The Future of Social Networks on the Internet: The Need for Semantics

Copyright 2008 Digital Enterprise Research Institute. All rights reserved.

www.deri.org

The Future of Social Networks on the Internet: The Need for Semantics

John G. Breslin, Stefan Decker, Uldis Bojars

{[email protected]}

Semantic Technologies Conference / San Jose, USA / 19th May 2008

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URL for the presentation

View the slides at Slideshare:

http://url.ie/e46

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Where in the world are we?

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Our mission and vision

• DERI Galway’s mission is “to exploit semantics for:– People– Organisations– Systems

• to collaborate and interoperate on a global scale”

• DERI Galway’s vision is “to be recognised as being among the leading international web science research institutes interlinking technologies, information and people to advance business and benefit society”

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• Founded June 2003 with 1 fulltime member (green field)• Status as of May 2008:

– About 130 members (from 27 nations) and growing

• Total research grants:– About €23M so far, 17 national and 16 EU projects

• Research publications > 370– Leading in International and European Semantic Web

Conferences– Participates in 12 standardisation groups

• Example technologies:– Semantic Digital Libraries– Semantic Desktop (in KDE4)– Semantic Web Search Engine

Some statistics

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Core industrial partners

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On the shoulders of giants…

• Memex (Vannevar Bush)A memex is “a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications.”

• Augmenting Human Intellect(Doug Engelbart)“By "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems.”

• WWW (Tim Berners-Lee)“There was a second part of the dream […] we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we re doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together.”

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It wasn’t the right time then…

Where are we now?

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Now, we are making progress…

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A network of knowledge…

• Interconnected• Universal• All encompassing

• Enable global and local collaboration

• The right information for the right people at the right time

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Getting to work in the DERI house

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What we’re going to talk about today…

1. Collaborating via the Social Web

2. Social networking services (SNSs) so far

3. Issues with social networking services

4. Leveraging semantics on the Social Web:• FOAF and SIOC

• Producers

• Collectors

• Consumers

5. Leveraging semantics in Enterprise 2.0 SNSs

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Social media sites are like data silos

* Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

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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



www.deri.org

1. Collaborating via the Social Web

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A move from the Web to a “social web”

The New Yorker, 1993

“On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

The New Yorker, 2005

“I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just

pointless, incessant barking.”

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What is social media?

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media– “Social media uses the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to connect

information in a collaborative manner.”– “Social media can take many different forms, including message

boards, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video.”

• Popular examples of social media sites:– Wikipedia, MySpace / Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, SecondLife,

Upcoming, Digg / Reddit / StumbleUpon, Flickr / Zooomr, del.icio.us, World of Warcraft, Amazon

• Related terms:– Web 2.0, Social Web, social software, social networks, social

news, social bookmarking, user-generated content

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What is Web 2.0?

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0– “Web 2.0 refers to a perceived second generation of web-based

communities and hosted services - such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies - which aim to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users.”

• The term Web 2.0 was made popular by Tim O’Reilly:– http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/

what-is-web-20.html

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Features / principles of Web 2.0 (O’Reilly)

1. The Web as platform

2. Harnessing collective intelligence

3. Data is the next “Intel Inside”

4. End of the software release cycle

5. Lightweight programming models

6. Software above the level of a single device

7. Rich user experiences+ The long tail

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Web 2.0 and social media in simple terms

1. Users

2. Content

3. Tags

4. Comments– Users post content

– Users share content– Users annotate content with tags

– Users browse content via tags– Users discuss content via comments

– Users connect via posted content– Users connect directly to users

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Content can be…

• Books Amazon• Discussion postings Blogs• Bookmarks del.icio.us• Photos Flickr• Music Last.fm• Movies Netflix• Events Upcoming.org• Places Dopplr• Products Microsoft Aura• Articles Wikipedia

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Blogging: a phenomenon for a new generation?

• Cincinnati Enquirer, October 2004

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Overview of blogs

• Weblog, web log or simply a blog is a web journal• “A web application which contains periodic time-stamped

posts on a common (usually open-access) webpage”• Individual diaries -> arms of political campaigns, media

programs and corporations (e.g. the Google Blog)• Citizen journalism…• Posts are often shown in reverse chronological order• Comments can be made by the public on some blogs• Latest headlines, with hyperlinks and summaries, are

syndicated using RSS or Atom formats (e.g. for reading favourite blogs with a feed reader)

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The state of the blogosphere from Technorati

• 70 million blogs• The blogosphere is doubling in size every

320 days (slowing down a little)• 120,000 new blogs are created each day

(i.e. 1.4 new blogs every second)• 1.5 million blog posts are made in a day

(i.e. 17 posts per second)• Around 5-10% of new blogs are spam

blogs or “splogs”• 35% of blog posts use tags

Definition of wikis

• A wiki is a type of website that allow users to easily add and edit content and is especially suited for collaborative writing

• The name is based on the Hawaiian term wiki-wiki, meaning “quick”, “fast”, or “to hasten”

• It amasses to a group of web pages that allows users to quickly add content and also allows others to edit the content:– It relies on cooperation, checks and balances of its members,

and a belief in sharing of ideas

Some uses of wikis

• Wikis are being used for:

– online encyclopaedias– free dictionaries– book repositories– software development– project proposals– writing research papers– event organisation

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The Wikipedia: from Irish to Esperanto

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Flickr, share your photos

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SlideShare for presentations

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The social bookmarking service del.icio.us

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All Consuming, what have you read today?

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LibraryThing, find out who else reads like you

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CiteULike, get publication references from peers

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Upcoming event listings and meetups

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Dopplr for managing travel, tracking friends abroad

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TouristR for travel destination stories and info

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You can even share your favourite walks…

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…and find others with like musical interests


www.deri.org

2. Social networking services (SNSs) so far

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We all live in a social network…

• …of friends, family, workmates, fellow students, acquaintances, etc.

