Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Using Semantics to Improve
Corporate Online Communities
Alexandre Passant
Digital Enterprise Research Institute,
National University of Ireland, Galway

COIN@MALLOW - Invited Talk
09/11/2009, Torino, Italy

© Copyright 2009 Digital Enterprise Research Institute. All rights reserved.

Introduction

  Postdoctoral researcher at DERI, NUIG
  Since September 2008
  Research interests
  Social Web and Semantic Web
  Especially the combination of both
  Ph.D. from Université Paris-Sorbonne
  Semantic Web technologies for Enterprise 2.0
  Industrial collaboration with EDF R&D
  The following talk is mainly based on my Ph.D. thesis and
its viva presentation
  More at http://apassant.net

2 of XYZ

Agenda

  Enterprise 2.0 and corporate online communities
  Tools, applications and social implications
  Technical issues with Enterprise 2.0 ecosystems
  Using semantics to improve Enterprise 2.0
  SemSLATES: A social semantic middleware architecture
  Socio-structural metadata
  Collaborative ontology population
  Semantic tagging
  Building new applications
  Questions and discussion

3 of XYZ

Enterprise 2.0

  Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social
software platforms within companies, or between
companies and their partners or customers
  [McAfee, 2006]
  Introduction of well-known services and practices
such as blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, tagging in the
professional sphere
  Serious usages of Web 2.0 applications
  A new Information Ecology
  [Davenport & Prusak, 1997]
  Users and online communities are as important
(sometimes more) than the IT components of such
ecosystems

The SLATES acronym

  Search
  Mainly plain-text or tag-based
  Links
  Internal and external
  Authoring
  Simple user-interfaces (e.g. wiki syntax)
  Tags
  User-driven annotation
  Extensions
  Suggesting relevant content
  Signals
  RSS feeds, microblogging, etc.

Social aspects of Enterprise 2.0

  New paradigms with regards to knowledge sharing
and communication patterns in organisations
  E.g. Anyone can edit / remove content from a senior
researcher in a wiki or publicly disagree with him by
commenting a blog post
  Social aspects are as important as the technical ones
  Breaking the “Knowledge = Power” schema
  “Enterprise 2.0 is a philosophy”
  Success depends on a company’s background
  A study by AIIM showed that 41% of companies do not have
a clear understanding of what Enterprise 2.0 is while this
percentage goes down to 15% in KM-oriented ones

Technical issues of Enterprise 2.0

  Based on our experience within an Enterprise 2.0
platform deployed at EDF R&D
  Information fragmentation
  Knowledge modelling and re-use
  Tagging issues
  Some of these issues are not new per se
  But Enterprise 2.0 strengthens them by providing more
and more data, voluntary published by end-users
  Enterprise 2.0 eases the process of collaboratively
publishing information thanks to and within
corporate online communities
  But efficiently exploiting it is a complex issue

Information fragmentation

  Heterogeneity of people, community, services,
needs and practices leads to various services and
applications being deployed in organisations
  Generally using different APIs, databases structure, etc.
  Information is fragmented over the company’s
network
  E.g. description of a project in a wiki, latest news in blog
posts, partners news in RSS feeds, etc.
  Getting the global picture of a given object (people,
project, etc.) is difficult
  Moreover, data integration is a costly task due to
heterogeneity issues

Knowledge modelling and re-use

  Most of Enterprise 2.0 applications acts as
independent and closed-world data silos and
provide only plain-text information
  Information is not interoperable
  Information is limited to human consumption
  Complex queries cannot be answered, even when
the information exists !
  List all French companies involved in sustainable energies
  How many institutes are part of project X
  List the latest 10 blog posts written by Bob dealing with a
research institute working on Web-based technologies

Tagging issues

  Tag ambiguity
  apple: fruit, computer brand, or record label ?
  Tag heterogeneity
  Semanticweb, semweb, web_semantique, etc.
  Lack of organisation
  No links between the tags SPARQL and RDF, while there is
obviously a link between the two domains
  Leads to various issues when searching for
information
  Noise: content not corresponding to the expected topic
  Silence: non-identified content as searched for using a
different keyword

Tagging and expertise

  Expertise level in corporate online communities
  Based on their individual experience and background,
people have different ways to approach a domain and tag
related content (basic level [Takana & Taylor, 1991])
  Use-case at EDF R&D
  194 items tagged with “TF” (= Thin Film, a particular kind
of solar cell)
–  Only 1% of them tagged with “solar” !
–  < 0.5% of “solar” items tagged “TF”
–  Clustering algorithms cannot be efficiently applied
  Another issue when searching for tagged content
  Valuable information (written and tagged by domain
experts) gets lost as non-expert cannot access it

