social semantic (sensor) web

Social Semantic (Sensor) Web

David Crowleydavid.crowley@deri.org

david.crowley@nuigalway.ie

About me!• Mechanical & Electronic Engineering (Cert)

• Mathematics & Information Technology (BA)

• Interactive Media (MSc) • Google Android Project• Implementing Sensor controlled applications

Currently

• PhD Candidate/Researcher

• NUI Galway– Electrical & Electronic Engineering

• Bio-Electronics (Sensors)

– DERI – Digital Enterprise Research Institute• USS – Social Software Unit

Social Web

The Social Webis exploding!

image from tinyurl.com/nuketest

Sites go up...

image from tinyurl.com/rocket15

...and sites come down

image from tinyurl.com/elhell

Semantic Web

The Web = The Internet + links + documents

orThe Web = The Internet + http + html

Image from - http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/s5/linked-data/s5.html

Current Web

• HTTP protocol is used for accessing and exchanging web data

• HTML language is used for creating web pages

• Machines can read the language

• But they don’t “understand” the content

People and the Web

• But people aren’t interested in documents!• People are interested in things (objects)

• People can extract knowledge from web pages• Machines can’t!

• So we need a way to help machines help us!

The Web as we know it…is not the Web that Tim

Berners Lee wanted

Social Machines

“Computers can help if we use them to create abstract social machines on the Web : processes in which the people do the creative work and the machine does the administration…”

Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, 1999

Semantic Web

• The idea of the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a web of data

• Tim Berners Lee defines the Semantic Web as "a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines."

Technologies - RDF

• RDF – Resource Description Language– Triples– Subject, Predicate, Object,

• “Stefan works at DERI”– Stefan – Subject – Works at – Predicate – DERI - Object

URI

• But Stefan can be described by a URIhttp://www.deri.ie/fileadmin/scripts/foaf.php?id=12• And DERI can be described by it’s homepagehttp://www.deri.ie• So we can rewrite it in English as http://www.deri.ie/fileadmin/scripts/foaf.php?id=12 works at http://www.deri.org/

SPARQL

• SPARQL - SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language

• Think of it as SQL for RDF

• But because RDF data is more “expressive” – SPARQL allows for more complicated queries

• Give me all artists signed to Elektra Records that are from the genre Rock

Ontologies

• Ontology define the terms used to describe and represent an area of interest– Concepts (classes)– Relationships (subclasses)– Properties (attributes)

• FOAF– Friend of a Friend• SIOC – Semantically Interlinked Online Communities• DC – Dublin Core• SSN – Semantic Sensor Network

Ontologies

• Ontologies are used to describe certain areas of interest

• For example FOAF – describes relationships between people

• SIOC – Describes groups and creates interoperability between blogs/forums/social networks

• SSN ontology describes sensor stations/sensor nodes and their sensing capabilities

Linked Data

• Linked Data is about using the Web to connect related data that wasn't previously linked

• Without Linked Data there is no Web of Data• For example - DBPedia – is a Linked Data

version of Wikipedia which recreates the data on Wikipedia and linked it to other data sources (Geonames)

Is publishing data enough?

http://lab.linkeddata.deri.ie/2010/star-scheme-by-example/

The LOD cloud

2008

2007

The LOD cloud

2009

2008

“Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. http://lod-cloud.net/”

Predicting the Future

Social Semantic Web

Social Semantic (Sensor) Web

“In the next century, planet earth will don an electronic skin. It will use the Internet as a scaffold to support and transmit its sensations.”

– Neil Gross, Bloomberg Business Week, 1999

And this skin contains

Sensors

Sensors, Sensors everywhere

• Embedded in our homes• Cars• Work places• Weather stations• Laptops• Tablets• Smartphones• People!

Sensor Networks

• Generally– Hard to build, – Hard to maintain– Distance issues– Network issues– Data issues

But we have lots of these…

And these..

Citizen Sensing

• Networks of Humans with Sensors• Humans process data (a positive and a

negative)• Sensor nodes generally do not process data

• But using mobile devices’ sensors we can add an additional layer to human in the loop sensing

Semantic Sensing

• Describing Sensors with Semantic Technologies

• SSN Ontology and adding reasoning on top of that

• For example – if light temperature is reading low light levels and the humidity sensor is reading high humidity then rain is likely!

Annotating Sensor data to Social web posts!

• Define a standard way for attaching mobile sensor data to social web content

• Twitter Annotations

• Extend SIOC ontology and align with SSN Ontology

Why?

• Natural Disaster Management• Traffic Reporting Applications• All kinds of crowdsourcing applications• Crowdsourcing, citizen sensing and sensor

web technologies for public and environmental health surveillance and crisis management: trends, OGC standards and application examples - http://www.ij-healthgeographics.com/content/10/1/67/abstract

References

• Hand drawn slide used with permission of John Breslin - http://www.slideshare.net/Cloud/the-social-semantic-web-1328494

• Other slides from John Breslin’s slideshare also used (LOD cloud images)

• BBC Presentation on Linked Data - http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/s5/linked-data/s5.html

• BBC Blog Post about using Sem Web Technologies for World Cup 2010 - http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2010/07/bbc_world_cup_2010_dynamic_sem.html