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• Friend of a friend, or “dúirt bean liom go ndúirt bean leí”

• Theory that anybody is connected to everybody else (on average) by no more than six degrees of separation

Everyone’s connected…

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Milgram’s six degrees of separation theory

• Sociologist Milgram conducted this experiment:– Random people from

Nebraska were to send a letter (via intermediaries) to a stock broker in Boston

– Could only send to someone with whom they were on a first-name basis

• Among the letters that found the target, the average number of links was six

Stanley Milgram (1933-1984)

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And now a major motion picture, kind of…

Six Degrees of Separation (1993)– “I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names... It’s not just big names — it’s anyone. A native in a rain forest, a Tiero del Fuegan, an Eskimo. I am bound — you are bound — to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.”

– Play from 1990 by John Guare

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The Erdős number

• Number of links required to connect scholars to Erdős via co-authorship of papers

• Erdős wrote 1500+ papers with 507 co-authors

• Jerry Grossman’s site allows mathematicians to compute their Erdős numbers:– http://www.oakland.edu/enp/

• Connecting path lengths, among mathematicians only:– The average is 4.65

– The maximum is 13

Paul Erdős (1913-1996)

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Trying to make friends

ValdisLatvia

UldisDERI

John Marc

Dublin

Clare BrosJohn C Andrew

Met

Marc and I already had friends in common!

I later found out my cousin Ailish also knows Andrew.

The “small world” phenomenon…

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“It’s a small world after all!”, by Kentaro Toyama

Kentaro

Bash

Karishma

Sharad

Maithreyi

Anandan

Venkie

Soumya

Prof. McDermott

Ranjeet

Prof. Sastry

PM Manmohan Singh

Prof. Balki

Pres. Kalam

Prof. Jhunjhunwala

Dr. Montek SinghAhluwalia

Ravi

Dr. Isher Judge Ahluwalia

Pawan

Aishwarya

Ravi’sFather

AmitabhBachchan

Prof.Kannan

Prof. Prahalad

NandanaSen

Prof. AmartyaSen

Prof. Veni

* Source: http://research.microsoft.com/toyama/talks/

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The Kevin Bacon game

Boxed version of the game• Invented by three Albright College students in 1994:– Craig Fass, Brian Turtle, Mike

Ginelly

• Goal is to connect any actor to Kevin Bacon, by linking actors who have acted in the same movie

• The “Oracle of Bacon” website uses IMDB to find the shortest link between any two actors:– http://oracleofbacon.org/

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The Kevin Bacon game (2)

• Total number of actors in database (as of 15th October):– 893283

• Average path length to Kevin:– 2.957

• Actor closest to “center”:– Rod Steiger (2.68)

• Rank of Kevin, in terms of closeness to center:– 1049th

• Most actors are within three links of each other!

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What are social networking services (SNSs)?

• From the beginning, the Internet was a medium for connecting not only machines but people

• Idea behind SNSs is to make the aforementioned real-world relationships explicitly defined online

• 2002:– Friendster

• 2003:– MySpace, LinkedIn, hi5

• 2004:– orkut, Facebook

• 2005:– Bebo

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The popularity of SNSs

• The 10 most popular domains ~= 40% percent of all page views on the Web (Compete, November 2006)– Nearly half of those views

were from the social networking services MySpace and Facebook – wow!

– And that’s just in the top 10…

Alexa rankings:

#5: MySpace

#6: Facebook

#8: hi5

#10: orkut

#18: Friendster

#119: Bebo

#212: LinkedIn

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SNSs attracting lots of monetary / media attention

• Friendster – $13M VC• Tribe – $6.3M VC• LinkedIn – $4.7M VC• Bebo – $15M VC, sold to AOL for $850M• MySpace – Sold for $580M• Friends Reunited – Sold for £120M• Facebook – $1B Y! offer, 1.6% sold to MS for $250M

Motivation for social network services

• Allows a user to create and maintain an online network of close friends or business associates for social and professional reasons:– Friendships and relationships– Offline meetings– Curiosity about others– Business opportunities– Job hunting

…– For social good:

• Kevin Bacon – sixdegrees.org• Ammado - ammado.com• Sun – openeco.org

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Big social network services (in terms of accounts)

• myspace.com 110,000,000• facebook.com 98,000,000• habbo.com 86,000,000• spaces.live.com 40,000,000• orkut.com 59,000,000• hi5.com 70,000,000• friendster.com 58,000,000• xanga.com 40,000,000• classmates.com 40,000,000• flixster.com 36,000,000• netlog.com 32,000,000• reunion.com 28,000,000

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites

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Features of social network services

• Network of friends (inner circle)• Person surfing• Private messaging• Discussion forums• Events management• Blogging and commenting• Media uploading

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Facebook, #6 in the world

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The success of (and hype around) Facebook

• According to Robert Scoble today, MS want to buy Facebook for $15-$20B:– http://scobleizer.com/2008/05/19/why-microsoft-will-buy-

facebook-and-keep-it-closed/

• 4,000 applications have been created for Facebook’s developer interface:– 70,000 developers signed up

• Active user count jumped by 70% in the four months after this contributable application layer was added

• 50% of Facebook users are non-students:– People over 24 are its fastest-growing demographic

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orkut, Google’s SNS

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Get LinkedIn to business contacts, 15 million users

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OpenEco, a SNS for managing GHG emissions

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Elgg, social networking software for education

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Other niche SNSs

• Age:– Multiply (seniors and settled); Boomj (baby boomers); Rezoom

• Country of origin:– Silicon India

• Gender:– CaféMom; MothersClick; Sister Woman (female friends)

• Occupation:– ModelsHotel; FanLib (fiction writers); AdGabber; TheFeng.org (financial

services executives); MilitarySpot (military families); Sermo (doctors and physicians)

• Business and careers:– ConnectBuzz; Doostang; Execunet; Netshare; Ryze; Viadeo; Xing

• Interests:– TradeKing (investors); StreetCred (hip hop); IndiePublic (art and

design); PeerTrainer (health and wellbeing)

* Source: Paul Gibler, Wisconsin Technology Network

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Enterprise 2.0

• Web 2.0 includes applications such as blogs, wikis, RSS feeds and social networking, while Enterprise 2.0 is the packaging of those technologies in both corporate IT and workplace environments

• “Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers”, Harvard Business School’s Professor Andrew McAfee

• “There are direct enterprise equivalents [to Facebook]. You can ask people the status of their projects, what they’re working on, are they travelling, things they’ve learned. All of these things would be very valuable inside an enterprise.”

