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How the Web can change
social science research (including yours)
Frank van HarmelenComputer Science
DepartmentVU University Amsterdam
Creative Commons License: allowed to share & remix,but must attribute & non-commercial
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Using the web (of data) for e-science
in Social SciencesFrank van HarmelenComputer Science
DepartmentVU University Amsterdam
Creative Commons License: allowed to share & remix,but must attribute & non-commercial
Health Warning:Computer Scientist!
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This talk is aboutusing the web
as an observational instrument
using the web of data as an even better observational instrument
using the web of data as a data-sharing platform
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This talk is not aboutit's NOT social science about e-science
(e.g Oxford research center)
it's NOT about high-performance computing(that's just boring infrastructure, let the computer scientists will deal with that)
I don’t discuss online social experiments(crowd sourcing, social games, mech. turk, etc)
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Who are you?
who is using large computerised data-sets ?
who is using data extracted from the web ?
who is using semantic web data ?
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This talk is aboutusing the web & the web of data
as an observational instrument &as a sharing platform
Through:A whole bunch of realistic examplesA sketch of the technology
Message = yes, you can do this too!
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Philosophical confessionI take a strongly positivistic stance
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Revolution ahead?
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Effects of observation instruments
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Effects of observation instruments
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Effects of observation instruments
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Effects of observation instruments
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Effects of observation instruments
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Example:Political science
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Question: Is the content of party-political programmes and election speeches predictive of government coalition attempts?
Data • All party manifesto’s, • half a year of all Dutch newspapers
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Example:Communication science
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Question: Can we predict the social network at Tn from the content at Tn-1?
Data• Discussions from online forum nl.politiek • 21.000 participants talking about 19 Dutch political parties during 259 weeks
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Example:Science dynamics
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Question: Is thematic co-occurence at Ynpredictive of co-authoring at Yn+1?
Data:5 year conference series, 1000 papers/year, 3000 authors/year
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AmCAT3: Keyword search
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This works…. sort of….Methods:web scrapingnat. lang. analysis
(parsing, stemming, synonyms, homonyms)
identity resolutionRequiredPhysical Interoperability Syntactic InteroperabilitySemantic Interoperability
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Web of Data to the rescue
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General idea of Web of Data(a.k.a. “Semantic Web”)
1. Make data available on the Webin machine-understandable form (formalised)
2. Structure the data and meta-data in ontologies
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Warning:technical content
coming up
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Bluffer’s Guide to RDF• Express relations between things:
• Results in labelled network (“graph”)• All labels are actually web-addresses (URIs)• You can “ping” any label and find out more• Bits of the graph can live at physically different
locations & have different owners
Frank y
x
AuthorOf
AuthorOf MITpublishedBy
Subject ObjectPredicate
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Bluffer’s Guide to RDF Schema
• types for subjects & objects & predicates• Types organised in a hierarchy• Inheritance of properties
Frank y
x
AuthorOf
AuthorOf MITpublishedBy
author book publisher
person artifact
man
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Ontologies (= hierarchical conceptual vocabularies)Identify the key concepts in a
domainIdentify a vocabulary for these
conceptsIdentify relations between these
conceptsMake these precise enough
so that they can be shared between• humans and humans• humans and machines• machines and machines
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Biomedical ontologies (a few..) Mesh
• Medical Subject Headings, National Library of Medicine
• 22.000 descriptions EMTREE
• Commercial Elsevier, Drugs and diseases• 45.000 terms, 190.000 synonyms
UMLS• Integrates 100 different vocabularies
SNOMED• 200.000 concepts, College of American
Pathologists Gene Ontology
• 15.000 terms in molecular biology NCBI Cancer Ontology:
• 17,000 classes (about 1M definitions),
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On the Web of Data, anyone can link anything to anything
x T
[<x> IsOfType <T>]
differentowners & locations
<institute>
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SPARQL: Bluffer’s GuideSELECT ?country_name ?population
WHERE { ?country a type:LandlockedCountries ; ?country rdfs:label ?country_name ; ?country prop:populationEstimate ?
population . FILTER (?population > 15000000) .
SELECT ?name ?img ?hp ?locWHERE {
?a a mo:MusicArtist ; ?a foaf:name ?name .
OPTIONAL { ?a foaf:homepage ?hp } . }
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Example:science dynamics
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Faculteit der Exacte Wetenschappen
MEET JULIE
PhD Student “institutional influences on collaboration patterns in interdisciplinary research”
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Faculteit der Exacte Wetenschappen
Julie needs data
33
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Faculteit der Exacte Wetenschappen34
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Faculteit der Exacte Wetenschappen
DBLP: RDF & RDF Schema
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Faculteit der Exacte Wetenschappen36
SELECT ?author ?affiliation ?uriAffiliation WHERE { GRAPH <$graph> { {<$article> swrc:author ?author.
OPTIONAL{?author swrc:affiliation ?uriAffiliation.} OPTIONAL{?author swc:affiliation ?affiliation.} }
}}
DBLP Query: 2 weeks 15 mins.
UNION { <$article> foaf:maker ?author.
OPTIONAL{?author swrc:affiliation ?uriAffiliation.} OPTIONAL{?author swc:affiliation ?affiliation.}
} UNION { <$article> dc:creator ?author.
OPTIONAL{?author swrc:affiliation ?uriAffiliation.} OPTIONAL{?author swc:affiliation ?affiliation.}}
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Example:Dutch census data
(1795 – 1971)
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40.745.554.078 triples Semantically rich
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Who’s doing it?
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The World Bank is also doing it!
http://data.worldbank.org/7,000 indicators from World Bank data
sets.
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The US gov is also doing it!http://data.gov/ : 390.000 data sets
Compare foreign aid budgets
Does tax influence smokers?
Compare campaign money
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already many billions of facts & rules
Everybody’s doing it!
Encyclopedia
Geographic names (millio
ns)
names of artists & art w
orks
(10.000’s)
scientific bibliographies
hierarchical dictionaries
(UK, FR, N
L)
life-science databases
any CD ever recorded (a
lmost)
May ‘09 estimate > 4.2 billion triples + 140 million interlinks
basic facts on every country on the planet
common sense rules & facts (1
00.000’s)
It gets bigger every month
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It gets bigger every month
25 billion facts &
relations…
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And many more
• Reuters• New York Times• EU (EUROSTAT, others)• BBC• Facebook• ….
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So how good is this observational instrument ? Studies on validity (e.g. in science
dynamics)
methods for provenance & trustmethods for attribution & citation
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For real ?
“ use the power of information to explore social and economic life on Earth ”
1bn€ over 10 years
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Pfew….
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Take home messageuse the web & the web-of-data
to obtain your datause the web-of-data to share your
datayes, you can do this too!
Collaborate with computer scientistsreflect on deeper consquences
for the social sciences(methodological, theoretical, etc)
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AcknowledgementsI’ve freely used material from the work
ofShenghui WangPaul GrothJulie BirkholzWouter van AtteveldtLaurens van RietveldRinke Hoekstraand many in the Semantic Web
community