Tutorial title

The Social Semantic Web:
How Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web Can Strengthen Each Other

Slides

You can download a PDF handout version of our slides.

Presenter contact information

John Breslin (john.breslin@nuigalway.ie)
  School of Engineering and Informatics, NUI Galway, Ireland
Alexandre Passant (alexandre.passant@deri.org)
  DERI, NUI Galway, Ireland

Aims/learning objectives

Web 2.0, a platform where people are connecting through their shared objects of interest, is encountering some boundaries in the areas of information integration, portability, search, and demanding tasks like querying. The Semantic Web is an ideal platform for interlinking and performing operations on the diverse data available from Web 2.0 “data silos”, and has produced a variety of approaches to overcome some of the limitations with Web 2.0. In this tutorial, Breslin and Passant aim to educate attendees on the applications of Semantic Web technologies to Web 2.0. They will also describe how Web 2.0 can serve as a very vaulable source of semantically-rich data for Semantic Web applications, solving the oft-quoted “chicken and egg” problem with the Semantic Web. The tutorial is intended for professionals, researchers, graduates, practitioners and developers who wish to learn how Semantic Web technologies can be applied to and leveraged by social software and social media systems.

Duration

The duration will be a half day. The tutorial will consist of PowerPoint presentations accompanied by web demonstrations where needed.

Scope (general topic area)

The scope is the application of Semantic Web technologies to social software applications and technologies such as social networks, microblogging, wikis, etc. as well as to other widely-used aspects of technology usage including enterprise collaboration systems and content aggregators.

Relevance to the summer 2010 time frame

The Semantic Web is increasingly aiming at applications areas. Applications such as blogging and wikis have become very popular and at the same time have begun to create an interconnected information space (through the “blogosphere” and inter-wiki links). At the same time, these applications are experiencing boundaries in terms of information dissemination and automation. Semantic Web approaches have appeared in recent years to overcome some boundaries in these application areas.

Systems such as Drupal will soon be producing semantic data about social media contributions on thousands of sites using formats such as FOAF and SIOC, and this will yield advanced applications in areas ranging from metadata-enabled search to distributed content recommendation. The summer 2010 time frame is an ideal time to describe new and emerging efforts, and also to educate academics and industry practitioners about new application areas or avenues open to commercial exploitation in the Social Semantic Web.

Keywords

web 2.0, semantic web, social media, social software, metadata, ontologies, collaboration, wikis, blogs, microblogging, social information spaces, online communities

Target audience

This course is intended for computer science professionals, researchers and graduate students interested in understanding the technologies and research issues involved in applying Semantic Web technologies to social media applications.

Social software applications require more automated ways for information distribution. Practitioners interested in such application areas will learn about methods for increasing the levels of automation in these forms of web communication.

Prerequisite knowledge of audience

We recommend that the audience have prerequisite knowledge in web-based social software systems such as wikis and blogs, so as to develop and create ideas on how to increase the usability of social software and other web systems using Semantic Web technologies.

Tutorial abstract

This tutorial will give an overview of current frameworks, prototypes and commercial applications for leveraging semantics in social software systems, ranging from content management systems like Drupal to microblogging applications like StatusNet. Following an overview of the motivation for combining Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web, we will proceed with an introduction to various technologies and trends in both the Web 2.0 and Semantic Web domains. This will be followed by a series of sections whereby issues in various Web 2.0 application areas will be discussed, and semantic enhancements to these areas will be described.

These will include online discussion systems such as forums, blogs and mailing lists; knowledge sharing services such as wikis and other sites for (mainly textual) information storage and recovery; multimedia services for sharing images, audio and video files; bookmarking sites and similar services organised around tagging functionality; online social networking services; interlinked online communities; and enterprise applications. Finally, in the last part, we will describe approaches to integrate these social semantic applications in what is termed the Social Semantic Web.

Full description

In this tutorial, we will present the contributions of the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 for interlinked communication and collaboration purposes in the Social Semantic Web.

Of specific interest are current proposals for adding semantics to emerging and established communications media such as microblogging and wikis - several proposals have been developed and are spreading.

We will also cover the usage of Semantic Web technologies for community portals - Semantic Web technologies like SIOC are currently being used to describe the structures of social media contributions, as well as for providing data exports and information sharing.

