SIOC/WWW2008TutorialProposal

From W3C Wiki

Submission Details

All tutorial proposals must include:

  • Tutorial title;
  • Presenter contact information;
  • Aims/Learning objectives;
  • Duration (half or full day; if full day, could it scaled to half-day if necessary?);
  • Scope (general topic area);
  • Relevance to WWW2008 attendees;
  • Keywords;
  • Target audience;
  • Prerequisite knowledge of audience;
  • Tutorial abstract (1-2 paragraphs suitable for inclusion in conference registration materials);
  • Full description (1-2 pages to be used for evaluation);
  • Will tutorial materials be provided to attendees? If so, are there any copyright issues?
  • Tutorial history (previous offerings of tutorial if any)
  • Presenter biography;
  • Relevant references that would support proposal evaluation;

Tutorial proposals should be submitted in PDF using the WWW2008 submission site. Do not use the two-column style, instead use a simple one-column style on letter-sized paper. Preliminary inquiries can be sent to tutorials@www2008.org.

Proposal

Title

"Interlinking Online Communities and Enriching Social Software with the Semantic Web"

Presenter contact information

  • John Breslin (john.breslin@deri.org)
  • Uldis Bojārs (uldis.bojars@deri.org)
  • Alexandre Passant (alexandre.passant@paris4.sorbonne.fr)

Aims/Learning objectives

Online communities and social networks are growing up very fast on the World Wide Web. So, it's necessary to research about new approaches for social software.

The aim of this tutorial is to educate about how the Semantic Web could help connecting all these web sites and, obviously, their knowledge. There are many scenarios where Semantic Web technologies could be applied on areas of collaboration / communication systems and social software, including semantic blogs, community sites, semantic wikis, mailing lists, semantic desktop, etc. After this tutorial, the audience will be able to apply Semantic Web technologies to these and other application areas.

Duration (half or full day; if full day, could it scaled to half-day if necessary?)

This will be a half-day tutorial. The tutorial will consist of PowerPoint presentations accompanied by demonstrations.

Scope (general topic area)

The scope is the application of Semantic Web technologies to the Social Web and Web 2.0 systems, such as blogs, wikis and other online services that involve user participation and facilitate online communities. The tutorial will also focus on other widely-used aspects of Semantic Web technologies usage including search of distributed content within decentralized communities.

Relevance to WWW2008 attendees

The Web is a social place where people are creating content, collaborating and communicating using Social Media sites. Online communities and collaboration also extend into the business world. At the same time, these applications are experiencing boundaries in terms of information dissemination and automation.

The Semantic Web is increasingly aiming at applications areas. Areas such as blogging and wikis have become very popular and at the same time have created an interconnected information space (through the “blogosphere” and inter-wiki links). A number of Semantic Web approaches have recently appeared to overcome the boundaries these application areas, e.g., Semantic Wikis, Semantic Blogging, etc.

By applying the Semantic Web to Social Media sites people can learn to bridge individual community sites and to use the full potential of interconnected information spaces. This tutorial will be interesting both to web developers interested in using the Semantic Web to improve online community sites and to researchers interested in combining these two fields.

Keywords

semantic web, social software, web 2.0, collaboration, blogs, wikis, information spaces, SIOC, FOAF

Target audience

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

Applications such as blogs and wikis require more automated and richer 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.

Developers could be interested in this tutorial because open-source APIs and frameworks are now available for producing, crawling and querying Semantic Web data from a number of popular collaborative systems such as Wordpress or Drupal.

Professionals and CTOs may be interested in learning about connecting distributed conversations and collaborative information spaces, and applying this know-how in a business environment.

Prerequisite knowledge of audience

In order to be at ease with the tutorial, we recommend that the audience have prerequisite knowledge in one of two areas:

  • Background knowledge in the area of the Semantic Web, so as to develop application knowledge in relation to social software and other widely-used related web technologies, or
  • Application knowledge in web engineering or the development of 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 (1-2 paragraphs suitable for inclusion in conference registration materials)

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 standardization activities as well as research prototypes, focusing on work of the Semantically Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) project, which recently produced the W3C member submission of the SIOC ontology, a standard way to represent rich data from online community sites and Web 2.0 tools in an interoperable form in RDF.

On a larger extent, we will cover additional topics such as semantic search based on metadata and large scale data integration in decentralized communities. We will also focus on implementations of tools for work with SIOC data providing audience with the know-how to build such systems using open-source APIs and frameworks. We will also discuss how technologies described in this tutorial can be applied in a corporate environment.

