Archive for the 'Semantic Web' Category

Interviewed for Data Portability article on PCWorld.com / WashingtonPost.com; SIOC mentioned

Published
by
Cloud
on 1/2/2008
in DERI, Data Portability, FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Networks, Social Software and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

I was interviewed recently as part of an article by Juan Carlos Perez for PC World about Data Portability, talking about synergies with SIOC (the article has since been syndicated by many media outlets including the Washington Post).

I think Juan wrote a balanced article which outlines the main goals of the initiative and addresses the worries that some companies are still unsure of what to expect. Since DP is just a few months old, it is therefore impressive that companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Plaxo and Digg are getting involved at this early stage.

For those who are unaware of the initiative, the DataPortability.org working group was recently established to look at ways in which data can be ported from one social media service to another. For example, one of their sample scenarios involves using the YADIS communications protocol to discover an identity for a particular person, which then returns a YADIS / XRDS document indicating which identities that person prefers to use and what services those identities are held on. Then, the WRFS abstraction model can be used to find out what containers the returned identities hold on those services.

SIOC is an ideal representation method for describing all content created by a person (via their user accounts) on various social media sites and the structure contained therein (see my previous post). One of the problems with combining social media data is in knowing exactly what accounts the user holds on different social media sites. As mentioned, YADIS / XRDS / WRFS can be used for discovery purposes, and the combination of the FOAF and SIOC vocabularies is particularly well suited to describe a person’s social network profile, their user accounts and the content items created using those accounts in various containers.

Yet SIOC is more that just a way to represent personal containers of data. I think that another task for the DataPortability.org workgroup is to discuss what methods can be used to port not just personal sets of data but whole sets of community data - especially for niche groups. SIOC was initially created to provide a way to describe the content from online communities (mailing lists, message boards, etc). While it was soon used for people’s blogs and more recently for other personal sets of Web 2.0-type content items, it has the concepts needed to describe the structure and contents of a community site as a whole. If someone runs a community site, and they decide that they want to port their group from one place to another, SIOC can be used to describe the structure (and content if combined with other vocabularies) of most community sites in order to re-create it on a different information system.

(Edit: The related workshop on social network portability will be held in Cork on the 2nd of March 2008.)

Programme announced for BlogTalk 2008

Published
by
Cloud
on 23/1/2008
in BlogTalk, Blogs, Cork, Internet, Ireland, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software, Web, Web 2.0 and WebCamp
. 0 Comments

We recently announced the programme schedule for the 5th International Conference on Social Software (and the co-located workshop on social network portability), to be held in Cork in six weeks time. We have an interesting set of keynote speakers and invited panellists so far (with one keynote to be confirmed).

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Also, the list of accepted presentations at the conference is varied and interesting, with some familiar faces and some new ones shown below. (In all, we accepted six presentations from practitioners, two from developers and six from academics. We’ve interspersed these in the schedule, but grouped by related topics.)

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Finally, I’d like to thank our reviewers, without whose help the selection would have been an impossible task. (The breakdown of our committee was seven academics and 15 non-academics).

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If you are interested in participating, I’d advise booking tickets as soon as possible as we do have an upper limit of 200 attendees. We will have a drinks reception in UCC’s Aula Maxima on the Sunday, followed by an optional blogger’s dinner for those interested. On Monday, the main conference dinner will be held in the Kingsley Hotel.

An interesting talk by Mike Brodie…

Published
by
Cloud
on 23/1/2008
in DERI, NUI Galway and Semantic Web
. 0 Comments

…was given at VLDB 2007 recently. Mike (chief scientist with Verizon Services Operations, and chair of the DERI advisory board) also gave this talk internally during his visit to DERI on Monday.

You can view the slides and the introductory video in high or low quality. There are some interesting figures on database growth, web usage and user-generated content in the slides / videos.

Interviewed for SemanticWeb.com

Published
by
Cloud
on 21/1/2008
in DERI, General, NUI Galway, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks and Social Software
. 0 Comments

You can read an interview I did recently with Jupiter Media’s Jennifer Zaino for SemanticWeb.com about SIOC.

The title of the article is SIOC-ing the Semantic Web.

XTech 2008, May 6th-9th 2008, Dublin, Ireland

Published
by
Cloud
on 21/1/2008
in Blogs, DERI, FOAF, General, Internet, Ireland, Podcasts, RSS, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software, Web, Web 2.0 and Wikis
. 3 Comments

Call for Participation for XTech 2008

Proposals for presentations and tutorials are invited for XTech 2008, Europe’s premier web technologies conference. The deadline for submitting proposals is January 25th, 2008.

XTech 2008 will be held from May 6-9th 2008, in Dublin, Ireland.

XTech’s theme this year is “The Web on the Move”, focusing on the emerging portability of data, applications and identity on the internet. We will explore the benefits, issues, practicalities and fun of a web built on open standards, open source and commodity technology.

XTech presentations should inspire, educate and challenge. Your audience will be people like you, responsible for steering the technological direction of their organizations and the web as a whole.

Last year’s schedule can be viewed on the XTech 2007 web site.

Please direct any questions to the conference chair, Edd Dumbill.

View the calls for participation and submit a proposal

Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Social platforms
    • Design patterns for social software
    • Social network interoperability
    • Internet application platforms (Facebook F8, OpenSocial, etc.)
  • Identity management
    • OpenID
    • Practical security
    • OAuth
  • Ajax
    • jQuery, YUI, other toolkits
    • Offline applications
    • Comet
    • Professional Javascript
    • Flex
  • The web of data
    • Collective intelligence
    • Semantic technologies
    • Search
    • Markup and meaning
    • Freebase, Twine, Google Base
    • The place of XML on the web
  • Data and databases
    • Client-side databases
    • REST-oriented databases (e.g. CouchDB)
    • XML and RDF
    • Messaging architectures
    • XQuery
  • Operations and programming
    • Web application frameworks
    • Virtualization and appliances
    • Application scaling
    • Multicore and concurrency oriented programming
  • Mobile devices
    • Commodity mobiles
    • Android, iPhone
    • Hardware hacking and personal prototyping
    • Geolocation
    • Getting the mobile mindset

(Note: DERI will be a co-host of this event.)

