SWAD-Europe Deliverable 3.16: Final
Workshop Report
Contents
Summary
- Introduction and
Background
- Workshop
- Outcomes
- Conclusions
Appendix A: Evaluation
References
This report is part of the SWAD-Europe project Work package 3:
Dissemination and Implementation.
The final workshop of the SWAD-Europe project was on the topic
of FOAF, Social Networking and the Semantic Web. It was on a larger
scale than previous SWAD-Europe workshops (103 attendees), and was
co-organised with DERI in Galway, Ireland. This document provides
an overview of the workshop themes and programme, summarises the
post-workshop evaluation and possible future work at W3C in this
area. See the workshop
website for full details of the programme and other supporting
materials.
The FOAF (Friend of a Friend) project explores a unique
combination of themes from social networking, search engines,
knowledge representation and software development. FOAF was
designed as a practical experiment that would highlight the
technical, social and business challenges raised by the next
generation of "Semantic" Web technology. Over the past few years,
the FOAF developer community has been working on standards-based
techniques for publishing and harvesting machine-readable
descriptions of people, the links between them, and the things they
create and do. The working assumption of the project is that such
techniques will underpin the deployment of the next generation of
Web technology, W3C's "Semantic Web". The FOAF project was created
in the expectation that these machine-readable descriptions will
grow, as the Semantic Web platform matures, to cover companies,
organisations, documents, groups, products, file sharing and many
other aspects of life, both online and off. The time has come to
evaluate these assumptions in the context of the opportunities and
challenges presented by the rise of FOAF and the Semantic Web.
Social networking is a recent topic gaining much interest and
publicity. Social networking sites are community sites where users
can maintain an online network of friends or associates for social
or business purposes: whether looking for a job, reconnecting with
old friends, moving to a new area, or dating. Most of these sites
are based on a centralised architecture: all users' descriptions
are stored in one big database. There is, however, growing user and
business interest in portability between such sites, and for
sophisticated "single sign-on" mechanisms that reduce the need for
data re-entry, while allowing users to manifest different aspects
of themselves in different contexts. FOAF-based import/export
allows such sites to address user demand for control of "their"
data; however, many deployment, privacy, authentication and
engineering issues have not yet been fully explored. To what extent
do mechanisms such as FOAF change the environment they attempt to
describe? How can the visibility of personal data be restricted to
certain audiences? How can businesses make money when their
customers can migrate to new services with increased ease?
This workshop on FOAF, social networking and the Semantic Web
provided a first chance to discuss the unusual combination of
perspectives - academic and scientific, engineering, social, legal
and business - drawn together by these trends. The workshop brought
together for the first time researchers interested in the effects,
analysis and application of social networks on the (Semantic) Web
as well as practitioners building applications and infrastructure.
The workshop also created, in effect, a snapshot of current
developments, and was helpful in exploring a roadmap for the future
of both FOAF and social networking - especially in the context of
the Semantic Web and standardisation.
Topics solicited in the call for participation (and covered in
the papers) included:
- Social network metadata standardsTrust issues in social
networks
- Profiles of FOAF, subsets, mapping to other vocabularies and
formats
- Federated digital identity, single sign-on (decentralized
identity management)
- Business models for the Semantic Web (life after banner
advertisements)
- Integration with desktop and mobile applications (chat, IM,
P2P, Bluetooth, address books, RSS/Atom)
- Privacy, etiquette and best practice issues for
aggregators
- Infrastructure for social networking
- Applications of online social networking
- Knowledge management with social networks
- Mathematical analysis of social networks
- Exchange of social network information
- Applications of online social networks
- Shared annotations
- Use of digital signatures and encryption with RDF/XML
- RDF-based search engines, data harvesting and syndication
- GUIs (browsers, editors) for FOAF and Semantic Web data
- Formalisms that address practical problems of heterogenous
changing data
- Pragmatics of sharing data schemas across subtly different
datasets
The workshop was held over two days in Galway, and (see
evaluation in Appendix A) was generally considered to be very
successful. It brought together researchers, business people,
opensource developers, and allowed for both formal academic-style
presentations as well as more informal, self-determined
collaborative breakout sessions.
16 Full Papers and 27 Position Papers were accepted for the
workshop, and are available from the workshop
web site.