Finally, we will discuss and present current approaches to realize the ideas of Vannevar Bush and Doug Engelbart on distributed collaboration infrastructures, which we term Social Semantic Information Spaces.

Full description (1-2 pages to be used for evaluation)

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 standardization activities as well as research prototypes, focusing on work of the Semantically Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) project, which recently produced the W3C member submission of the SIOC ontology, a standard way to represent rich data from online community sites and Web 2.0 tools in RDF.

The session will begin with a state of the art in the Semantic Web area. Presenters will describe the work done by the community so far regarding metadata, ontologies, rules and languages of the Semantic Web, as well as software prototypes using these technologies. This introduction is inteded to provide an overview of the current maturity of Semantic Web technologies.

Then, the main part of the tutorial will focus on how Social Media can benefit from the Semantic Web technologies and how this can be done practically, running through examples and demonstrations. The tutorial will use the SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Community) ontology and relevant tools as a foundation enabling Social Media sites on the Semantic Web.

The following points will be studied during the tutorial:

  • Overview of the SIOC project: SIOC is a standard way for expressing information on online community sites in a rich, machine-readable form. Having recently been published as a W3C member submission it is an important Semantic Web ontology to be aware of and use. SIOC provides the main classes and properties needed to describe the content and structure of online community sites. We will give examples of SIOC data and will demonstrate people how to create similar data from their favorite blog or forum engines.
  • From distributed communities to Interlinked-Onlined Communities: We will show how SIOC, combined with other ontologies as FOAF, can help to interlink online communities across various sites. Moreover, we will see how OpenID and FOAF can be used together as a way to identify people on the Web and create connections between tools and distributed services thanks to their users. This part will also deal with privacy issues.
  • From blogs and wikis to Semantic Blogging and Semantic Wikis: This topic will describe current approaches to blogging, and detail how Semantic Web technologies improve both the process of creating / editing blog posts and browsing / querying the data created by blogs. We will describe the application area of WikiWikiWebs and how adding semantics to wikis can offer distinct benefits by augmenting the language text in wiki articles with structured data and typed links for purposes of advanced querying and browsing.
  • Creating Semantic Web data from Social Media sites: This topic will focus on how SIOC and FOAF data can be created by the existing social media sites such as blog and forum engines, using existing SIOC exporters. We will also describe how to use SIOC APIs to create new applications for platforms where there are no existing SIOC tools. In addition, we will describe tools for generating SIOC data from legacy sources such as mailing lists and from emerging Web 2.0 services such as Jaiku - a popular micro-blogging site.
  • Using SIOC with other ontologies: As a good Semantic Web citizen SIOC already reuses and can be used together with other vocabularies such as FOAF and SKOS. We will show the benefits of combining SIOC with data from other domain ontologies, in the Linking Open Data spirit, that can enrich the information on the Social Web and allow to express information from various Web 2.0 sites in RDF. Combining data from various sources, described using different ontologies is a key point of the Semantic Web and this part will show the benefits of this approach, with examples of such projects.
  • Finding, reusing and searching Semantic Web data produced by the Social Web: We will describe how to gather Semantic Web data, and how to build services that use it. In relation to semantic search, we will show how integrated, conceptual query answering is performed over various sources and kinds of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data, with the goal of providing answers instead of document lists (or both). We will explain how to find and retrieve real-time SIOC data using tools such as the Semantic Radar and PingTheSemanticWeb, how to build an RDF store around this data and then run SPARQL queries over it.
  • Browsing, exploring and consuming Semantic Web data: This topic will describe how the uses of Semantic Web data such as SIOC that go beyond finding it and running simple queries. We will demonstrate a number of different ways for exploring SIOC data including SIOC Explorer - a faceted RDF browser adapted for SIOC data and capable of extracting social relations from this the data. We will also look at importing RDF data back into social media sites which is an important step towards reuse of the data created on the Social Web.
  • Industry applications of Semantic Technologies for Online Communities: Web users are not the only party to benefit from Semantic Web technologies. We will show how SIOC can be applied towards integrating disparate collaborative workspaces which is a frequent need faced by the industry, especially since collaborative information systems are now common in companies and are used for exchanging knowledge between employees.

Finally, as a conclusion of the tutorial, we will define some future directions of a global Semantic Web 2.0 and what is still needed to be achieved.

Will tutorial materials be provided to attendees? If so, are there any copyright issues

Slides will be privided to attendees. There are no copyright issues, slides will be made public.

