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

•  .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

Breakdown of ugc visits

Sites go up...

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Facebook and twitter

...and sites come down

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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

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Need ways to connect these islands

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Allowing users to easily move from one to another

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Enabling users to easily bring their data with them

image from pidgintech.com

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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

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From last October

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

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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

What If your car could tweet

image from knightriderfestival.com

image from tinyurl.com/starshiptr

now at amazon.com

our new book

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