Full Papers
- Bootstrapping
the FOAF-Web: An Experiment in Social Network Mining Peter
Mika
-
Descriptions of Social Relations Peter Mika, Aldo Gangemi
- FOAF-Realm -
control your friends' access to resources Sebastian Ryszard
Kruk
-
Keyword Extraction from the Web for FOAF Metadata Junichiro
Mori, Yutaka Matsuo, Mitsuru Ishizuka, Boi Faltings
-
Linking Semantically-Enabled Online Community Sites Andreas
Harth, John G. Breslin, Ina O'Murchu, Stefan Decker
-
Using RDF + FOAF to create a local business review and search
network Chris Schmidt
-
Moleskiing: a Trust-aware Decentralized Recommender System
Paolo Avesani, Paolo Massa, Roberto Tiella
- A
model of trust and anonymity in a content rating system for
e-learning systems. Tom Croucher
- Open
Rating Systems R.V Guha
-
Ontological Consideration on Human Relationship Vocabulary for
FOAF Yutaka Matsuo, Masahiro Hamasaki, Junichiro Mori, Hideaki
Takeda, Koiti Hasida
- The
People's Portal: Ontology Management on Community Portals Anna
V. Zhdanova
- Redefining
Web-of-Trust: reputation, recommendations, responsibility and trust
among peers Viktor S. Grishchenko
- rss4you:
Web-Based Syndication Enhanced with Social Navigation Nicolas
Nova, Roberto Ortelli
- The
Semantic Web as a Semantic Soup Harith Alani, Simon Cox, Hugh
Glaser, Steve Harris
-
Technical and Privacy Challenges for Integrating FOAF into Existing
Applications Joseph Smarr
-
The Challenges of FOAF Characterization John C. Paolillo and
Elijah Wright
Position Papers
- Creating
a Social Network from an Existing Bulletin Board Community John
G. Breslin
- Exploiting
Familiar Strangers: creating a community content distribution
network by co-located individuals Jamie Lawrence and Terry
Payne
- Extending
FOAF with Resume Information Uldis Bojars
- Fentwine:
A navigational RDF browser and editor Benja Fallenstein
- FOAF
driven development Dave Beckett
- On
the Use of FOAF in Semantic Web Portals Knud Moller, Livia
Predoiu
- FoafNet Marc
Canter
- FoafScape Mark
Giereth
- Ghosts
in the Semantic Web Machine? mc schraefel, Alun Preece, Nick
Gibbins, Steve Harris, Ian Millard
- Knowledge
sharing using Semantic Web technologies, Nick Kings
- Learning
new things about your friends A FOAF Position Paper Gunnar
AAstrand Grimnes, Alun Preece, Pete Edwards
- The LJ
Viewlet Troy Gardner
-
The REL Project: Mobile-based Reliable Relations Jean-Marc
Seigneur, Patroklos Argyroudis, David O'Callaghan, Joerg
Abendroth,
- Estimating
whether partial FOAF descriptions describe the same individual
Simon Price, Simon Rawles and Peter Flach
-
Personal Digital Identity Management Dick Hardt
- Rhizome
Position Paper Adam Souzis
- Semantic
Campus - A FOAF Extension Benjamin Nowack
-
Semantic Interaction with Music Content using FOAF Oscar Celma,
Miquel Ramrez, and Perfecto Herrera
- Semantic
Planet Position Paper Ian Davis, James Carlyle
-
Semblog: Personal Publishing Platform with RSS and FOAF, Ikki
Ohmukai, Hideaki Takeda
- SemIndex:
Preliminary results from semantic web indexing Stephen Harris,
Nicholas Gibbins and Terry Payne
- Social
Networking Portals: an Overview and Evaluation Ina O'Murchu,
John G. Breslin, Stefan Decker
- Statement
of Interest Klaus Schild
- WhatILike Hugh
Glaser, Steve Harris, Kevin Page, Daniel Smith
- Validating RDF
with TreeHugger and Schematron Damian Steer, Libby Miller
- FOAF to
the People Timothy Falconer
- Token
Based Authentication -- Implementation Demonstration Chris
Schmidt
The workshop
programme included 11 of these papers, in 30 and 15 minute time
slots, as well as three breakout sessions and a panel on the theme
of "I want my data back", which drew together some of the business
and technical concerns associated with FOAF-like technology.
