2. Social Websites and Approaches to Add Semantics

1. Sheila Kinsella 2. Social Websites and Approaches to Add Semantics

2. We all live in a social network… …of friends, family, workmates, fellow students, acquaintances, etc.

3. Friend of a friend, or “dúirt bean liom go ndúirt bean leí” Theory that anybody is connected to everybody else (on average) by no more than six degrees of separation Everyone’s connected…

4. Milgram’s six degrees of separation theory Sociologist Milgram conducted this experiment: Random people from Nebraska were to send a letter (via intermediaries) to a stock broker in Boston Could only send to someone with whom they were on a first-name basis Among the letters that found the target, the average number of links was six Stanley Milgram (1933-1984)‏

5. And now a major motion picture, kind of… Six Degrees of Separation (1993)‏ “I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names... It’s not just big names — it’s anyone. A native in a rain forest, a Tiero del Fuegan, an Eskimo. I am bound — you are bound — to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.” Play from 1990 by John Guare

6. The Erdős number Number of links required to connect scholars to Erdős via co-authorship of papers Erdős wrote 1500+ papers with 507 co-authors Jerry Grossman’s site allows mathematicians to compute their Erdős numbers: http://www.oakland.edu/enp/ Connecting path lengths, among mathematicians only: The average is 4.65 The maximum is 13 Paul Erdős (1913-1996)‏

7. The Kevin Bacon game Boxed version of the game • Invented by three Albright College students in 1994: • Craig Fass, Brian Turtle, Mike Ginelly • Goal is to connect any actor to Kevin Bacon, by linking actors who have acted in the same movie • The “Oracle of Bacon” website uses IMDB to find the shortest link between any two actors: • http://oracleofbacon.org/

8. The Kevin Bacon game (2)‏ Total number of actors in database (as of 15th October): 893283 Average path length to Kevin: 2.957 Actor closest to “center”: Rod Steiger (2.68)‏ Rank of Kevin, in terms of closeness to center: 1049th Most actors are within three links of each other!

9. What are social networking services (SNSs)? From the beginning, the Internet was a medium for connecting not only machines but people Idea behind SNSs is to make the aforementioned real-world relationships explicitly defined online 2002: Friendster 2003: MySpace, LinkedIn, hi5 2004: orkut, Facebook 2005: Bebo

10. The popularity of SNSs The 10 most popular domains ~= 40% percent of all page views on the Web (Compete, November 2006)‏ Nearly half of those views were from the social networking services MySpace and Facebook – wow! And that’s just in the top 10… Alexa rankings: #5: MySpace #6: Facebook #8: hi5 #10: orkut #18: Friendster #119: Bebo #212: LinkedIn

11. SNSs attracting lots of monetary / media attention Friendster – $13M VC Tribe – $6.3M VC LinkedIn – $4.7M VC Bebo – $15M VC, sold to AOL for $850M MySpace – Sold for $580M Friends Reunited – Sold for £120M Facebook – $1B Y! offer, 1.6% sold to MS for $250M

12. Motivation for social network services Allows a user to create and maintain an online network of close friends or business associates for social and professional reasons: Friendships and relationships Offline meetings Curiosity about others Business opportunities Job hunting … For social good: Kevin Bacon – sixdegrees.org Ammado - ammado.com Sun – openeco.org

13. Big social network services (in terms of accounts)‏ myspace.com 110,000,000 facebook.com 98,000,000 habbo.com 86,000,000 spaces.live.com 40,000,000 orkut.com 59,000,000 hi5.com 70,000,000 friendster.com 58,000,000 xanga.com 40,000,000 classmates.com 40,000,000 flixster.com 36,000,000 netlog.com 32,000,000 reunion.com 28,000,000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites

14. Features of social network services Network of friends (inner circle)‏ Person surfing Private messaging Discussion forums Events management Blogging and commenting Media uploading

15. Facebook, #6 in the world

16. The success of (and hype around) Facebook According to Robert Scoble today, MS want to buy Facebook for $15-$20B: http://scobleizer.com/2008/05/19/why-microsoft-will-buy-facebook-and-keep-it-closed/ 4,000 applications have been created for Facebook’s developer interface: 70,000 developers signed up Active user count jumped by 70% in the four months after this contributable application layer was added 50% of Facebook users are non-students: People over 24 are its fastest-growing demographic