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• Social media services that people have been using in everyday life on the Web are now entering organisations:– Blogs– Wikis– Social networking– Tagging

• Lots of companies and products in this space:– Awareness, Mentor Scout, Contact Networks, Microsoft

SharePoint, IBM Lotus Connections, SelectMinds, introNetworks, Tacit, Illumio, Jive Software, Visible Path, Leverage Software, Web Crossing, SocialText

• These new deployments also face the same issues that are on the Web

Enterprise 2.0 (2)

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introNetworks

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Jive Software

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Visible Path

– Visible Path powers “Hoover’s Connect” for business research company Hoover's, which lets users know how they're connected to companies and people in the Hoover's database


www.deri.org

3. Issues with social networking services

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Problems with SNSs

• Fundamental problems block their potential to access the full range of available content and networked people online

• There is a need to build semantic social networking into the fabric of the next-generation Internet itself:– Interconnecting both content

and people in a meaningful way

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First issue

Need interesting objects to draw you back to keep on using social networking services

* Source: Jyri Engestrom, “Object-Centered Sociality”, Reboot 7

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Many social networking services are boring…

* Source: Jyri Engestrom, “Object-Centered Sociality”, Reboot 7

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Object-centred sociality can provide meaning

• Users connected via a common object, e.g., their job, university, hobbies, a date…

• “Another tradition of theorizing offers an explanation of why Russell linked out, and why so many YASNS ultimately fail.”

• “According to this theory, people don’t just connect to each other. They connect through a shared object.”

* Source: Jyri Engestrom, “Why Some Social Networks Work…”

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Object-centred sociality can provide meaning (2)

• “When a service fails to offer the users a way to create new objects of sociality, they turn the connecting itself into an object [LinkedIn].”

• “Good services allow people to create social objects that add value.”– Flickr = photos– del.icio.us = bookmarks– Blogs = discussion posts

* Source: Jyri Engestrom, “Why Some Social Networks Work…”

76…that connect us to other people

These are the social objects…

• Discussions• Bookmarks• Annotations• Profiles• Microblogs• Multimedia

…

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Second issue

We all have too many separate profiles and sets of contacts on disconnected social networking services

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So many social media sites…

* Source: Smashcut Media, www.smashcut-media.com

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Even more services…

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It takes a lot of time…

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Filling out your profiles, re-adding your friends…

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Uploading posts and content items to “stovepipes”!

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What if I use multiple services and I want to…

• Move the stuff I have on one service to another (e.g. move all my blog posts, comments, friends, etc. from WordPress.com to “Acme Blogs”)

• Move all my stuff from multiple services to one third-party service

• Centralise my stuff on my own service, e.g. my blog• See my stuff on a third-party service providing an

aggregate view, like FriendFeed

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(De-)centralised me

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Initiatives set up to address this recently

• Social network portability:– http://groups.google.com/group/social-network-portability

• A bill of rights for users of the Social Web:– http://opensocialweb.org/

• DataPortability:– http://dataportability.org/

• DiSo:– http://code.google.com/p/diso/

• OpenSocial (see also Friend Connect):– http://opensocial.org/

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Social network portability

• Need distributed social networks and reusable profiles• Users may have many identities and sets of friends on

different social networks, where each identity was created from scratch

• Allow user to import existing profile and contacts, using a single global identity with different views (e.g., via FOAF, hCard, OpenID, etc.)

• See also:– http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/– http://danbri.org/words/2007/09/13/194– http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/

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Social networking fatigue

• How many general or niche SNSs are you willing to register and / or interact with?

• People search engine and aggregation sites are now appearing to compensate:– SocialURL – organise your online identities– PeekYou – matching web pages with their owners– Spock – organising information around people– Rapleaf – reputation lookup and email search– Wink – free people search engine– FriendFeed – subscribe to all of your friends’ feeds

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Ownership, control, freedom at opensocialweb.org

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The DataPortability initiative

• http://dataportability.org• Existing technologies• Inventing no new ones

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Other initiatives “near” DataPortability

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Fold a social networking layer into tech stacks

• Make social networking a shared component across various desktop and Web applications

• Rather than having a fragmented view of one’s network in each application, the social networking stack would let users employ all their person-to-person connections in any application:– See http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MIC.2007.138


www.deri.org

4. Leveraging semantics on the Social Web

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timbl on Semantic Web / Social Web synergies

“I think we could have both Semantic Web technology supporting online communities, but at the same time also online communities can support Semantic Web data by being the sources of people voluntarily connecting things together.”

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, podcast interview during ISWC 2005

http://esw.w3.org/topic/IswcPodcast

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Semantics can help

• By using agreed-upon semantic formats to describe people, content objects and the connections that bind them all together, social media sites can interoperate by appealing to common semantics

• Developers are already using semantic technologies to augment the ways in which they create, reuse, and link profiles and content on social media sites (using FOAF, XFN / hCard, SIOC, etc.)