Tutorial history (previous offerings of tutorial if any)

This tutorial is a follow-up to the WWW 2006 tutorial on "Semantic Web 2.0: Creating Social Semantic Information Spaces" and will look at new technologies, tools, and research issues that happened during the last 2 years.

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

Through previous international tutorials (e.g. at ECAI, IJCAI and VLDB), conference presentations, seminars at Stanford University, and lecture courses at DERI’s location in the National University of Ireland, Galway, we maintain an up-to-date tutorial set that benefits from our previous experience and ongoing research work in the Semantic Web area.

Additionally the presenters are at the forefront of Semantic Technology. Dr. Breslin is the Social Software cluster leader at DERI Galway, researching semantic social networks and interlinked online communities. All three presenters have been at the core the SIOC Project with their research focusing on a joint use of Social Media and the Semantic Web.

Presenter biography

Dr. John Breslin

John Breslin was born in Dublin, Ireland. He received the BE degree with 1st class honours and the PhD degree from the National University of Ireland, Galway in 1994 and 2002 respectively. He is currently a researcher and subcluster leader at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway, where he is researching semantically-enabled community portals. He worked as a lecturer to Electronic and Computer Engineering students at the Department of Electronic Engineering in NUI Galway from 2000 to 2004. Before that, he was a research officer and postgraduate student there. He also worked as a visiting scholar at Virginia Tech in 1996. Dr. Breslin received an award for co-authoring the best paper in the IEEE PELS Transactions in 2000.

He established the SIOC (semantically-interlinked online communities) project in 2004, with the aim of connecting distributed conversations on the Web. He has initiated a number of community sites including Ireland’s largest discussion site boards.ie, the “Planet of the Blogs” Irish blogs community, and the “Wiki Ireland” culture and heritage archive. He has received a number of awards for website design, including a Golden Spider award in 2000. He has also been nominated for a “Social Contribution” IIA Net Visionary Award in 2005. Dr. Breslin is a member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Together with Dr. Stefan Decker he has presented a tutorial "Semantic Web 2.0: Creating Social Semantic Information Spaces" at the 15th International World Wide Web Conference, Edinburgh, 2006.

Uldis Bojārs

Uldis Bojārs received the M.Sc. degree from the University of Latvia in 2002. His master thesis was about expressing data from persons' resumes on the Semantic Web. Currently he is a PhD student at DERI Galway and is doing research on the Semantic Web and Social Software.

His work focuses on the SIOC project and using the Semantic Web to interconnect online community sites. Uldis is one of the editors of the W3C member submission of the SIOC Core Ontology and the author of the Semantic Radar extension for Firefox and various tools for the SIOC project (e.g. SIOC export plugin for WordPress blog engine). He has experience presenting Semantic Web and SIOC to both academic and web developer audiences.

Alexandre Passant

Alexandre Passant received the M.Sc. degree from the Université Paris Dauphine in 2004. In parallel of his studies, he worked as a software engineer specializing on content management systems and open-source solutions.

He is currently a PhD student from the LaLIC institute (at Université Paris Sorbonne) and Electricité de France R&D. His PhD focuses on enriching users services and information retrieval capabilities in Collaborative Information systems for Organizations, thanks to Semantic Web technologies, by combining meta-data and domain ontologies in blogs and wikis. He is one of the co-author of the SIOC specifications and related documents, and also released some on-line services reusing and displaying Semantic Web data in a user-friendly way, such as foafmap.net.

Relevant references that would support proposal evaluation

Papers:

  • David Aumueller. Semantic Authoring and Retrieval Within a Wiki. In Proceedings of the 2nd European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC ‘05), Heraklion, Greece, LNCS 3532, May 2005.
  • John G. Breslin, Andreas Harth, Uldis Bojārs, and Stefan Decker. Towards Semantically Interlinked Online Communities. In Proceedings of the 2nd European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC ’05), Heraklion, Greece, LNCS 3532, pages 500–514, May 2005.
  • Knud Möller, Uldis Bojārs, John Breslin. Using Semantics to Enhance the Blogging Experience. In Proceedings of the 3rd European Semantic Web Conference, Budva, Montenegro, 2006.
  • Steve Cayzer. Semantic Blogging: Spreading the Semantic Web Meme. In XML Europe 2004, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Proceedings, April 2004.
  • Uldis Bojārs, John Breslin and Alexandre Passant. SIOC Browser-Towards A Richer Blog Browsing Experience. In Proceedings of the 4th Blogtalk Conference (Blogtalk Reloaded), Vienna, Austria, 2006.

Specifications and related documents:

Applications and Implementations:

Additional publications: http://sioc-project.org/publications/

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