17. orkut, Google’s SNS

18. Get LinkedIn to business contacts, 15 million users

19. Niche SNSs Age: Multiply (seniors and settled); Boomj (baby boomers); Rezoom Country of origin: Silicon India Gender: CaféMom; MothersClick; Sister Woman (female friends)‏ Occupation: ModelsHotel; FanLib (fiction writers); AdGabber; TheFeng.org (financial services executives); MilitarySpot (military families); Sermo (doctors and physicians)‏ Business and careers: ConnectBuzz; Doostang; Execunet; Netshare; Ryze; Viadeo; Xing Interests: TradeKing (investors); StreetCred (hip hop); IndiePublic (art and design); PeerTrainer (health and wellbeing)‏ * Source: Paul Gibler, Wisconsin Technology Network

20. Many social networking services are boring… * Source: Jyri Engestrom, “Object-Centered Sociality”, Reboot 7

21. Object-centred sociality can provide meaning Users connected via a common object, e.g., their job, university, hobbies, a date… “Another tradition of theorizing offers an explanation of why Russell linked out, and why so many YASNS ultimately fail.” “According to this theory, people don’t just connect to each other. They connect through a shared object.” * Source: Jyri Engestrom, “Why Some Social Networks Work…”

22. Object-centred sociality can provide meaning (2)‏ “When a service fails to offer the users a way to create new objects of sociality, they turn the connecting itself into an object [LinkedIn].” “Good services allow people to create social objects that add value.” Flickr = photos del.icio.us = bookmarks Blogs = discussion posts * Source: Jyri Engestrom, “Why Some Social Networks Work…”

23. …that connect us to other people Discussions Bookmarks Annotations Profiles Microblogs Multimedia … These are the social objects…

24. Blogging: a phenomenon for a new generation? Cincinnati Enquirer, October 2004

25. Overview of blogs Weblog, weblog or simply a blog is a web journal “A web application which contains periodic time-stamped posts on a common (usually open-access) webpage” Individual diaries -> arms of political campaigns, media programs and corporations (e.g. the Google Blog)‏ Citizen journalism… Posts are often shown in reverse chronological order Comments can be made by the public on some blogs Latest headlines, with hyperlinks and summaries, are syndicated using RSS or Atom formats (e.g. for reading favourite blogs with a feed reader)‏

26. The state of the blogosphere from Technorati 70 million blogs The blogosphere is doubling in size every 320 days (slowing down a little)‏ 120,000 new blogs are created each day (i.e. 1.4 new blogs every second)‏ 1.5 million blog posts are made in a day (i.e. 17 posts per second)‏ Around 5-10% of new blogs are spam blogs or “splogs” 35% of blog posts use tags

27. Structure-enhanced blog posts Sometimes you have a burning need for more structure, at least some of the time When you know a subject deeply, and your observations or analysis recur, you may be best served by filling in a form The form will have its own metadata and its own data model Uses: People get to express themselves, and Blogs start to interoperate with enterprise applications

28. Soccer coach example An after-game soccer report typically includes: which teams played where and when officials, and a list of game events: who scored (and when and how)‏ who received penalties (when and for what), etc. Wouldn't it be handy for the coach’s blogging tool to understand this structure, present an editing form, render the form in HTML to their blog, and render the post (including the form) to their RSS feed? Great for the World Cup!

29. Integrating readers with structured blogging And in the future, news aggregators and news readers should be able to: Auto-discover an unknown structure Notify the user that a new structure is available Learn the structure, including entry forms, pick list sources, rendering guidance, and default style sheet Make it available when the blogger is ready to write

30. Structured blogging using WordPress

31. Making use of structured blog posts

32. Why semantic blogging? Traditional blogging: Little or no query possibilities (except keyword and flat tags)‏ Little or no reuse of data (except textual copy and paste)‏ Little or no linking between posts (except simple hrefs and trackbacks)‏ Semantic blogging: Facilitates better querying: More precise Allows aggregation from various sources Better reuse potential Richer links

33. Why semantic blogging? (2)‏ • Users collect and create large amounts of structured data on their desktops • This data is often tied to specific applications andlocked within the user's computer • Semantic blogging can lift this data into the Web

34. Releasing your data to the Web scenario John‘s Computer Blog Post writes Post Ina annotates Post Blog Post Ina‘s Computer Metadata Blog Post imports metadata publishes Post Blog Post Metadata Metadata reads Post John Web

35. Positioning of the metadata Where in the blog will the semantic metadata go? Directly in the HTML? Validity problems, parsing, restrictions on use of RDF... Put it in the newsfeed (RSS 1.0)? Would have to change blogging platforms, hard to get accepted Newsfeed items disappear over time Externally? Just add a link to HTML á la: <a type=“application/rdf+xml“ href=“http://bresl.in/foaf/foaf.rdf“>John</a>

