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

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!

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

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)

Who are you?

who is using large computerised data-sets ?

who is using data extracted from the web ?

who is using semantic web data ?

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!

Philosophical confessionI take a strongly positivistic stance

Revolution ahead?

Effects of observation instruments

Effects of observation instruments

Effects of observation instruments

Effects of observation instruments

Effects of observation instruments

Example:Political science

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

Example:Communication science

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

Example:Science dynamics

Question: Is thematic co-occurence at Ynpredictive of co-authoring at Yn+1?

Data:5 year conference series, 1000 papers/year, 3000 authors/year

AmCAT3: Keyword search

This works…. sort of….Methods:web scrapingnat. lang. analysis

(parsing, stemming, synonyms, homonyms)

identity resolutionRequiredPhysical Interoperability Syntactic InteroperabilitySemantic Interoperability

Web of Data to the rescue

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

Warning:technical content

coming up

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

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

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

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),

On the Web of Data, anyone can link anything to anything

x T

[<x> IsOfType <T>]

differentowners & locations

<institute>

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 } . }

Example:science dynamics

Faculteit der Exacte Wetenschappen

MEET JULIE

PhD Student “institutional influences on collaboration patterns in interdisciplinary research”

Faculteit der Exacte Wetenschappen

Julie needs data

33

Faculteit der Exacte Wetenschappen34

Faculteit der Exacte Wetenschappen

DBLP: RDF & RDF Schema

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.}}

Example:Dutch census data

(1795 – 1971)

40.745.554.078 triples Semantically rich

Who’s doing it?

The World Bank is also doing it!

http://data.worldbank.org/7,000 indicators from World Bank data

sets.

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

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

It gets bigger every month

25 billion facts &

relations…

And many more

• Reuters• New York Times• EU (EUROSTAT, others)• BBC• Facebook• ….

So how good is this observational instrument ? Studies on validity (e.g. in science

dynamics)

methods for provenance & trustmethods for attribution & citation

For real ?

“ use the power of information to explore social and economic life on Earth ”

1bn€ over 10 years

Pfew….

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)

AcknowledgementsI’ve freely used material from the work

ofShenghui WangPaul GrothJulie BirkholzWouter van AtteveldtLaurens van RietveldRinke Hoekstraand many in the Semantic Web

community