SemSLATES

  The SemSLATES methodology
  A social semantic middleware architecture for Enterprise 2.0
dedicated to solving the previous issues and bringing
additional and innovative services to end-users
  Middleware
  Add-ons to existing Enterprise 2.0 ecosystems, do not require
to rebuild the complete architecture
  Semantic
  Based on Semantic Web technologies [Berners-Lee et al., 2001]
  Social
  Online communities play a core role in producing and using
structured knowledge

The Semantic Web

SemSLATES overview

Browsing and querying interfaces

Semantic mediation architecture
(Ontologies, semantic annotations)

Enterprise 2.0 information system

Different layers of annotations

Socio-structural
Ontology population Ontologies Semantic indexing
meta-data

Energy Company located in Country

Ontologies and Semantic annotations
is a is a
produces

EDF located in France

has topic

Blog post has link Wiki page 2

has author is part of

AP Wiki A
Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem

hyperlink

Blog post creates Wiki page 2
contains
has tag

EDF Wiki A

Socio-structural metadata

Socio-structural
meta-data


is a is a
produces


has topic



AP Wiki A

hyperlink

contains
has tag

EDF Wiki A

FOAF

  FOAF – Friend-Of-A-Friend
  [Brickley & Miller, 2000]
  http://foaf-project.org
  An ontology for describing people and the
relationships that exist between them
  From online communities to semantically-enriched online
communities
  Particularly suited for social networking purposes
  FOAF in Enterprise 2.0 settings
  Model individuals, teams, relations between both, etc.
  As well as linking people to their interests and skills
  Identity unification across enterprise applications

SIOC

  SIOC - Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities
  [Breslin et al., 2005]
  http://sioc-project.org
  SIOC - Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities
  A model to represent activities of online
communities and the related content
  Who is writing what, who is answering to who
  Relationships between documents (blog posts, wikis
pages) and their container
  One core ontology, several modules
  Published as a W3C Member Submission in 2007

The SIOC Ontology

Producing FOAF and SIOC data

  Automatically generated from existing Enterprise 2.0
applications
  Lots of applications / plug-ins already available
  Completely transparent for the end-user
  Use-case at EDF R&D: > 20000 instances of sioc:Item created

Collaborative ontology population

Socio-structural
meta-data


is a is a
produces


has topic



AP Wiki A

hyperlink

contains
has tag

EDF Wiki A

Defining domain ontologies

  A need to represent particular objects that are
being discussed in corporate online communities
  Industrial domains, projects, agents, etc.
  Domain ontologies are required to represent these entities
  Depend on the use-casebut SemSLATES offers a set
of best practices
  Re-using existing models from the Web (FOAF, SKOS,
geonames …) to benefit from return on experience and
build semantic mash-ups
  Developed several models, combining lightweight ontology
design and knowledge engineering [Masolo & al., 2005]

SKOS skos:Concept

Role Ontology
Geonames rdfs:subClassOf rdfs:subClassOf

geonames:Feature role:Type role:Domain

rdf:type
rdf:type rdf:type
rdf:type http://
sws.geonames.org/
3017382/

athena:Producteur rdf:type athena:EnergieNucleaire
geonames:parentFeature
role:hasDomain
http:// geonames:locatedIn role:hasType
sws.geonames.org/ skos:broader Ontologies
2988507/

athena:Constructeur
athena:Role1 athena:CentraleNucleaire
Base de
connaissances
geonames:locatedIn
role:hasType role:hasDomain

role:hasRole
athena:Role2
role:hasRole
athena:PierreGadonneix foaf:member athena:EDF
partenariat:hasDomain

partenariat:hasMember
athena:Areva athena:part1
rdf:type rdf:type
rdf:type rdf:type

foaf:Person foafplus:Company

partenariat:Partenariat
rdfs:subClassOf rdfs:subClassOf
FOAFplus

foaf:Agent Partenariat

FOAF

Ontology population

  Once the ontologies are provided, the related
knowledge base(s) must be created and maintained
  Usual applications for ontology population are dedicated
to advanced users; not suitable in many contexts
  Our approach: Semantic Wikis
  Using online communities and wiki philosophy to build
and maintain structured knowledge bases
  An open, collaborative and evolutive vision of
ontology population
  No technical nor knowledge engineering skills required
  Anyone can contribute

From wikis to structured knowledge

hyperlink is a Enterprise
EDF
France

Ontologies and
Documents EDF Country
produces instances
located in
Energy
is a
hyperlink
Energy
France