36. Structural metadata: Relations between blogs, posts, comments, etc. More than just “A links to B“ - what kind of relationship? Approval? Criticism? Mentions? Is about? …relations within the blogosphere Content-related metadata: What is this post about, what is its topic? Anything a blog author wishes to discuss ...relations between the blogosphere and everything else Structural versus content-related

37. How is this related to structured blogging? Structured blogging is mainly based on “Microformats” (http://www.microformats.org/)‏ Therefore restricted to specific schemata, not open Positioned inline on HTML page (and in feed)‏ Can be directly rendered using CSS Structured and semantic blogging do not compete Metadata can be added as RDF and using Microformats Web-based implementations for generating structured blogging metadata e.g. for WordPress and Movable Type

38. Using the metadata Once a blog has semantic metadata, it can be... Used to query: “Which blog posts talk about papers by Stefan Decker?” Used to browse across blogs and other kinds of discussion methods: Imported into desktop applications of blog readers (AKA “The Web as a Clipboard“)‏

39. The Web as a clipboard using a suitable reader • A user can import metadata from here into his / her own applications

40. Definition of wikis A wiki is a type of website that allow users to easily add and edit content and is especially suited for collaborative writing The name is based on the Hawaiian term wiki-wiki, meaning “quick”, “fast”, or “to hasten” It amasses to a group of web pages that allows usersto quickly add content and also allows others to edit the content: It relies on cooperation, checks and balances of its members, and a belief in sharing of ideas

41. Some uses of wikis Wikis are being used for: online encyclopaedias free dictionaries book repositories software development project proposals writing research papers event organisation

42. The Wikipedia: from Irish to Esperanto

43. Problems with traditional wikis Structured access Information reuse JohnGrisham He is the author of PelicanBrief.He lives in Mississippi. He writes a book each year. He is published by RandomHouse. Structured access: • Other books by JohnGrisham (navigation)‏ • All authors that live in Europe? (query)‏ Information reuse: • The authors from RandomHouse (views)‏ • And what if I don't speak English? (translation)‏

44. What are semantic wikis? A wiki that has an underlying model of the knowledge described in its pages: Semantic wikis allow to capture or identify further information about the pages (metadata) and their relations Knowledge model available in a formal language, so that machines can (at least partially) process and reason on it A semantic wiki would be able to capture that an "apple" article is a "fruit" (through an inheritance relationship) and present you with further fruits when you look at apple Some are used for personal knowledge management, others aimed at KM for communities http://wiki.ontoworld.org/wiki/Swikig http://www.semwiki.org/

45. Structural and content metadata in semantic wikis

46. Information reuse in SemperWiki

47. Semantic MediaWiki Semantic MediaWiki is an extension of MediaWiki, the open-source wiki system powering Wikipedia: Allows users to add structured data to the entries, turning it into a semantic wiki Users can classify the “type” of links, e.g. making a relationship such as “capital of” between Berlin and Germany explicit: ... [[capital of::Germany]] ... resulting in the semantic statement "Berlin" "capital of" "Germany" On the page about Berlin, users can explicitly define its population by writing: ... the population is [[population:=3,993,933]] ... resulting in the semantic statement "Berlin" "has population" "3993933" Currently the most widely-deployed semantic wiki, Semantic MediaWiki is also being used by various organisations, and is being deployed as a service by Centiare and Wikia

48. Tagging and the Semantic Web Tags are powerful but: Heterogeneity: different tags, one meaning Ambiguity: one tag, different meanings Unrelated: no (explicit) relationship between tags A common semantic for tags and tagging actions: The “Tag Ontology” by Newman from 2005 tags:Tag rdfs:subClassOf skos:Concept A “Tagging” class describes a tripartite relationship between: A user An annotated resource Some tags

49. Going further with tagging SCOT (Social Semantic Cloud of Tags): A model to describe tagclouds (tags and co-occurrence)‏ Ability to move your own tagcloud from one service to another Share tagclouds between services, and between users “Tag portability” MOAT (Meaning of a Tag)‏ A model to define “meanings” of tags using existing URIs e.g. SPARQL →http://dbpedia.org/resource/SPARQL Tagged content enters the “Linked Data” web Collaborative approach: Anyone can define a new meaning for a tag Meanings are shared inside a given community LODr: re-tag your existing Web 2.0 content with semantics

50. gnizr