Archive for the 'Social Networks' Category

Prototype for distributed / decentralised microblogging using semantics

Published
by
Cloud
on 9/5/2008
in Blogs, DERI, Data Portability, FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch wrote an interesting blog post on Monday about a “decentralised Twitter”, which was picked up by Dave Winer, Marc Canter and Chris Saad amongst others.

I’m happy to say that we have recently described and shown how this can work. Alex has been the driving force behind a paper that we (Alexandre Passant, Tuukka Hastrup, Uldis Bojars and I) have written for SFSW 2008, demonstrating (a prototype called SMOB for) distributed / decentralised microblogging:

Microblogging: A Semantic Web and Distributed Approach

The prototype uses FOAF and SIOC to model microbloggers, their properties, account and service information, and the microblog updates that users create. A multitude of publishing services can ping one or a set of aggregating servers as selected by each user, and it is important to note that users retain control of their own data through self hosting.

The aggregate view of microblogs use ARC2 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.

The SMOB prototype code (both the semantic microblogging publishing client and server-based web service) is available here. You can install your own client and post to our demo server (set up today by Tuukka) here. There are some pictures below of it in use:

20080505a.jpg
Latest updates rendered in Exhibit

20080505b.jpg
Map view of latest updates with Exhibit

20080505c.png
Global architecture of distributed semantic microbloggging

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I wish I was going to XTech 2008 in Dublin…

Published
by
Cloud
on 6/5/2008
in DERI, Data Portability, FOAF, Internet, Ireland, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software, Web and Web 2.0
. 5 Comments

…but unfortunately due to a major review here next week, I have a lot of presentation preparation to do.

Anyway, if I were going to XTech 2008 tomorrow in Dublin, here’s what I’d go to see (thanks to the XTech 2008 personal scheduler):

9:45 Wednesday, 7 May 2008
Opening keynote
David Recordon (Six Apart)

11:00 Wednesday, 7 May 2008
Using socially authored content to provide new routes through existing content archives
Rob Lee (Rattle Research)

11:45 Wednesday, 7 May 2008
Browsers on the move: The year in review, the year ahead
Michael(tm) Smith (W3C)

14:00 Wednesday, 7 May 2008
Here Be Dragons: Knowing Where the World Ends
Leigh Dodds (Ingenta)

14:45 Wednesday, 7 May 2008
Linked Data Deployment
Daniel Lewis (OpenLink Software)

9:00 Thursday, 8 May 2008
OpenSocial, a standard programming model for the Social Web
Matthew Trewhella (Google)

9:45 Thursday, 8 May 2008
Creating portable social networks with microformats
Jeremy Keith (Clearleft)

11:00 Thursday, 8 May 2008
The Programmes Ontology
Tom Scott (BBC Audio and Music Interactive), Yves Raimond (Queen Mary, University of London), Patrick Sinclair (BBC Audio and Music Interactive), Nicholas Humfrey (BBC Audio and Music Interactive)

11:45 Thursday, 8 May 2008
Ni Hao, Monde: Connecting communities across cultural and linguistic boundaries
Simon Batistoni (Flickr)

14:00 Thursday, 8 May 2008
SemWebbing the London Gazette
Jeni Tennison (The Stationery Office), John Sheridan (The Office of Public Sector Information)

14:45 Thursday, 8 May 2008
Data portability for whom? Some psychology behind the tech
Gavin Bell (Nature)

16:00 Thursday, 8 May 2008
Google Data APIs on the move: innovation vs. Standards Compliance
Frank Mantek (Google)

16:45 Thursday, 8 May 2008
The attention economy is only just around the corner
Ian Forrester (BBC)

9:00 Friday, 9 May 2008
Data Portability with SIOC and FOAF
Uldis Bojārs (DERI Galway), John Breslin (DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway), Alexandre Passant (LaLIC institute (at Université Paris Sorbonne) and Electricité de France R&D)

(Here is the full schedule.)