Wiki Semantic wiki

UfoWiki

  Various semantic wikis prototypes dedicate to
ontology population available as open-source apps
  However, none fulfilled all our requirements, especially in
terms of user-friendliness (i.e. not dedicated to SW-people)
  UfoWiki
  Ontology-based information modeling
  Simple form-based user-interfaces
  Modeling both domain and structure metadata
  Immediately using created knowledge
  Using public data to improve browsing interfaces
  About 25 users, > 350 instances collaboratively maintained

Maintaining ontology instances

Simple
autocomplete
ﬁeld

Complex
instance ﬁeld

Semantic tagging

Socio-structural
meta-data


is a is a
produces


has topic



AP Wiki A

hyperlink

contains
has tag

EDF Wiki A

MOAT

  MOAT – Meaning Of A Tag [Passant & Laublet, 2008]
  http://moat-project.org
  Using ontologies to support free-tagging activities
  Using Semantic Web resources (from internal knowledge bases
and from the Web) to represent the meaning of tags
  From free-tagging to ontology-based semantic indexing
  A model and a framework
  A model to link each tag to its local and global meaning(s)
  A framework to collaboratively manage these meanings in
online communities
  1176 tags linked to 715 resources, 39 URIs w > 4 related tags!

MOAT: Example data

tag:RestrictedTagging
http://example.org/tag/
apple
rdf:type tag:associatedTag

http://example.org/
tagging1

tag:taggedBy tag:taggedResource Tag Ontology

moat:tagMeaning

http://example.org/ http://dbpedia.org/
post/1 resource/Apple_Inc.

foaf:maker dct:title

rdf:type MOAT + DBpedia
http://apassant.net/alex/ Nouvel iPhone
disponible

sioct:BlogPost
FOAF

SIOC + DC

MOAT: Framework

User creates content and tag it Client queries the MOAT server

<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple> Server returns the set
for global meaning URIs
User chooses local meaning URI <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple_Inc.>
<http://example.org/id/myappleresource>

tags:associatedTag
User saves the content
http://example.org/ http://example.org/tag/
tagging1 apple

moat:tagMeaning

Content enters
tags:taggedResource http://dbpedia/org/resource/
the Web of Data Apple_Inc.
tags:taggedBy
http://example.org/
post/1
http://apassant.net/alex

Building new applications

  Use all the annotations
created from different tools
Browsing and querying interfaces
  Blogs, wikis, RSS feeds …
  Combine ontologies, socio-
structural metadata and
knowledge bases Semantic mediation architecture
(Ontologies, semantic annotations)
  For advanced querying
capabilities
  Hide the complexity of tools
to the end-users
  So that everyone can benefit
from it Enterprise 2.0 information system

UfoWiki macros

  Embedding SPARQL query results in wiki pages
without the complexity of such queries
  Mapping between macro syntax and SPARQL (inspired by
Semantic MediaWiki)
  E.g. [onto|members] to list all members of a company
  Taking context into account
  E.g. Listing related blog posts from a wiki page (via MOAT)
  Support a subset of RDFS inference
  E.g. Listing enterprise and research institutes when asking
for organisations in general
  Different ways of browsing the results
  XHTML snippets, Geolocation, Faceted browsing

Semantic mashups

  Re-using RDF data from the LOD cloud internally
  Low-cost Semantic mash-ups
  E.g. Geolocation of internal wiki data using Geonames

Semantic Search

  Solving the information fragmentation issue
  Delivering all information about a particular object in a
single page
  Using different level of annotations
  Hiding RDF(S)/OWL and SPARQL to the users

Solving the Expertise Gap

  Defining rules to extend information retrieval by
suggesting nearest entities for a given search
  Solving the issues of free-tagging related to heterogeneous
expertise levels in online communities
Ontologies

skos:Concept sioc:Post foaf:Person

rdf:type rdf:type rdf:type

athena:Solaire moat:taggedWith :post1 foaf:maker :NonExpert

Non-expert level
skos:broader

athena:TF moat:taggedWith :post2 foaf:maker ::Expert

Expert level

Conclusion

  Enterprise 2.0 enables interactions in corporate
online communities and ease content-generation
  But introduces new issues / emphasizes existing ones
  Semantic Web technologies can help
  Various ontologies for distinct levels of representation
  Lightweight software add-ons for semantic annotations
  New applications can be build on the top of it
  Consuming RDF(S)/OWL data to solve the initial issues
  And bring new services to online communities
  Some more challenges need to be solved …
  Trust, context-awarness, privacy, etc.

Thank you !

  Questions and discussion

  Contact
  alexandre.passant@deri.org
  http://apassant.net (blog, papers, etc.)

Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

What's hot

What's hot (20)

Viewers also liked

Viewers also liked (20)

Similar to Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Similar to Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities (20)

More from Alexandre Passant

More from Alexandre Passant (15)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities