Yerin KulağıA platform to share overheard dialogues

www.yerinkulagi.com

Social Semantic Web project byBaşar UğurIşık Barış Fidaner

Introduction

In this project, we developed a web site called "Yerin Kulağı" (YK). This site is an open platform for sharing lines of dialogues in Turkish overheard in public places. Our source of inspiration was the web site "Overheard In New York"1 which serves a similar purpose in a different language and culture. There are a few overheard sites stemming from this idea such as "Overheard In McGill" and "Overplot", which plots the locations that overheard dialogues took place on a map of New York.

An overheard dialogue has basically the following structure:

A title:Mr. Toad's Wild Ride Can Get Pretty Romantic

Lines of dialogue in format "Sayer: Phrase":First year law student: Don't you think Disney World is romantic?Second year law student: Anything can be romantic.First year law student: Yes, anything can be romantic... if you're on the right drugs.

The place:--Cardozo Law School

A signature:Overheard by: Ronaldo

In YK, we preserve this structure. But we also make a few improvements on it.

1 The original idea was started by this website: http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/ The authors Morgan Friedman and Michael Malice also have a published book with the same title. There are several other websites named like "Overheard in <Location>" based on this concept. If you want to know, you can open Google and search for the phrase "overheard in" in double quotes.

Localizing the concepts

As YK is a Turkish website, so we firstly decided on a set of core concepts and entities, such as:

Duyum: An overheard dialogue, which is composed of a title, location and several lines of dialogue. The figure below shows the components of a duyum:

Deyiş: A dialogue line that consists of a Sayer and a Phrase. Each Phrase that has a Sayer (displayed in blue) is a deyiş. Example: "aloo"

Üye: A member of the platform, who has access to several social actions in addition to viewing the dialogues.

Then, we defined the possible actions that can be taken by a member:

Yeni duyum, Değişiklik: Posting a new dialogue to YK or editing a dialogue.

Oylama: Scoring a duyum by either 0, 2.5 or 5 points by clicking on either the red, yellow or green dot.

Kulak verme: Subscribing to another member to follow her duyums.

İleti gönderme: Sending a private message to another member.

Title

Line = Sayer: PhraseDialogue

RatingSignature, Date

Location, City

Figure 1. A "duyum" in Yerin Kulağı

Link to RDF version

Atfetme: Attributing a line of dialogue to another member.

Below is a graph that relates entities through the actions possible in Yerin Kulağı:

Social aspects

YK incorporates several social mechanisms most of which are common. We also implemented a few novel ideas that could only be possible in an overheard site.

1. Rating system: Every duyum is rated by the members, so that better duyums can be more accessible for the audience.

2. To follow a member: This is similar to following users in Twitter, except that you read duyumsin YK instead of tweets. Thus, every member has a list of followers and a list of followed members. This directed closeness creates an appropriate situation for the members to drive one another onward, unless all of them lose their interest.

Figure 2. Real-time preview while editing a duyum

Figure 3. The entities and relations in YK

Figure 4. Left sidebar provides access to random content, or the content that are rated best or most frequently

DuyumÜye

Deyişİleti

Kulak verir

Oy verir Yaratır

DeğiştirirÜyeye

gönderirAlır

İçerir

Üyeye atfeder

3.

3. Private messages (PM): This allows the members to post private messages to each other without exiting the platform. We should mention that privates messages are encrypted in the database, as well as passwords, and only decrypted when serving directly to a member that either sent or received it. Despite PM is a known channel of harrassment and usually inspected by a moderator in other systems, we intentionally avoided creating a backdoor that provided any person the authority to read members' private messages.

Figure 5. Right sidebar where you see members you follow and the members following you, and other social features such as PM

4. Attributing a phrase to a member: We believe that this is the most powerful novelty in YK. Phrases in dialogues can be very rich in attitude, personality and use of language. As YK automatically extracts these phrases, we can immediately use them as an object. When one attributes a phrase to a member, one plays a part in the formation of that member's public image on YK, because every member page contains a list of phrases attributed to that member. This might also create a motivation to enter a dialogue you heard, if it reminded you of other members of YK, just to attribute the phrases in the dialogue which is used as a resource or a material.

Figure 6. On a member's page, one can see the list of phrases that are attributed to that member as well as the follow relationships in FOAF format

FOAF page of the member

The list of phrases attributed to the member

List of duyums by the member

Semantic functionality

In other overheard sites, anyone can post a dialogue with an arbitrary signature. So they are not social websites by their nature. But in YK, the dialogues you post always bear your member name below them, and other members may follow you for more of your dialogues. Another novelty is the opportunity to attribute a line of dialogue to a member you follow.

Moreover, unlike other overheard sites, when you write a dialogue, YK segments it on the run, so that you can see a live preview as you edit it. After you send it, it is automatically parsed and seperated into individual lines, sayers and phrases. For every published duyum, a machine readable RDF file is generated for semantic web applications that can use the structured information in a duyum.

An example tree structure from a dialogue:

dialogueo line1

sayer1

phrase1

o line2

sayer2

phrase2

o line3

o line4

This structure is used to generate an RDF of a duyum. An example given below:

We also generate FOAF files that contain information about "kulak verme" relationships between members as "knows" objects:

Tools used

Notepad++ to edit/upload PHP code

WAMP Server to test PHP pages on our Windows machines

Tabulator to display RDF content

Firefox / Internet Explorer 7 / Safari / Google Chrome to test the website

Godaddy.com for domain and hosting