• In the other direction, object-centered social networks can serve as rich data sources for semantic applications

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The (evolving) Semantic Web layer cake

• http://www.w3.org/2007/03/layerCake.png

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A need for common semantics

• Communities should provide their data in a common, machine-understandable way:– RDF (resource description framework) as a data layer– One single format for all the data– Different transport layers (RDF/XML, N3, etc.)– The base of the Semantic Web

• Communities should use common semantics to define this data:– Avoiding the use of proprietary APIs– Since this means that they can talk together, exchange

information, using the same modelling layer for their data– Using SIOC for representing content and actions– Using FOAF for representing people and networks

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FOAF (Friend-of-a-Friend)

• FOAF is an ontology for describing people and the relationships that exist between them

• Can be integrated with any other SW vocabularies• Some services with FOAF exports:

• People can also create their own FOAF document and link to it from their homepage

• FOAF documents usually contain personal info, links to friends, and other related resources

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A distributed social network with FOAF

• Can use FOAF to describe social networks across a number of services

• Picture shows data from both boards.ie and John’s hand-coded FOAF file

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The (lowercase) semantic web

• Microformats:– http://microformats.org/– “Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats

are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.”

– Embedded metadata within (X)HTML web pages

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Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC)

• An effort from DERI to discover how we can create and establish ontologies on the Semantic Web

• Goal of the SIOC ontology is to address interoperability issues on the (Social) Web

• SIOC has been adopted in a framework of 50 applications or modules deployed on over 400 sites

• http://sioc-project.org

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Motivations for SIOC

• Need to understand how to create and establish ontologies on the Web:– Social engineering is required– Model, agree, deploy, re-model

• Disconnected sites on the Social Web require ontologies for interoperation:– Lots of social data, inherent semantics (chicken and egg)– Potential for high impact

• In parallel, lack of integration between social software and other systems in enterprise intranets

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The aims of SIOC

• To “semantically-interlink online communities”• To fully describe the content and structure of community

sites• To create new connections between online discussion

posts and items, forums and containers• To enable the integration of online community

information• To browse connected Social Web items in interesting

and innovative ways• To overcome the chicken-and-egg problem with the

Semantic Web

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The steps involved

1. Develop an ontology of terms for representing rich data from the Social Web

2. Create a food chain for producing, collecting and consuming SIOC data

3. As well dissemination via papers about SIOC, provide docs and examples at sioc-project.org

• SIOC aims to enrich the Web infrastructure:– During the next upgrade cycle, gigabytes of community data

become available!

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The SIOC ontology

• The main classes and properties are:

SIOC Specification:http://rdfs.org/sioc/spec

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The SIOC food chain

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Dissemination

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Quotes about SIOC

• “I […] think the concept is HOT” – Robert Douglass, Drupal Developer

• “It just dawned on me that the burgeoning SIOC-o-sphere (online communities exporting and exposing content via SIOC Ontology) is actually: Blogosphere 2.0” – Kingsley Idehen, Founder and CEO of OpenLink Software

• “SIOC has the potential to become one of the foundational vocabularies that make Semantic Web applications useful” – Ivan Herman, W3C / ERCIM

• “A project that started back in 2000 called Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) represents relationships between people, as well as basic contact details. SIOC does this for groups: it extends the FOAF idea to being able to talk about whole groups of people. I am excited about SIOC because you can use that information to determine trust, to let people in.” – Tim Berners-Lee, Creator of the World Wide Web

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SIOC metrics

• SIOC documents at PTSW:– 107759 (SIOC)

– 96540 (SIOC Types)

• 42911 hits in Swoogle• Sites producing SIOC data:

– 373 listed in PTSW pings

• SIOC ontology is ranked 4th and SIOC Types module 5th in 500 ontologies at PTSW

• SIOC developer mailing list:– 200 members

– 900 posts

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What is required to represent a community?

• Represent the data, not only documents:– From the WWW to a “GGG”, hyperlinks to semantic relationships

• A model for all the aspects of a community:– Users accounts, groups and roles:

• Reader, reviewer, moderator

– Content and types:• A blog, a blog post, a bulletin board, a wiki page, etc.

– Actions between users and content:• Uldis creates a post, Alex comments on it, John moderates it

• A model for the entire content:– Any data: RSS 1.0 and Atom limited to syndication / latest posts– Any user and relationship: new user, new post, replies, etc.

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Representing community data with SIOC

• Using SIOC as an ontology to represent the activities of online communities on the Web:– Namespace: http://rdfs.org/sioc/ns– Five top-level classes: User / Role / Space / Container / Item– A “SIOC Types” module for Social Web content– Action: A user posts an item in a container

• A Semantic Web citizen: – Reusing and interlinking existing ontologies– Not reinventing the wheel (connects to DC, FOAF, etc.):

• http://www.w3.org/Submission/2007/SUBM-sioc-related-20070612/

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The SIOC ontology

• The main classes and properties are:

SIOC Specification:http://rdfs.org/sioc/spec

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Example of SIOC data

• Alex wrote a post on his WordPress blog:

:myblogpost rdf:type sioc:Post ;dc:title “I’m blogging this” ;sioc:has_creator :alex ;sioc:has_container :mywpblog .

:mywpblog rdf:type sioc:Forum .

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The same model for any website

• John wrote a post on his Drupal-powered blog:

:myblogpost rdf:type sioc:Post ;dc:title “Another blog post” ;sioc:has_creator :john ;sioc:has_container :mydrupal .

:mydrupal rdf:type sioc:Forum .

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The same model for rich data

• Uldis owns a photo gallery on Flickr:

:myitempost rdf:type exif:IFD ;dc:title “Another posted item”;sioc:has_creator :john ;sioc:has_container :myflickrgallery .

:myflickrgallery rdf:type sioct:ImageGallery .

