The social semantic web:
 new york times edition
                   John breslin
lecturer at Nui galway
          Engineering and
               informatics
Researcher at Deri, nui galway
Co-founder of Boards.ie
Socialmedia.net editor, owner
Social media
is exploding!


image from tinyurl.com/nuketest
Breakdown of ugc visits
•  .61 = social networks
•  .11 = forums
•  .11 = UG content sites, e.g. UrbanDictionary.com
•  .10 = UG marketplaces, e.g. Craigslist.org
•  .03 = Blogs
•  .01 = UG reviews, e.g. ApartmentRatings.com
•  .01 = Wikis
•  .02 = Other
                 Text from tinyurl.com/briscougc
Sites go up...




           image from tinyurl.com/rocket15
Facebook and twitter
...and sites come down




     image from tinyurl.com/elhell
bebo
It's the social objects we
              create…
• Discussions
• Bookmarks
• Annotations
• Microblogs
• Multimedia
…that connect us
to other people
Social media sites are like data
              silos




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




         image from pidgintech.com
Need ways to connect these
         islands




        image from pidgintech.com
Allowing users to easily move
     from one to another




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




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

              image from tinyurl.com/highway2
Foaf (friend of a friend)
What's foaf?

• An ontology for describing people and the
  relationships that exist between them:
  – foaf-project.org
  – Identity, personal profiles, social networks
  – Can integrate with other SW vocabularies
  – Used on LiveJournal, MyOpera, identi.ca,
    MyBlogLog, hi5, Fotothing, Videntity,
    FriendFeed, Ecademy, Typepad
               image from tinyurl.com/friendship2
Distributed identities with FOAF




            Image by sheila kinsella
FOAF (Friend-of-a-Friend)
FOAF (Friend-of-a-Friend)
Image by dan brickley
SIOC, pronounced shock




     image from tinyurl.com/siocshock
Semantically-Interlinked Online
       Communities (SIOC)
• Goal of the SIOC ontology is to address
   interoperability issues on the Social Web
• sioc-project.org
• SIOC has been adopted in a framework of
   60 applications or modules deployed on
   hundreds of sites
• Web 2.0, enterprise information
   integration, HCLS, e-government
Some of the SIOC core ontology
   classes and properties
Some applications using sioc
From last October




36
RDFA (Sioc, FOAF) in drupal 7
• Drupal is a cms used by various sites:
  – whitehouse.gov, warnerbrosrecords.com,
    uk.sun.com, motogp.com...

• Five Alpha versions of drupal 7 released
   already, semantic web support built-in
  – Release candidate version on its way


               image from tinyurl.com/drupaper
Rdfa on newsweek.com
Rinse, repeat, beautiful hair
Semantic search
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
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
An ontology stack for the social
         semantic web
Distributed
Architecture
(Smob)
Semantic
#hashtags
Stuff that looks exciting




      image from tinyurl.com/fireflames
Facebook open graph
• Allows metadata from external pages to
  be embedded (claimed) within facebook
• E.g. metadata about a restaurant (name,
  location, contacts) could be imported into
  a facebook news feed via a like button
• Good for facebook, good for the semantic
  web? Yes!
OGP in RDF (FOAF, DC, SIOC, GR)
Twitter Annotations
• forthcoming initiative by Twitter:
  – attach arbitrary metadata to any tweet
  – overall limit for the metadata payload
  – May be able to attach RDF-type statements
• Going beyond geotemporal annotations:
  – "type":{"attribute":"value"}
  – "movie":{"title":"avatar"}
              image from tinyurl.com/twannotation
image from knightriderfestival.com




What If your car could tweet
image from tinyurl.com/starshiptr
our new book




               now at amazon.com
Twitter.com
/johnbreslin
Johnbreslin.com




             Slides at www.slideshare.net/cloud

The Social Semantic Web: New York Times Edition