Shaping our futures: the Social Semantic Web

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Survival, Evolution or Extinction? Shaping
Our Futures: the Social Semantic Web

John Breslin

john.breslin@nuigalway.ie
http://www.johnbreslin.org/
© Copyright 2009 Digital Enterprise Research Institute.
All rights reserved.

Social websites, semantics, and libraries

• A move from the Web to a “Social Web”:
– Blogs, Wikipedia, Flickr, etc.
– All powered by people and user-generated content
– The blogosphere doubles in size every five months
• [Digital] libraries need to participate in this ecosystem:
– Contribute metadata to the ecosystem
– Leverage the semantics being created by users

2

Explosion of social / collaborative websites

(disconnected)

From knowledge sharing to book recommendations

Social websites and informal learning

• Estimates that 75-80% of learning is informal, and with 40-50% of
employees accessing information and knowledge from the Social
Web, it is potentially responsible for a large proportion of this
informal learning (up to 30-40%):
– “More than 40% of business users consume social networking
applications like blogs, intranets and RSS feeds more than three times a
week.”
– “More than 30% of respondents read information in wikis, social
networks, discussion boards and videoconferences / IMs more than
three times a week.”
– “More than 20% of respondents contribute to blogs, intranets, social
networks, discussion boards, video conferencing and tagging more than
three times a week.”
• http://www.technewsworld.com/story/59315.html

Enabling users to easily data silos one with them
Social websites are like bring data
Allowing users to easily move from on these islands
Need ways to connect users / their data to another

* Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

What is the Semantic Web?

• Sir Tim Berners-Lee et al., Scientific American, 2001:
– “An extension of the current web in which information is given
well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to
work in cooperation.”
• “Entrepreneurs see a Web guided by common sense”,
John Markoff, New York Times, 2006:
– “Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very
idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an
unobtainable vision. But the underlying technologies are rapidly
gaining adherents, at big companies like IBM and Google as well
as small ones.”
• Requires web pages to have metadata with underlying
ontologies

It’s all a big graph of triples!

#Bob interest
knows

#Alice interest dbpedia.org/
name resource/
Guitar

type
Alice Cooper
Metadata
Ontology
type

type
xmlns.com/
foaf/0.1/ interest
knows Person
xmlns.com/
foaf/0.1/ interest www.w3.org/
Person 1999/02/
name
22-rdf-syntax-ns#
www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#Literal resource

Towards a Social Semantic Web

Previously in digital content and digital libraries

• Digital libraries provide:
– Databases and archiving (storage)
– Digital bibliographic descriptions (metadata)
– Full-text search (interface)
• Advantages:
– Content is accessible online
– Federations of libraries, have to visit less places
• Disadvantages:
– Lonely users!
– If we need to find the right keywords, there is no one to ask
when we do not know them (e.g. “man without an ear” paintings)
– Still many problems with connecting to other sources

10

Possibilities with today’s interlinked social media

• Towards social semantic information spaces:
– Semantic descriptions (interconnected metadata)
– Annotations provided by users (social metadata)
– Collaborative search and browsing (interface)
• Features associated with this:
– Search and browsing based on semantics empowers users
– Users contribute to the classification process
– Users can understand community-driven annotations
– Users enhance digital content using blogs, wikis on the side
– Library can interact with other Internet services

11

JeromeDL, DERI’s social semantic digital library

• Integrated social networking with user profiling
• Enhanced personalised search facility
• Interconnects meaningful descriptions of resources with
social media
• Extensible access control based on social networks
• Collaborative browsing and filtering
• Dynamic collections
• Integration with other Web 2.0 services
• Open source!

Towards “Library 2.0” (3.0)?

• Users become active producers of the content and
metadata
JeromeDL can turn a single resource into a blog post:
– Users can then annotate it
– Users can also rank it
– Metadata about user annotations is exported for other services
• Community annotations for multimedia:
– Region of interest (ROI) tagging in photos
– Time-tagging of video streams (e.g. video lectures)
• Other Web 2.0 services can easily hook up to the
information and services provided by JeromeDL

Exposing semantics in library contents to search

• Yahoo! Search Monkey and Google Rich Snippets
• Highlights the structured data embedded in web pages

• Google developers have indicated that scholarly
publications marked up with Rich Snippets will also be
picked up and appropriately indexed by Google Scholar

Shaping our futures: the Social Semantic Web

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