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A Tool for Collaborative Research

James MillerUC Berkeley School of Information

May 2009

What is Slants?

• “Standardsland Tagging Service”– A research tool– Focused on a specific domain:

Public policy and ICT standards– But any domain is possible

• Requests Delicious RSS feeds from many users

• Harvests bookmarks and tags• Organizes them for retrieval

About Delicious

• A social bookmarking website• Easy tagging as you browse• Share bookmarks with others

About Delicious

About Delicious

How Slants Uses Delicious

How Slants Uses Delicious

The Problem That Slants Addresses • Technical standards have public policy

consequences1:– Identity– User/content discrimination– Content censorship and control– User consent, etc

• Often unaddressed in standards• Best to find out early in the standards

process1 Morris,J, A. Davidson."Public Policy Considerations for Internet Design Decisions," Center for Democracy and Technology, 2003.

More Easily Said Than Done

• There are now more than 400 ICT standards consortia active globally

• Thousands of standards• Consumer and watchdog groups are

unlikely to be represented• Therefore, specifications may not take

due account of their needs

Semantic Gap

Semantic Gap: IPv6 (RFC-2464)

“Under IPv4, the predecessor to IPv6, Internet addressing allowed a reasonable amount of privacy and anonymity, because a numeric address was typically not tied to any particular machine or user.  With IPv6, however, the standard provided that in many cases a user’s address would be derived from the unique MAC (Medium Access Control) address embedded in the user’s Ethernet network card.”2

2Davidson, Alan, John Morris, Rob Courtney. “Strangers in a Strange Land: Public Interest Advocacy and Internet Standards.: Washington, D.C.: Center for Democracy and Technology, 2002. <www.cdt.org/publications/piais.pdf>

Focus on Identity•Information privacy•Information security•Authentication•Access•Online tracking•Datamining•Profiling•Third-party use•Anonymous speech•Etc.

The Slants Approach

• Recruit or select Delicious users interested in ICT/public policy issues

• Harvest their Delicious bookmarks, based on their tagging

• Harvest other bookmarks from the wider Delicious network

• Aggregate and organize the bookmarks on the Slants website

Tag Harvesting

• Slants requests bookmarks from Delicious– For specific users– For specific resources– With specific sets of tags

• Delicious returns an RSS feed of bookmarks

Tag Harvesting

• An automated process• Search terms are based on thesaurus

relationships:– BT/NT : identity + authentication + OpenID– SA: RFID_tags + vicinity_cards– UF: surveillance + eavesdropping– RT: key_generation + key_distribution– Expansive: smart card OR chip card

Expansive Searches

Find bookmarks tagged:mobile

smart cell_phone

smartphone

phone cellphone

CDMA GSM

iPhone

android

eavesdropping

covert

track eavesdrop

location_tracking

monitor

tracking intercept

monitoring

+surveillance

Interception

…or…

…or…

Normalized Results

Organize tags under:mobile

smart cell_phone

smartphone

phone cellphone

CDMA GSM

iPhone

android

eavesdropping

covert

track eavesdrop

location_tracking

monitor

tracking intercept

monitoring

+surveillance

Interception

Processing Bookmarks

• Database stores individual bookmarks• Bookmark tags are checked against the

thesaurus– Matching tags are normalized against the

controlled vocabulary; e.g., eavesdropping becomes surveillance

– Nonmatching tags are discarded:

Accessing Bookmarks

• Tags are organized to create an index according to rules in the thesaurus

• Index is refreshed whenever new bookmarks are harvested

• The index allows users to sort bookmarks by topic

Why Use Slants?

• Leverages the researching skills of many users in a single area of interest

• Automatically searches the entire Delicious network (over 5 million users)

• Normalizes disparate tagging into a consistent system

• Organizes bookmarks by topic

Low Cognitive Cost

• No extra work involved, just tagging as usual

• Gathers domain-relevant resources in one place

• Provides easy browsing and finding

Additional Features

• Identifies Delicious users that have the same interest

• Scores resources by times bookmarked• Enables users to create custom

searches

Future Work

• Term recommender system• Thesaurus building tool

Summary

• A collaborative research tool• Leverages social bookmarking that

users would do anyway• Performs expansive searches• Normalizes search results for easy

retrieval• Built for the public policy domain but

can be applied to any domain

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