• We reuse external vocabularies (e.g. EXIF) to define item types

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Interlinking communities

• Since all communities can use the same model to define their data, it is easy to link them from a data point of view

• Interlinking:– URIs are used to define things and created objects– A post on blog “A” can be semantically linked to a post on blog “B”

• Using SPARQL to query data:– Can perform unified queries no matter where the data comes from– No need to learn new APIs from data providers– SPARQL is a W3C Recommendation for querying RDF

121

FOAF and social network connections

• FOAF allows us to represent the connections between people:– A machine-readable format for social-networking

• Using the foaf:knows property:– :John foaf:knows :Alex

• Extensions using the RELATIONSHIP vocabulary:– http://vocab.org/relationship/– All rel:* properties are subproperties of foaf:knows– :John rel:worksWith :Uldis– RDFS inferencing allows tools to answer queries using foaf:knows

when people use rel:* alternatives

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Linking people to user accounts

• FOAF is the main vocabulary used to represent people:– http://foaf-project.org– foaf:Person class:

• “The foaf:Person class represents people. Something is a foaf:Person if it is a person.”

– foaf:holdsAccount property:• “The foaf:holdsAccount property relates a foaf:Agent to a

foaf:OnlineAccount for which they are the sole account holder.”

– Linking people to user accounts:• sioc:User rdfs:subClassOf foaf:onlineAccount• Links a foaf:Person to various sioc:User(s)• As many sioc:User(s) as required can be linked to a single person• One people, various identities

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Representing users and online accounts

• The sioc:User class:– An online user account– Can be thought of as a virtual representation of any person online,

within the context of a given social media website or community– A subclass of foaf:OnlineAccount– Various properties:

• name, avatar, email

– Users create and manage content:• has_creator and has_modifier properties• :blogpost123 sioc:has_creator :john

– A user can have roles on a given container:• (Moderator, Forum 1) ← User A• (Contributor, Blog 2) ← User B

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A person and their user accounts

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Add SKOS for topics and categories

• Interlinking using common categories:– Share tags and topics across different content

• SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organisation System):– http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/– A vocabulary to describe controlled vocabularies– Used in the “Tag Ontology”:

• http://www.holygoat.co.uk/projects/tags/

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Interlinking content with SKOS

skos:isSubjectOfsioc:topic

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Interlinking content items

• Can create direct links between instances of sioc:Item:– Link from a blog post to a bulletin board page– sioc:related_to, sioc:links_to, sioc:has_reply

• Interlinking using common categories:– Share tags and topics across different content– SKOS: Simple Knowledge Organisation System

• http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/• A vocabulary to describe controlled vocabularies• Used in the “Tag Ontology”: http://www.holygoat.co.uk/projects/tags/

• Interlink using existing URIs as topics– geonames.org , DBpedia, Revyu– MOAT: a process to simplify linking content to such URIs

• http://moat-project.org/

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Identity management across networks

• Social media sites (or RDF exporters) create a new foaf:Person instance when they export their data:– TalkDigger, Revyu, Flickr exporters, etc.– There is a need to unify URIs so as to represent one's unified identity

• Linked-data principles are to use owl:sameAs and rdfs:seeAlso:– See http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/– owl:sameAs: Used to identify two resources with different URIs as being

the same resource– rdfs:seeAlso: “More information about this resource can be found here”,

can be used by Semantic Web tools such as Tabulator

• Inference using owl:InverseFunctionalProperty:– foaf:mbox, foaf:openid, etc. can be used to identify uniqueness for a

foaf:Person

• Unifying aspects of a foaf:Person across networks:– All relevant sioc:User accounts may be related to one foaf:Person

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:alex owl:sameAs flickr:33669349@N00 ;owl:sameAs twitter:terraces

Linking foaf:Person URIs for one person

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Distributed social networking with FOAF

• Combining networks from multiple FOAF URIs via owl:sameAs:– Decentralised social networks can represent connections for the

same person – A person’s networks can be merged together– Any sub-network in the social graph can be reached from a single

entry point, via the person’s URI

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Integrating social networks with FOAF

Common formats,unique URIs

* Source: Sheila Kinsella, Applications of Social Network Analysis 2007

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Distributed social networking with FOAF

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Applications for browsing the social (semantic) graph

• FOAFnaut, FOAF Explorer, etc.• FOAFGear: thanks to common semantics, only 100 lines

of code: http://apassant.net/home/2008/01/foafgear/

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Aggregation of semantic social networks

• Browse / re-use your social graph in personal applications• Merge identities with pre-defined rules• Tools:

– Beatnik– Knowee– SPARQLpress– Nepomuk (Social Semantic Desktop)

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Using OpenID with FOAF

• Can link to your FOAF profile from your OpenID URL, so that services can browse your machine-readable profile when you log-in:

<head><link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" href="foaf.rdf" />

</head>

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Example of OpenID used with FOAF

• Bob creates an account on Networkr, a new social networking website, using OpenID

• Networkr retrieves the FOAF URI thanks to an auto-discovery link

• From the FOAF file, it identifies if there are any people already subscribed to Networkr who are listed in Bob’s defined relationships:– Bob can add them as “local connections”, share data with them,

etc. without having to once again search for / add his friends

• Specific rules: – If I know X from Flickr, he / she can see my pictures on Networkr

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138

SIOC data producers

• SIOC applications list:– http://rdfs.org/sioc/applications/

• > 20 applications for producing SIOC data:– Free and open source

• SIOC export tools for:– Blogs and forums: WordPress, phpBB, Drupal, b2evolution– “Legacy” applications: mailing lists, IRC– New media: Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook, Flickr– Enterprise applications: CWE (collaborative work environments)

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Case studies

• WordPress SIOC exporter:– http://sioc-project.org/wordpress– First SIOC plugin created, custom built