CELT talk / WWW@15 on Morning Ireland / Ulrich Schnauss

Published
by
Cloud
on 2/5/2008
in Blogs, DERI, Education, Music, NUI Galway, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software, Web and Wikis
. 1 Comment

A mixed-up blog post, but I haven’t the energy to write three separate posts, so here’s a three-in-one:

  • On Wednesday, I gave a talk at CELT, NUI Galway about “Learning via the Social Web”, which was a slightly-revised version of the one I gave in February. Again, there was an amazing turnout, and there will be a webcast made available via the CELT website at a later date. For now, you can access the PowerPoint slides here.
  • Yesterday, Damien Mulley and I were interviewed by Richard Downes on RTÉ R1 Morning Ireland about the 15th anniversary of CERN releasing the World Wide Web code for free (podcast available here; alternatively there’s an extracted clip here). I talked a little bit about the WWW versus UMn’s Gopher, and how the Web has expanded beyond the initial target audience of academics and researchers. I gave a slightly-tangential answer to a question I was asked about the importance of the Web to Ireland’s future and economy (FYI: CSO 2007 ICT stats), saying how dependent we are on the Web to do many tasks today, and describing how our work at DERI in NUI Galway will help us to deal with the current over-abundance of websites, by adding more structure to web pages so that computers can help us in finding the right information. “Are you telling me that the future of the Web […] is being designed in Galway?”, Richard asked at one point. Yes!!! Finally, I mentioned how the problems with online video gridlock may have larger consequences as the Web is increasingly moving from the desktop to mobile devices where bandwidth is even more important, so smarter ways are needed to reduce exactly what will be sent to your phone (FYI: Opera Mini is a nice example, a tiny Java browser that works on most phones where the content is pre-filtered server-side before it gets to you).
  • Last night, I went along with friend Conrad to see Ulrich Schnauss at Stress in DeBurgo’s here in Galway. Although I missed the encore (it had been a long day, with a nine-hour session at work), I really enjoyed the night and the support acts: Beatpoet was great playing on his mono-something device, and Airiel were pretty good too :)

Slides from the SIOC tutorial at WWW2008

Published
by
Cloud
on 28/4/2008
in Blogs, China, DERI, Data Portability, FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software, Web, Web 2.0 and Wikis
. 0 Comments Tags: .

Here are the PowerPoint slides from our tutorial on “Interlinking Online Communities and Enriching Social Software with the Semantic Web” at the World Wide Web Conference in Beijing - you can also download them from here:

The tutorial went well, it was hot in the room and we were a bit jetlagged, but we had some good feedback afterwards and about 30 people attended in all.

I had a nice few days in Beijing, participating in the W3C advisory commitee meeting on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, giving our SIOC tutorial with Alex and Uldis on Monday afternoon, popping along to our paper at the Linked Data on the Web workshop on Tuesday, attending some sessions on Wednesday (Kai-Fu Lee’s plenary keynote on Cloud Computing, the discussion panel with Lada Adamic et al. on the Future of Online Social Interactions, the W3C Open Your Data! track, and a packed session on Social Networks: Discovery and Evolution of Communities). On Thursday, I gave a talk about DERI at Tsinghua University to Cemon Yang and his team at the Digital Government / Web and Software Research Centre. Thursday evening we had the banquet in the Great Hall of the People, and I headed back to Ireland on Friday.

Unfortunately I saw little of Beijing outside of travelling between venues in taxis and buses, so I have a good reason to return and see / do more next time…

Really cool SIOC widget from Sindice (for WordPress)

Published
by
Cloud
on 20/4/2008
in DERI, FOAF, NUI Galway, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software and Web 2.0
. 3 Comments Tags: , .

I’ve installed the new Sindice SIOC widget, produced by Adam, Fabio and Giovanni from the Sindice team.

As you can see, if you look at the post author or click into any comments list, each user now has a speech bubble beside the username. Clicking on this bubble will show you posts, comments and topics created by that user across the “SIOC-o-sphere”.

20080411b.png

You can also click on any arrow icon beside a link in a blog post to see where else it has been referenced, like this one.

There is a Sindice SIOC API available which serves as a gateway to SIOC data via the Sindice discovery and search services, enabling the verification of the presence of a user or a link on the SIOC-o-sphere as indexed within Sindice.