The table of contents for the tutorial is as follows:

Motivation for applying Semantic Web technologies to the Web 2.0

This part will focus on the motivation for applying Semantic Web technologies to Web 2.0, as summarised in the abstract just given.

Brief introduction to Web 2.0 and social media

We assume the audience has a working knowledge of many of the social software systems we will address, but a brief overview of some trends regarding Web 2.0 and some of its limitations will be given. We shall also give an overview of existing structured content sources/APIs that are available from social websites. Then we will introduce the notion of object-centred sociality (referencing the observations of Jyri Engeström and Karen Knorr-Cetina), where social websites are organised around the objects of interest that connect people together.

Adding semantics to the Web

In this part, we will examine state of the art in the Semantic Web such as metadata and ontology standards and mashups, as well as some efforts aimed at providing semantic search and leveraging linked data. We aim to give a useful primer regarding Semantic Web technologies since this may be new to much of the audience. We shall talk about why object-centred sociality provides a meaning for representing Web 2.0 content using semantics. The section will mainly focus on the ‘uppercase’ Semantic Web (where OWL and RDF are used to represent ontologies and associated metadata), but we will also discuss the ‘lowercase’ semantic web (including microformats).

Discussions

We shall begin by describing current approaches to blogging, and detail how semantic technologies improve both the processes of creating and editing blog posts, and of browsing and querying the data created by blogs (via structured blogging and semantic blogging). We shall also discuss semantic enhancements to forums, mailing lists, and other web-based discussion systems such as microblogging (for lightweight and agile communication on the Web).

Knowledge and information sharing

We shall outline how adding semantics to wikis can offer distinct benefits: augmenting the language text in wiki articles with structured data and typed links enables advanced querying and browsing. We shall examine popular semantic wikis in usage today (e.g. Semantic MediaWiki), and we will look at semantic services that leverage structured information from wikis (such as the DBpedia). We shall also look at the latest wave of knowledge networking and information sharing services (including Twine and Freebase).

Multimedia sharing

We shall begin by looking at Web 2.0 applications for storing and sharing photographs and other images, and describe an application called FlickRDF that exports semantic data from the Flickr service. We shall then describe both audio and video podcasting, and describe the application of semantics to this area. We shall finish with a description of how semantic technologies can be applied to social music services and websites like Last.fm, through projects such as DBTune and the Music Ontology.

Social tagging

We shall look at issues related to tagging/social bookmarking behaviours, and describe how semantics can assist with the tagging process as well as enhancing related aspects such as tag clouds. This is achieved by defining models to represent tagging activities or particular behaviours and by extracting a hierarchy of concepts or vocabularies from tags. Semantic social bookmarking and tagging applications (e.g. int.ere.st, Revyu, LODr) will also be described to emphasise how different aspects of tagging applications can be augmented thanks to Semantic Web technologies.

Social networks

We shall begin with an overview of social networks, and look at current developments regarding the ‘social graph’. We further describe the idea of object-centred sociality as introduced earlier. We shall then discuss initiatives from major Web companies to provide interoperability between social networking applications. We shall finish the section with a description of how open and distributed semantic social networks can be created through definitions such as Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) or XHTML Friends Network (XFN), enabling interoperability between different networks.

Interlinking online communities

We shall describe the usage of Semantic Web technologies for enhancing community portals and for connecting heterogeneous social websites - SIOC is currently being used for information structuring as well as for export and information dissemination. We shall describe current standardisation activities as well as research prototype applications and commercial implementations. We shall also show how SIOC can be combined with other popular vocabularies (including FOAF, SKOS, and Dublin Core) in architectures for community site interoperability. We will look at current projects that enable one to query for topics or to browse distributed discussion content across various types of social websites.

Web 2.0-type applications in enterprise

We shall begin with an overview of Enterprise 2.0, looking at how Web 2.0 applications are being used internally and externally by companies. We shall then examine the application of Semantic Web technologies to Enterprise 2.0 ecosystems. In particular, we will look at the usage of semantics in integrated enterprise social software suites as well as how the Semantic Web can help us to integrate the various components that are being used in Enterprise 2.0 ecosystems.