• vBulletin and phpBB SIOC exporters:– http://wiki.sioc-project.org/index.php/VBSIOC– http://sioc-project.org/phpbb– Uses SIOC API for PHP

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Overview of WordPress SIOC exporter

• Installation:– Download from http://sioc-project.org/wordpress– “Drop” two files into the WordPress plugins folder– Go to the administrator’s user interface– Plugins → SIOC Plugin → “Activate”

• SIOC data created for every page:– Data describing all blog posts, comments, users, etc.– SIOC data can be discovered via RDF autodiscovery links:– <link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml"

title="SIOC" href="http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/index.php?sioc_type=site" />

• Data can be explored or crawled using existing Semantic Web applications

141

Sample export of SIOC data from WordPress

142

• RDF data from the WordPress SIOC Exporter, displayed in the SIOC RDF Browser

143

SIOC export APIs

• Benefits:– Hides the complexity from application developers– Can be used by people who are not Semantic Web experts– Automatically updated according to changes in the SIOC

ontology and best practices documents

• Existing SIOC APIs:– Java– Perl (new!)– PHP (most used)– RDFa on Rails

• See “2.1 SIOC APIs” in http://rdfs.org/sioc/applications/

144

Overview of vBulletin and phpBB SIOC Exporters

• There is a large amount of structured related information contained within message boards, and this can be leveraged in interesting ways by exposing the semantic data for new applications

• Exporters have been developed for commercial (vBulletin) and open-source (phpBB) message board systems, bringing these islands together and allowing conversations on topics that are taking place across various sites

• vBulletin and phpBB SIOC Exporters are based on the SIOC API for PHP:– http://wiki.sioc-project.org/index.php/PHPExportAPI

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Sample export of SIOC data from vBulletin

146

Sample export of SIOC data from vBulletin (2)

147

SIOC competition with boards.ie

• boards.ie has been publishing social graph information online using FOAF since 2004

• With its 10 years of discussions, boards.ie can serve as a rich source of SIOC data for the Social Semantic Web:– The data to be “SIOC-ified” is already all publicly viewable, but it

is difficult to leverage without any added semantics due to the fact that it is embedded in heavily-styled HTML pages

• DERI are sponsoring a competition with prizes (the top prize is €3000) for whoever is judged to have produced the most interesting application(s) that makes use of the SIOC data exported from boards.ie

• To enter, go to http://data.sioc-project.org

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Creating your own exporters

• Use SIOC API(s) if possible:– Or create new APIs to contribute back to the community

• Creating RDF data is easy:– Use the plugin API provided by the host system– Collect required information from the host (CMS) system– Create in-memory RDF or object model (optional)– Serialise RDF data (using RDF API or print templates)

• Seek help from the SIOC developer community:– http://sioc-project.org/ or SIOC-Dev mailing list or #sioc on IRC

149

Explore more producers of SIOC data

• Sioku:– SIOC data from Jaiku microblogging service– http://sioku.sioc-project.org/

• SWAML:– Exports mailing list archives in RDF– http://swaml.berlios.de/

• OpenLink DataSpaces:– Uses SIOC as a representation format for multiple social spaces– http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/wiki/main/Main/OdsIndex/

• Use the Semantic Radar extension for Firefox for detecting / exploring SIOC data:– http://sioc-project.org/firefox

150

151

• There is a lot of Social Semantic Web data available:– From services

– Via exporters

– Hand-crafted

• But it is scattered all around the Web:– How do we find, browse, query, reuse it?

• These need to be addressed:– To provide novel applications that can leverage the interlinked nature of

this data from the Social Web

– To show the benefits of RDF and the Semantic Web

Semantic Web Documents (RDF)

Motivation for finding and reusing semantic data

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Finding data from the Social SW

• PingTheSemanticWeb:– http://pingthesemanticweb.com– A ping service for SW documents– REST or XML/RPC– Accepts, reads different formats:

• RDF/XML, N3, Turtle

– The “blo.gs” of the Semantic Web

• Various ontologies detected by PTSW:– FOAF, DOAP, SIOC, etc.– About 1M documents, 3.7M pings

• “A Scripting Architecture to Discover and Query Decentralized RDF Data”, The 3rd Workshop on Scripting for the Semantic Web (SFSW 2007), Innsbruck, Austria, June 2007

153

• Direct ping to PingTheSemanticWeb:– Blog engines: WordPress, Drupal, etc.– Services: Revyu, TalkDigger

• “Semantic Radar” extension for Firefox:– http://sioc-project.org/firefox– Easy to setup and use (Firefox extension, auto-update)– Support for RDFa!– Architecture of participation: just browse the Web– Discover Semantic Web documents using RDF autodiscovery

links (a popular practice for advertising Atom/RSS and FOAF):<head> <link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF"

href="http://example.com/people/~you/foaf.rdf"/></head>

Advertising RDF data to PTSW

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Click to view SW data.

Semantic Radar in action, sending pings to PTSW

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FireFoxSemantic Radars

Web Services and Software Agents

Semantic Web Documents (RDF)

Ping the Semantic Web

doap:store

• PTSW acts as a central access point for RDF data:– Subscribe to the service– Ask for recent updates– Apply namespace

restrictions (e.g. export FOAF only)

– Get fresh Semantic Web data

– Concentrate on your tools, rather than on finding the data

Reusing data from PTSW

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• Sindice:– Lookup service for Semantic Web documents

• doap:store:– DOAP-based projects directory

• SWSE, Zitgist, Swoogle:– Semantic Web search engines

Existing services that can make use of PTSW

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doap:store

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Write your own Social Semantic Web application

• Find data:– Subscribe to PTSW– Make a crontab script to regularly fetch new data

• Store data:– Plain-text files– RDF stores

• Query the data:– SPARQL query language and protocol, a W3C recommendation– “Trying to use the Semantic Web without SPARQL is like trying to

use a relational database without SQL” - Tim Berners-Lee

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Storing RDF data

• RDF stores:– Storage systems for triples– Better performance that distributed queries– Some support inference engines (OWL, RDFS)– Many provide an open SPARQL endpoint to let people use data

• Various implementations:– YARS (Java)– ARC2 (PHP)– 3Store (C)– Virtuoso, etc.