4. Conclusions
The workshop exceeded our expectations in many ways. It was
generally considered by attendees to have been enjoyable,
educational and productive. Within the SWAD-Europe project,
discussions at the workshop have helped us tie together some themes
from different workpackages. In a W3C context, practical
discussions at the workshop have fed into the Semantic Web Best
Practices WG, in particular the new Task Force on RDF/SW Vocabulary
Management. The success of the workshop has also prompted some
discussions within W3C about the possibility for beginning
standards-track work in the areas covered by the workshop. At the
time of writing, this is under active investigation. Themes from
the workshop have also been followed up in the context of the W3C
Semantic Web Interest Group (SWIG), and in the FOAF project itself.
In this way, the SWAD-Europe final workshop measures up well
against the original goals of the project, which sought to
establish and support grassroots communities whose efforts could
feed into more formal standardisation efforts.
We used the ILRT's BOS [BOS] system to gather information from
the workshop participants. The participants were asked eight
questions:
- their sector (industry education content provider Open Source
developer)
- their country
- their rating of the workshop overall, and overall comments
- ratings of the usefulness of short talks, long talks, panel and
breakout session
- their rating of introductions, breakout sessions (by session)
and panel
- how improvements could be made
- other comments
44 people responded out of a possible total of 103. The majority
of the attendees who responded self-described as 'education'
(60.5%) with the largest other group being "Industry" (27.9%), and
9.3% as "Open Source Developers". There were no "Content providers"
and one person described themselves as being in
"standardisation"
Of the respondents, attendees were based in 14 countries:
Ireland (14), UK (10), USA (6), Japan (2), Austria (2),
Switzerland, Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy,
Latvia, Russia, Spain (all 1)
Overall the workshop was rated very highly with 46.5% rating it
reasonably useful and 48.8% very useful, 41 people in total.
There were some practical suggestions for improvement, in
particular the usefulness of the breakout sessions seemed quite
varied. Most people found them useful, but comments also
included:
- Make the breakouts longer (more workshop?)
- Workshops should be programed in advance.
- Re. breakout sessions overall - I suggest a part of the
breakout sessions to have a pre-set subjects. If the subjects are
assigned on-the-spot, then there is a probability that some of the
subjects important for FOAF are missing - one way could be to have
50% of session titles to be determined by the community before. on
a suggesting / voting basis or something similar.
However the opportunity to meet and talk fairly informally and
in small groups was appreciated:
- I found the most informative and productive times for me were
the breakout sessions and small groups discussing niche issues
after the workshop officially ended for the day (e.g. at the pub
afterwards). Encouraging more of these informal settings (seen with
great success elsewhere at events such as FOO/FOAF Camp) would be a
benefit to all.
- add more excuses for people to get together and talk (like
dinner, but without having to shout). better planned breakout
sessions (happened too quick, and in some ways was merely
self-serving (people's own projects)
There were varied responses to the papers; comments included
- Maybe it would be wise to select some more theoretical papers -
but you should also keep some practical papers as it was this
time.
- There needs to be a better mix of people, not just academic vs
industry but sociologists vs comp sci. FOAF is, or should be, as
much about the social aspects as the semantic web representational
issues. It was all beer guts and beards this time - a typical geek
fest.
- Some more papers on building rdf ontologies: things to do and
not to do, things to watch out for.
- Better talks (more entertaining) and maybe a bit more
focus.
A selection of 'other' comments:
- Timing is everything and this was a very timely event.
Thanks!
- Fantastic job - thanks very much
- I enjoyed the workshop a lot.
- The workshop was very well organized, well run, and useful. I
have no complaints at all.
- Choice of location was excellent: it felt different and cool,
but it was very practical. Thanks!
- I really appreciate the work that went into organising this -
it means a great deal to be able to meet face to face and it will
certainly spur renewed enthusiasm in SemWeb development and easier
cooperation in the coming year.
- thanks for all your hard work! it was really a blast!
- All in all the workshop was very useful.
- I really enjoyed the workshop. It was great work ! :-)
- [CPF]
- SWAD-Europe
Final Workshop Call for Papers
- [PAPERS]
- SWAD-Europe
Final Workshop list of accepted papers
- [PROGRAMME]
-
SWAD-Europe Final Workshop Programme
- [BOS]
- Bristol Online
Surveys (BOS)