and reuse
• Describe people, networks, content, presence,
knowledge, tags, etc. with semantics
• Providing solutions for novel uses on the public Web
and in enterprise intranets

52. image from tinyurl.com/starshiptr

53. Our book…
…at Amazon.com
Slides at www.slideshare.net/Cloud