Social Networking to Support Researchers at

Minority Serving Institutions

Marlon Pierce

Community Grids Lab

Indiana University

Acknowledgements

Geoffrey Fox (PI)Joshua Rosen (Developer)Siddharth Maini (Developer)Part of MSI-CIEC, an NSF OCI CITEAM

Funded Project http://www.msi-ciec.org/eduwiki/index.php/Main_P

ageThanks to Dr. Alex Ramirez of MSI-CIEC for

feedback and guidance.

Challenges for MSI Researchers

We need in general a portal/gateway to online community services geared specifically for (MSI) faculty and researchers. Support their communications: identifying solicitations,

forming or joining teams, writing proposals, etc. Enable them to identify interesting projects and people.

Our general philosophy is that the broad range of Web 2.0 services provides the necessary capabilities MySpaces, Facebook, Flickr, Imagelooop, Google Docs, etc.

And you can build on collaboration software Sakai, Moodle, MediaWiki, Drupal, …

We concluded that these sorts of collaborations should really be a sophisticated mashup.

Shared Bookmarking for Social Networks

Our kernel project is to support tagging and online shared bookmarking. Pioneered by del.icio.us in 2003 (!)

Bookmarking services allow you to Share links (URLs) with networks of friends Organize your links by mnemonic tags Find other interesting URLs by popularity (most bookmarked) Find interesting URLs by keywords

When used collectively, tags form folksonomies. “Pave the cow paths” Typically about tagged URLs. But also about people who tag. Semantic Web Lesson: everything is a URI.

RSS FeedsCan Be Click-Tagged. Additional feeds easy to make with OpenKapow’s Robomaker.

Tag Cloud and Favorite Tags

Tag Cloud of

Everything

Favorite Tags

Clicking a tag brings up all the

URLs in the main area.

Recent Tags

Recent Tags

Not very well placed…

Gives a list of most recent additions.

Drag and Drop Feature

You can Drag and Drop any menu items between left and right navigational

menu

Scriptaculous, Flex, etc

Drag / Drop

Dragged Recent

Tags

Tag SystemURLs are bookmarked by usersUsers describe these bookmarks with

descriptive tagsThese tag/bookmark relationships form a graph

that can be navigated Tag Yahoo with “search” If you look up “search”, Google has the same tag. Google is also tagged with “video”…

Walk the graph through the Internet, or through databases (as we will see)

Login

User Profiles

Personal Tags

Personal User Tags

Bookmark (drag or right-click)

Personalized Bookmarklet when you Login appears

Either Drag it into the Bookmark menu in Firefox or

Right-click and “Book this Link”

Click the Bookmarklet

button

Assign tags and Submit Query

Example tags:algore nobel peace prize

Recent tags

My Tags

When you return to the portal, you will see the tags added to your list.

Results are highlighted in bold and the corresponding user who owns the tag is also displayed

Searching the tag “research” gives a list of other users with this tag. Click the user name to navigate to the profile.

Click the tag to get the real URL and navigate out.

Harvesting NSF Tags

Harvesting NSF information to seed the system with relevant

proposal information.

Populating Tags with NSF Grant Information

The NSF Awards web site is a good source for data to import and convert into tags

We believe tagging will add value. Tagging gives you alternative paths through

database. Walk a graph

Tagging bridges multiple resources (databases, URLs, etc).

Ex: TeraGrid user database has overlap with nsf.gov on OCI users.

NSF.org Award Search

Sample Search Results

NSF.org sends back an XML encoding of your search request.

NSF Grants Tag SystemNSF has the ability to get information on all of the

grants a particular person worked on (in XML)We downloaded, parsed, and bookmarked this

info using a little scavenger robot. Each grant is represented by a bookmark and tagged

(using namespaces) with relevant information Grant tags point to URLs of the NSF award page.

The investigators are imported as users Each has a bookmark for each project they

worked on They are also represented in the tags of these projects.

Tags and URLs Form Graphs

Tag

Bookmark (URL)

User (URI)

Grant 1

Joe Smith

Large Award

Joe Smith

John Doe

sbe directorate

NSF Tag System Example

Grant 2

John Doe

John DoeSmall Award

A. Einstein

A. Einstein

NSF Tag NavigationYou can start at a user or a grantYou find “which grants has this user worked

on” or “which users worked on this grant”In this way, you can find users by crawling

from user to grant and vice versaAlso, you can use the tags to narrow your

search (e.g. only large awards, only a certain directorate)

We are working on a system to use tags to successively refine searches.

Looking Forward: Tagging Profiles, Folksonomies, and

MatchmakingSocial bookmarking sites are generally

geared toward managing URLs.But you can also use it to find like-minded

people with shared tagging profiles. Ex: LibraryThing.com

More direct social networking: LinkedIn, Facebook,

Tag clustering can also be investigated as a CS problem: Clustering, machine learning

More Information

mpierce@cs.indiana.eduCurrent portal will debut at SC07

General bookmarking and NSF grant information tagging.

RSS Feeds and “click tagging”

Future Work: Matchmaking and Graphs

Now that we have a substantial amount of tags, we can investigate graph operations.

These are classic CS problems in clustering and machine learning.

We hope in this way to build recommendation systems: Find other users with similar research interests

(tagging profiles). Potentially interesting to tie this to scholarly journal

search engines.

Third Party Software Connotea used as a backing bookmark manager. Scriptaculous - A javascript framework incorporating animation effects and ajax functionality. - Used in interface for animations and page loading Pear - PHP framework to facilitate uses of xml, databases, and various other

functions - Used to interface with database Flex - Being used for advanced animated effects and navigation interface PHPClasses.org - a website that allows users to share classes and functions they created - A ‘queue’ class was adapted for use in the NSF loader - A ‘rssGenerator’ class is being used to create various rss feeds OpenKapow RoboMaker - Allows the creation of navigation robots to create REST and RSS services - Used in news rss feed and some other planned services

Internal Messaging / E-mail system

To send messagesReceive messagesContact GroupsOr some better way to communicate with

groups or each other

Matchmaking

Membership

Ontology tree for a common Tag Cloud

Profile Actions

Classifieds

Profile

More Information

Portal snapshot is available from http://gf14.ucs.indiana.edu/

See demos at Supercomputing 2007Contact me: mpierce@cs.indiana.edu

CITEAM Features

Features

FIND

A Web 2.0 Diversion

REST services: back to the futureSimple message formats

JSON, RSS, AtomRich Client Interfaces: JavaScript is back on

the menu. AJAX

Gadgets, widgets, badges, etc. Client-side integration

Microformats, tagging