Keynote speakers lined up for BlogTalk

Published
by
Cloud
on 8/1/2008
in BlogTalk, Blogs, Cork, Internet, Ireland, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software, US, Web and Web 2.0
. 4 Comments

I’m happy to announce that we have four interesting and varied keynote speakers lined up for the BlogTalk 2008 conference on social software in Cork this March.

  • Nova Spivack - Founder and CEO, Radar Networks
    Nova is the entrepreneur behind the Twine “knowledge networking” application, which allows users to share, organise, and find information with people they trust. He will talk about semantic social software for consumers.
  • Rashmi Sinha - Founder, Uzanto
    Rashmi led the team that produced SlideShare, a popular presentation-sharing service that some have described as “YouTube for PowerPoint”. She will talk about lessons learned from designing social software applications.
  • Salim Ismail - Head of Brickhouse, Yahoo!
    Salim is a successful investor and entrepreneur, with expertise in a variety of early-stage startups and Web 2.0 companies including Confabb and PubSub. He will talk about entrepreneurship and social media.
  • Final speaker has been selected but has yet to be 100% confirmed.

You can see further details and longer biographies of the keynote speakers at 2008.blogtalk.net/invitedspeakers. We will also have two invited panel sessions, the details of which will be announced shortly.

DataPortability.org, web standards, SIOC and FOAF

Published
by
Cloud
on 4/1/2008
in FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Networks, Social Software and WebCamp
. 5 Comments

Leo Sauermann has written an e-mail to the public DataPortability.org mailing list suggesting that the DataPortability.org initiative also takes W3C’s web standards like RDF into account, as well as considering existing efforts like FOAF and SIOC for data portability on the social web. The initiative’s chairperson Chris Saad has indicated that they will put all related communities and standards in context, including RDF (and I assume FOAF and SIOC too).

As co-founder of the SIOC project, I’ve recently been evangelising the fact that SIOC can be used to provide a representation of all content items created by a person (via their user accounts) on various social media sites, and this can be nicely combined with the FOAF profile of that person who holds the associated user accounts (click on the picture below, and see our Internet Computing article for more).

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In the image, Bob holds user accounts on various social websites (two shown for clarity, but here’s another view), and via those accounts he creates content items (usually within containers of some sort, e.g., in a bookmark folder, personal weblog, message board or image gallery) on those sites. He should be able to port not only his social graph (in this case, his connections to Alice and Carol), but also his personal containers / sets of content items and perhaps even associated comment replies. The vocabulary terms are shown in dark grey: foaf:knows, sioc:User, etc.

It’d be great if we can get some of the DataPortability.org people to come to the WebCamp workshop on Social Network Portability in Cork in March. There are some valuable contributors to the initiative so far including Chris Saad, Ashley Angell, Paul Jones, Chris Messina, Ben Metcalfe, Daniela Barbosa, Phill Morle, Ian Forrester, Shashank Tripathi, Kristopher Tate, Paul Keen, Brian Suda, Emily Chang, Danny Ayers, Marc Canter, Jeremy Keith, Peter Saint-Andre, Robyn Tippins, and Robert Scoble.

First SIOC brainstorming session

Published
by
Cloud
on 17/12/2007
in DERI, SIOC and Semantic Web
. 0 Comments

We had our first SIOC brainstorming session in DERI last week, and I think it was quite productive (though I missed a big chunk of it). Thomas Schandl has written up the minutes here, and I’ve vectorised / rendered Uldis’ whiteboard notes below.

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SIOC tutorial accepted for WWW2008

Published
by
Cloud
on 7/12/2007
in General, SIOC, Semantic Web and Web
. 2 Comments

I’m happy to announce that our tutorial proposal on SIOC entitled “Interlinking Online Communities and Enriching Social Software with the Semantic Web” (Uldis Bojars and John Breslin of DERI, NUI Galway, Alexandre Passant of EDF R&D / LaLICC, Université Paris 4) has been accepted for WWW2008, the 14th International World Wide Web Conference to be held in Beijing, China in April. The abstract is as follows:

This tutorial will give an overview of current research issues and solutions for using Semantic Web technologies in order to enrich social software and to interlink online communities. We will discuss current standardisation activities as well as research prototypes, focusing on the work of the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) project. This initiative recently produced the W3C Member Submission for the SIOC Ontology, which describes a standard way to represent rich data from online community sites and Web 2.0 tools in an interoperable form using RDF.

On a larger extent, we will cover additional topics such as search and browsing based on community metadata, large-scale data integration in decentralised communities, and linking social media contributions to the social graph. We will also focus on implementations of tools that work with SIOC data, providing the audience with the know-how to build such systems using open-source APIs and frameworks. We will also discuss how the technologies described in this tutorial can be applied to enterprise scenarios, and we will detail some commercial applications that are now using SIOC.

Finally, we will describe how a network of interlinked communities powered by semantic social software can lead towards the creation of Social Semantic Information Spaces.

A full list of the accepted tutorials is available here.

Tales from the SIOC-o-sphere, part 6

Published
by
Cloud
on 30/11/2007
in Blogs, DERI, FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Software and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

Here are the latest happenings from the world of SIOC during the past few months, with thanks to all involved in supporting the initiative! (Note to new readers that SIOC is an open data format for community description.)