Towards the Social Semantic Web

Finally, we will discuss and present current approaches to realise the ideas of Vannevar Bush and Doug Engelbart on distributed collaboration infrastructures, towards the Social Semantic Web. We can combine the semantically-enhanced social software applications described in previous sections into an interlinked Social Semantic Web. In the spirit of seminal visions such as the Memex and OHS, we draw parallels with various initiatives for creating semantic connections within and between people’s information spaces.

Throughout the tutorial, we plan to use a multimedia approach, combining traditional presentations with live demos/applications/examples on separate screens, and with the presenters working in tandem to eliminate context switching.

Each module of the tutorial will naturally tend to focus more on one or the other style, but all will use both to help reinforce the concepts.

Tutorial history

In this tutorial we benefit from ongoing research and development on the Semantic Web and social software within the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), the globally-largest effort on and research institute for Semantic Web technology.

Through previous international tutorials (WWW2006, WWW2008, SemTech 2008, etc.), conference presentations, international seminars, and lecture courses at NUI Galway, the presenters have an up-to-date tutorial set that benefits from previous experience and ongoing research work in the social software and Semantic Web areas.

You can see some sample presentations from past tutorials by the presenters at:

• http://slidesha.re/yVrYX
• http://slidesha.re/3QOA8z
• http://slidesha.re/SVD3z

Additionally the presenters are at the forefront of semantic technology applications for social software systems. Dr. Breslin and Dr. Passant are co-leaders of the Social Software Unit at DERI, NUI Galway, and are both researching the Social Semantic Web. They recently authored a book on this topic (published by Springer in October 2009). The presenters are strong supporters of ICWSM: both published separate papers at ICWSM 2007, and Dr. Breslin has been on the programme committees for ICWSM 2008 and ICWSM 2010.

Presenter biography (Dr. John Breslin)

John Breslin is currently a lecturer in the School of Engineering and Informatics at NUI Galway. He is also co-leader of the Social Software Unit at DERI, NUI Galway, where he is researching semantically-enabled social networks and community portals. He is the founder of the SIOC project, which aims to interlink online communities with semantic technologies.

He was previously a postdoctoral researcher at DERI from 2004 to 2008, and a lecturer at the University from 2000 to 2004. He has received a number of awards for website design, including a Golden Spider for the Irish community website boards.ie, which he co-founded in 2000. The Irish Internet Association presented him with Net Visionary awards in 2005 and 2006. Dr. Breslin is a member of Engineers Ireland, the Institution of Engineering and Technology and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

http://www.johnbreslin.org/

Presenter biography (Dr. Alexandre Passant)

Alexandre Passant is a postdoctoral researcher and adjunct lecturer at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway, where he leads the Social Software Unit. His research activities focus around the Semantic Web and Social Software: in particular, how these fields can interact with and benefit from each other in order to provide a socially-enabled machine-readable Web, leading to new services and paradigms for end-users.

Prior to joining DERI, he was a PhD student at Université Paris-Sorbonne and carried out applied research work on "Semantic Web technologies for Enterprise 2.0" at Electricité De France. He is the co-author of SIOC, a model to represent the activities of online communities on the Semantic Web, the author of MOAT, a framework to let people tag their content using Semantic Web technologies, and is also involved in various related applications as well as standardization activities.

http://apassant.net/

Some references

• J.G. Breslin, A. Passant, S. Decker, "The Social Semantic Web", Springer, ISBN 9783642011719, 3 October 2009.
• U. Bojars, J.G. Breslin, A. Finn, S. Decker, "Using the Semantic Web for Linking and Reusing Data Across Web 2.0 Communities", Special Issue on the Semantic Web and Web 2.0 in the Journal of Web Semantics, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 21-28, February 2008.
• J.G. Breslin, S. Decker, "The Future of Social Networks on the Internet: The Need for Semantics", IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 11, pp. 86-90, November 2007.
• U. Bojars, J.G. Breslin, A. Passant, "SIOC Browser - Towards a Richer Blog Browsing Experience", BlogTalks Reloaded: Social Software - Research and Cases, ISBN 3833496142, Vienna, Austria, October 2006.
• J.G. Breslin, A. Harth, U. Bojars, S. Decker, "Towards Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities", The 2nd European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC '05), LNCS 3532, pp. 500-514, Heraklion, Greece, May 2005.