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What is Slants?
• “Standardsland Tagging Service”– A research tool– Focused on a specific domain:
Public policy and ICT standards– But any domain is possible
• Requests Delicious RSS feeds from many users
• Harvests bookmarks and tags• Organizes them for retrieval
About Delicious
• A social bookmarking website• Easy tagging as you browse• Share bookmarks with others
The Problem That Slants Addresses • Technical standards have public policy
consequences1:– Identity– User/content discrimination– Content censorship and control– User consent, etc
• Often unaddressed in standards• Best to find out early in the standards
process1 Morris,J, A. Davidson."Public Policy Considerations for Internet Design Decisions," Center for Democracy and Technology, 2003.
More Easily Said Than Done
• There are now more than 400 ICT standards consortia active globally
• Thousands of standards• Consumer and watchdog groups are
unlikely to be represented• Therefore, specifications may not take
due account of their needs
Semantic Gap: IPv6 (RFC-2464)
“Under IPv4, the predecessor to IPv6, Internet addressing allowed a reasonable amount of privacy and anonymity, because a numeric address was typically not tied to any particular machine or user. With IPv6, however, the standard provided that in many cases a user’s address would be derived from the unique MAC (Medium Access Control) address embedded in the user’s Ethernet network card.”2
2Davidson, Alan, John Morris, Rob Courtney. “Strangers in a Strange Land: Public Interest Advocacy and Internet Standards.: Washington, D.C.: Center for Democracy and Technology, 2002. <www.cdt.org/publications/piais.pdf>
Focus on Identity•Information privacy•Information security•Authentication•Access•Online tracking•Datamining•Profiling•Third-party use•Anonymous speech•Etc.
The Slants Approach
• Recruit or select Delicious users interested in ICT/public policy issues
• Harvest their Delicious bookmarks, based on their tagging
• Harvest other bookmarks from the wider Delicious network
• Aggregate and organize the bookmarks on the Slants website
Tag Harvesting
• Slants requests bookmarks from Delicious– For specific users– For specific resources– With specific sets of tags
• Delicious returns an RSS feed of bookmarks
Tag Harvesting
• An automated process• Search terms are based on thesaurus
relationships:– BT/NT : identity + authentication + OpenID– SA: RFID_tags + vicinity_cards– UF: surveillance + eavesdropping– RT: key_generation + key_distribution– Expansive: smart card OR chip card
Expansive Searches
Find bookmarks tagged:mobile
smart cell_phone
smartphone
phone cellphone
CDMA GSM
iPhone
android
eavesdropping
covert
track eavesdrop
location_tracking
monitor
tracking intercept
monitoring
+surveillance
Interception
…or…
…or…
Normalized Results
Organize tags under:mobile
smart cell_phone
smartphone
phone cellphone
CDMA GSM
iPhone
android
eavesdropping
covert
track eavesdrop
location_tracking
monitor
tracking intercept
monitoring
+surveillance
Interception
Processing Bookmarks
• Database stores individual bookmarks• Bookmark tags are checked against the
thesaurus– Matching tags are normalized against the
controlled vocabulary; e.g., eavesdropping becomes surveillance
– Nonmatching tags are discarded:
Accessing Bookmarks
• Tags are organized to create an index according to rules in the thesaurus
• Index is refreshed whenever new bookmarks are harvested
• The index allows users to sort bookmarks by topic
Why Use Slants?
• Leverages the researching skills of many users in a single area of interest
• Automatically searches the entire Delicious network (over 5 million users)
• Normalizes disparate tagging into a consistent system
• Organizes bookmarks by topic
Low Cognitive Cost
• No extra work involved, just tagging as usual
• Gathers domain-relevant resources in one place
• Provides easy browsing and finding
Additional Features
• Identifies Delicious users that have the same interest
• Scores resources by times bookmarked• Enables users to create custom
searches
Summary
• A collaborative research tool• Leverages social bookmarking that
users would do anyway• Performs expansive searches• Normalizes search results for easy
retrieval• Built for the public policy domain but
can be applied to any domain
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