DataPortability lunch meetup in London / OpenSocial hackathon

Published
by
Cloud
on 11/4/2008
in Data Portability, FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Networks and Social Software
. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

20080411a.png

I attended the DataPortability lunch meetup in London on Sunday (see link to some photos above), where I met up with DP enthusiasts including Tom Morris, Tony Haile, Chris Saad (founder), Cassandra Shanks, Imp, Julian Bond, Christian Scholz, and Sokratis Papafloratos. We had some great food and interesting discussions, including DP scenarios, the scope of DataPortability (is it more than just the Social Web?), SIOC, forthcoming announcements, and more…

Tom, Christian and I went to the OpenSocial hackathon at the BT centre afterwards. I spoke with organiser Michael Mahemoff briefly, and Dan Peterson invited us to attend the forthcoming Google I/O event in May. I also listened in to Dan Brickley and Cassie discuss connections between FOAF and the OpenSocial APIs. (Unfortunately, I missed the presentations which were on in the morning before I arrived in London.)

Danja rocks with his “DataPortability and me” video / some slides I’ve made for DP+SIOC

Published
by
Cloud
on 31/3/2008
in Data Portability, FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks, Social Software and Web 2.0
. 1 Comment Tags: .

Wow! Danny Ayers has made the best video I’ve seen for the “DataPortability and me” competition, which ends today:

Travelling on the train to Dublin and back this morning, I gathered and made some slides for future presentations on DataPortability and SIOC:

(De-)centralised me

Published
by
Cloud
on 30/3/2008
in Data Portability, FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Media, Social Networks and Social Software
. 2 Comments Tags: .

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington has an interesting article today about the “centralised me”, a follow-up to Loic Le Meur’s post about wanting to re-centralise his decentralised social “map”. Here is a picture I drew some time back showing the decentralised me:

20080330a.png

I previously talked about how SIOC and FOAF can be used to represent this, and how this representation of people’s decentralised content is tied to the networks formed via social objects. (See also this paper.)

This is certainly something that fits with the ideas of DataPortability. I think people may have different requirements, including:

  • I may want to centralise my stuff on my own service, like Loic outlined.
  • I may want to see my stuff on a third-party service providing an aggregate view, like FriendFeed.
  • I may want to move all my stuff from multiple services to one third-party service.
  • I may just 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 Blog Service).

DataPortability, Microsoft’s Contacts API and OpenSocial.org

Published
by
Cloud
on 26/3/2008
in Data Portability, FOAF, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Networks, Social Software and Web 2.0
. 5 Comments Tags: , , , .

20080326a.png (No, the picture I created on the right ISN’T the new DataPortability logo; I totally missed out on the closing date, but it will serve as an image for this blog post. There have been some very cool submissions for the competition however.)

There were two interesting announcements yesterday in the portability space. The first was from Microsoft, announcing that they would be “working with Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, Tagged and LinkedIn to exchange functionally-similar Contacts APIs, allowing us to create a safe, secure two-way street for users to move their relationships between our respective services” (Contacts APIs provide contact data portability). The second was from Google, Yahoo! and MySpace, jointly announcing that an OpenSocial Foundation is to be formed as a non-profit entity (OpenSocial provides social application portability). Unfortunately, there is still some confusion regarding exactly what data portability functionality OpenSocial will offer (if any), and at the moment the consensus seems to be that DataPortability and OpenSocial aren’t as related as previously thought.

DataPortability (including Microsoft’s move in this area) is mainly about users being able to have portable data (profiles, identities, content like photos, videos, discussion posts) that they can move between the services and sites that they trust and choose to use. (See Uno de Waal’s interesting post on how the Microsoft Invite2Messenger service allows you to get your Facebook friends’ e-mail addresses in plain text.)

OpenSocial on the other hand is more about “gadget” portability, where social applications can be deployed across a variety of social networking sites. As summarised by Julian Bond, OpenSocial consists of a gadget API (for gadget programmers) and a standard for site owners to implement these gadgets on their own sites. The part of OpenSocial related to DataPortability is a REST API, details of which are a bit vague right now. Not to be confused with OpenSocial (although the similar names make this difficult), the Social Graph API from Google is more related to DataPortability as it indexes semantic data from many social networking sites like Hi5, MySpace, LiveJournal, Twitter, etc. and allows users to bring their social graph with them when they sign up for a new site that supports the API.