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Querying RDF data

• SPARQL language:– A language to query a set of triples– REST-protocol between clients and endpoint– Results in standard formats (XML or JSON)– http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-sparql-query/

• SPARQL endpoint:– Remotely accessible data– Data openness– Easy to use, e.g. ARC2 requires just three lines of code:

include_once('path/to/arc/ARC2.php');$ep = ARC2::getStoreEndpoint(array(...));$ep->go();

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Semantic Web Search Engine (SWSE)

• A large-scale Semantic Web search engine developed and run by DERI Galway:– http://swse.deri.org/– Andreas Harth, Jürgen Umbrich, Aidan Hogan, Stefan Decker,

“YARS2: A Federated Repository for Querying Graph Structured Data from the Web”, The 6th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2007), pp. 211-224, Busan, Korea, 2007

What does SWSE do?

• SWSE searches and navigates factual entities collected from over 200,000 data sources

• Components:– Web-scale crawling and object consolidation– Fully-distributed RDF storage and SPARQL query processing using

YARS2 (already achieved 7 billion synthetically generated triples)– Advanced schema agnostic ranking– User interface with guided navigation

• Features:– Ability to handle various entity types (such as people, places, proteins)

and various media types– Tracking provenance of triples using context / named graphs

• Search and explore the Semantic Web at:– http://swse.deri.org/

SWSE™ data flow

QueryProcessorIndexCrawler

UserInterface

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The Sindice lookup index

165

The Sindice SIOC widget

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SPARQLing Social Semantic Web data

• Find all posts and their titles by John, using SELECT, and combining vocabularies (DC, SIOC, SIOC Types):

SELECT ?post ?title

WHERE {

?post rdf:type sioct:BlogPost ;

dc:title ?title ;

sioc:has_creator <$johns_URI> .

}

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SPARQLing Social Semantic Web data (2)

• Find all users that posted replies to John’s blog since January 2008, introducing the FILTER clause:

SELECT ?who

WHERE {

?post rdf:type sioct:BlogPost ;

dc:title ?title ;

sioc:has_creator <$johns_URI> .

?post sioc:has_reply ?reply .

?reply sioc:has_creator ?who ;

dcterms:created ?date .

FILTER (?date > "2008-01-01T00:00:00Z"^^xsd:dateTime)

}

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SPARQLing Social Semantic Web data (3)

• Find all content created by someone with a given OpenID URL:– Browse someone’s social media contributions posted on various

websites using different account names, but for the same person

SELECT ?item

WHERE {

?person foaf:openid <$openid> ;

foaf:holdsAccount ?user .

?user sioc:creator_of ?item .

}

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Parse SPARQL results

• SPARQL XML• JSON:

– Easiest– Many extensions (e.g. PHP5)– Many examples

170

Querying RDF files

• Redland: http://librdf.org• Bindings: Available for PHP, Python, etc.• Example in Python:

Import RDFm = RDF.Model()m.load(‘http://apassant.net/foaf.rdf’)q = RDF.Query("SELECT ?s WHERE { ?s ?p ?o .}")results = q1.execute(model)for result in results:

print result[’s']

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Need more data?

• Translate any data to SIOC:– Re-use SIOC tools for non-SIOC data

• Semantic Pipes:– http://pipes.deri.org/

• SPARQL constructs:– The “XSLT” of RDF– Translate a set of RDF data from one graph format to another– For example:

CONSTRUCT { ?x a sioc:Post . ?x sioc:has_creator ?y }

WHERE { ?x a myont:BlogElement . ?x myont:created_by ?y }

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173

Consuming SIOC as Semantic Web data

• SIOC = RDF data

• Generic Semantic Web applications can be used:– RDF APIs (Jena, Redland, etc.)– RDF crawlers– RDF browsers (Tabulator, Zitgist, SIOC RDF Browser, etc.)– More apps: http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/SW-FAQ#tools

• Customised applications can provide more added value and / or better user interfaces:– SIOC Explorer (faceted browsing of SIOC data)– Buxon, etc.

174

How can SIOC data be used?

175

Browsing SIOC

176

• sparql.captsolo.net/browser

SIOC RDF Browser

177

SIOC RDF Browser (2)

178

SIOC RDF Browser (3)

179

Demonstration of SIOC Explorer

180

Accessing SIOC content from multiple sourcesBrowsing SIOC content from one sourceFilter by “facet” from all sources

• Facet can be a direct or indirect property:

Direct

– The topic of the content item

– The creator of the item

– The date created

…

Indirect

– A geographic location of the person who created it

– The gender of the person

– An interest shared by many creators

181

Social SIOC Explorer

182

Browsing SIOC with Piggy Bank

183

Browsing SIOC with TimeLine

184

Browsing SIOC with TimeLine (2)

185

Semantic MicrOBlogging [SMOB]

186

Semantic MicrOBlogging [SMOB] (2)

• User publishing services can ping one or a set of SMOB aggregating servers (and post on Twitter simultaneously)

• Users can retain control of their own data (in RDF) through self hosting

• For the server, ARC2 is used for storage / querying and Exhibit for the user interface:– Security and privacy are open issues, but can be addressed in

some part by requiring OpenID authentication

• At http://smob.sioc-project.org you can test client / server– Download from http://smob.googlecode.com/