Apart from the lack of intersection between Microsoft (plus affiliate Facebook) and Google, a good few companies are in multiple “camps” (DataPortability, Contacts APIs, OpenSocial), as shown by the Venn diagram I drew below:

20080326b.png

Marc Canter and others have pointed out that although the Contact APIs from Microsoft are not open in themselves, at least the APIs seem to export as much data as they can import. Marc also says that Microsoft (and other big companies) may not be explicitly following the actions (e.g. the technical recommendations) of the DataPortability initiative, but rather claims that it would hurt them if they didn’t open up and go along with some portable data efforts given the current climate and the tide of users in favour of this.

For users to have true data portability, there needs to be some consensus on both the APIs and the formats needed to transfer / represent this portable data. It may be that a number of APIs and formats are required for different scenarios. The Semantic Web is an ideal means for representing the data to be ported from social websites, in that is well suited (using vocabularies like SIOC and FOAF) to represent how people and all kinds of objects on these sites are connected together (documents, discussions, meetups, places, interests, media files - whatever). Of course other data formats may be used, but most importantly, it would be a waste of time to come up with a bunch of new formats for representing the data that needs to be portable, because a lot of work has been done on how to best provide interoperable, reusable and linked data through efforts like the Semantic Web, AtomPub and the microformats community.

I’ll be attending the DataPortability Lunch Meetup in London on the 6th April 2008 if anyone there feels like a chat about some of these topics…

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Nova Spivack visits DERI, NUI Galway and talks about Twine: Radar Networks’ semantic social software product in beta

Published
by
Cloud
on 25/3/2008
in BlogTalk, DERI, FOAF, Galway, NUI Galway, SIOC, Semantic Web, Social Networks, Social Software, US and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

20080325b.png In association with the IT Association of Galway, DERI recently invited Radar Networks‘ Nova Spivack to speak at our research institute in the National University of Ireland, Galway (Nova also gave a keynote talk at BlogTalk 2008 in Cork).

Nova is CEO of one of the companies that is practically applying Semantic Web technologies to social software applications. Radar have a beta product called Twine which is a “knowledge networking” application that allows users to share, organise, and find information with people they trust. People create and join “twines” (community containers) around certain topics of interest, and items (documents, bookmarks, media files, etc., that can be commented on) are posted to these twines through a variety of methods. The seminar room was full of both “DERIzens” and members of Galway’s IT community for Nova’s talk on the Semantic Web and Twine (see his slides here), and after a lengthy question-and-answers session, this was followed by some presentations to Nova of ongoing research work in DERI.

20080325c.png I personally find Twine very interesting, and as well as using it to gather information about SIOC, I intend to use it to gather and publish personal interests that I think will be of interest to the public (once it leaves beta). As well as producing semantic data (just stick “?rdf” onto the end of any twine.com URL), Twine features some cool functionality that elevates it beyond the social bookmarking sites to which it has been compared, including an extensive choice of twineable item types, twined item customisation (”add detail”) and the “e-mail to a twine” feature, all of which I believe are extremely useful. (I have a few Twine invites left for readers of my blog; drop me an e-mail if you need one.)

There is also the community aspects of twines. I forsee that these twines will act as the “social objects” (see presentation by Jyri) that will draw you back to the service, in a much stronger manner than other social bookmarking sites currently do (due to Twine’s more viral nature, its stronger social networking functionality, better commenting, and a more identifiable “home” for these objects). Of course, having more public users will help, but from experience I know that it is a good idea to build on a core group of regular users (in Twine’s case, mainly techies) before increasing the user base too much.

It’s been an exciting few months in terms of announcements relating to commercial Semantic Web applications. As I mentioned recently in an interview with Rob Cawte for the web2.0japan.com blog, this is becoming obvious with the attention being given to startup companies in this space like Powerset, Metaweb (Freebase) and Radar Networks (Twine), and also since many big companies including Reuters (Calais API), Yahoo! (semantically-enhanced search) and Google (Social Graph API) have recently announced what they are doing with semantic data. There has been a lot of talk recently about the social graph (notably from Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick), which looks at how people are connected together (friends, colleagues, neighbours, etc.), and how such connections can be leveraged across websites. On the Semantic Web with vocabularies like FOAF, SIOC, etc., it is not just people who are connected together in some meaningful way, but documents, events, places, hobbies, pictures, you name it! And it is the commercial applications that exploit these connections that are now becoming interesting…

(Edit: Nova Spivack has blogged about his visit.)