187

Using SIOC and FOAF to represent portable data

188

Porting social media contributions from data providers to import services

• Importing SIOC data:– A Semantic Web “building

block” for portable data

189

SIOC import tools

• Importing SIOC data is easy:– Parse SIOC RDF data (e.g. using ARC2 or RAP for PHP)– Convert SIOC data to the content model of the target system:

• e.g. content and other properties of blog posts and comments• Can use SIOC APIs to hold the data model

– Store data in the target application:• The most difficult part

• More info:– Uldis Bojārs, Alexandre Passant, John Breslin, Stefan Decker,

“Social Network and Data Portability using Semantic Web Technologies”, The 2nd Workshop on Social Aspects of the Web (SAW 2008), Innsbruck, Austria, May 2008

190

WordPress SIOC Importer

• We have lots of producers of SIOC data, but now we need more applications that can consume it, like the SIOC WordPress Importer:– http://wiki.sioc-project.org/w/SIOC_Import_Plugin

• Just as WordPress can import blog entries from various blogging systems, the SIOC importer can import any discussion posts (and comments) represented in SIOC (forum posts, mail messages, IRC chats, etc.)

• SIOC data from various formats (e.g. RDFa, GRDDL) can be used

191

SIOC import process for WordPress

1. Parse RDF data (using the open-source RAP RDF parser for PHP)

2. Find all posts, i.e. instances of sioc:Post, which exhibit all of the properties required by the target site

3. For each post found, it creates a new post and all its comments using WordPress API calls

• To do:• Multiple sources• Authentication• Synchronisation• SIOC import APIs


www.deri.org

5. Leveraging semantics in Enterprise 2.0 SNSs

193

• Semantic Web technologies can be leveraged in organisations for:– Knowledge management– Data integration– Reasoning– Augmented search

• See the SWEO use cases document:– http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/– More than 25 case studies and use cases– Vodafone, NASA, Renault, etc.

Semantic Web in organisations

194

Distributed Web 2.0 corporate information systems

• McAfee’s “SLATES” requirements for Enterprise 2.0:– Search– Links– Authoring– Tagging– Extension– Signals

• The Semantic Web can offer enhanced functionality by interlinking Enterprise 2.0 data with common semantics:– Use back-end ontologies to extend search– Search by type (i.e. restrict to wiki pages)– Provide semantic links between documents

195

Using SIOC in collaborative working environments

196

Accessing BSCW spaces in BC with SIOC / WSDL

197

Interconnecting Enterprise 2.0 services

• RDF hub architecture (Tim Berners-Lee):

– Add-ons to produce RDF data from existing Web 2.0 applications

– Store distributed data using RDF stores

• Create new applications:– Semantic mashups– Semantic search– Open architecture thanks to a

SPARQL endpoint, services as plugins to the architecture

198

OpenLink DataSpaces

• ODS provides access to SIOC instance data from a range of ODS application instances including blogs, wikis, aggregated feeds, shared bookmarks, discussions, photo galleries, briefcases, etc.

199

Talis Engage

200

Seesmic

201

gnizr


www.deri.org

6. Conclusions

203

Addressing the issues

• Object-centred sociality makes sense:– This is the way we really use social websites– Use semantics to describe this usage, by representing objects

that can be linked and reused across sites

• Interlinking disconnected sites and profiles:– Leverage a “vocabulary onion” of linked semantic ontologies

including FOAF and SIOC– Describe people, social networks, content items within and

across sites

• Providing solutions for Enterprise 2.0:– Not only the Social Web, but novel uses in organisations

204

Realisations of how to leverage social semantics

205

A vocabulary onion, building on FOAF, SKOS, SIOC, SIOC Types, DC

206

Disconnected sites on the Social Web / Web 2.0 can be linked using Semantic Web vocabularies

207

Some examples of where SIOC is already use (about 50 implementations / applications)

208

A list of some of these SIOC implementations

Creating SIOC data• SIOC APIs

– SIOC Export API for PHP*– SIOC API for Java*

• Weblog, forum and CMS exporters – WordPress SIOC Exporter– Dotclear SIOC Exporter*– b2evolution SIOC Exporter– Drupal SIOC Exporter– phpBB 2.x SIOC Exporter– Triplify*

• Other exporters – OpenLink DataSpaces*– TalkDigger*– SWAML*– Mailing List Archives*– Mailing List Exporter*– Twitter2RDF*– IRC2RDF*– Sioku (Jaiku2RDF) – gnizr*– OpenQabal*– BlogEngine.NET*

Using SIOC data• SPARQL endpoints, querying SIOC data

– ODS demo server and MyOpenLink.net*– #B4mad.Net SPARQL endpoint*

• Crawling and browsing SIOC data – SIOC Crawler– SIOC Browsers* and SIOC Explorer– Buxon*

• Using SIOC for new data – Fishtank*– BAETLE*– RDFa on Rails*– IkeWiki*– int.ere.st– OpenLink Virtuso AMI*– Talis Engage*

• Reusing SIOC data – IKHarvester, notitio.us and JeromeDL– BSCW*, BC*, Corona*

SIOC utilities• Finding and indexing SIOC data

– Semantic Radar– PingTheSemanticWeb.com*

* Created outside DERI

209

Thank-you… Do you want to know more?

• Thanks to Alexandre Passant for help with the slides

• The SIOC project is supported by Science Foundation Ireland under grant number SFI/02/CE1/I131

• The SIOC project page:– http://sioc-project.org

• The SIOC W3C member submission:– http://www.w3.org/Submission/2007/02

• A SIOC developer mailing list:– http://groups.google.com/group/sioc-

dev

• An IRC chat channel about SIOC:– irc://irc.freenode.net/sioc

• A comprehensive list of SIOC applications:

– http://rdfs.org/sioc/applications/

• The SIOC Browser prototype:– http://sparql.captsolo.net/browser/

• Semantic Radar extension for Firefox:– https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/

firefox/addon/3886