A (brief) introduction toSIOC and MOATAlexandre Passant - http://apassant.net

LaLIC, Université Paris-Sorbonne, France

State of the semantic web in the BBC - 30 June 2008

Modeling Social Media Contributions with

SIOC

http://flickr.com/photos/ejpphoto/2314610838/ by EJP Photo

Social Media Contributions

• Lots of user-created and distributed content:

• Blog posts, wiki pages, pictures, bookmarks ...

• Called “Social Media Contributions” or SMC

• A need for common semantics to

• Provide a single model for any SMC, wherever it comes from

• Enables the use of SPARQL queries instead of APIs

• Interlink data and find relationships between content

Semantically-Interlined Online Communities

• SIOC (Breslin et. al, 2005): http://sioc-project.org

• A ontology to represent the activities of online communities on the Web

• W3C Member Submission, June 2007

• Namespace: http://rdfs.org/sioc/ns

• 5 top-level classes: User, Role, Space, Container, Item

• A “SIOC Types” module

• A Semantic Web citizen:

• Reusing and interlinking existing ontologies

The SIOC ontology

http://rdfs.org/sioc/spec

Unified data modeling with SIOC

Services

Unified data modeling with SIOC

Exporters Common semanticServices

:blog_1

sioc:container_of

:post_1

rdf:type

:blog_2

sioc:container_of

:post_2

:wiki_1

sioc:container_of

:article_1

rdf:type

rdf:type

sioct:BlogPost

sioct:WikiArticle

sioct:BlogPost

Unified data modeling with SIOC

Exporters Common semanticServices

:blog_1

sioc:container_of

:post_1

rdf:type

sioc:Item

:blog_2

sioc:container_of

:post_2

:wiki_1

sioc:container_of

:article_1

rdf:type

rdf:type

sioct:BlogPost

sioct:WikiArticle

sioct:BlogPost

rdfs:subClassOf

rdfs:subClassOf

rdfs:subClassOf

Unified data modeling with SIOC

Exporters Common semanticServices

:blog_1

sioc:container_of

:post_1

rdf:type

sioc:Item

:blog_2

sioc:container_of

:post_2

:wiki_1

sioc:container_of

:article_1

rdf:type

rdf:type

sioct:BlogPost

sioct:WikiArticle

sioct:BlogPost

rdfs:subClassOf

rdfs:subClassOf

rdfs:subClassOf

Unified data modeling with SIOC

Exporters Common semanticServices

:blog_1

sioc:container_of

:post_1

rdf:type

sioc:Item

:blog_2

sioc:container_of

:post_2

:wiki_1

sioc:container_of

:article_1

rdf:type

rdf:type

sioct:BlogPost

sioct:WikiArticle

sioct:BlogPost

rdfs:subClassOf

rdfs:subClassOf

rdfs:subClassOf

Connecting FOAF and SIOC

• sioc:User

• Can be thought of as a virtual representation of any person online, within the context of a given social media website or community

• A subclass of foaf:OnlineAccount

• foaf:holdsAccount

• “The foaf:holdsAccount property relates a foaf:Agent to a foaf:OnlineAccount for which they are the sole account holder.”

• Links a foaf:Person to various sioc:User(s)

• As many sioc:User(s) as required can be linked to a single person

People, accounts and SMC

http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2008/01/04/dataportabilityorg-web-standards-sioc-and-foaf/

Retrieving all SMC of a given user

• Combining FOAF, SIOC and OpenID to retrieve any content from a given user, on various services

SELECT ?user ?item WHERE { ?people foaf:openid <$openid> ; foaf:holdsAccount ?user . ?item sioc:has_creator ?user . }

Querying the SIOC-o-sphere

• Sindice developer tools (SIOC API and widgets)

• http://sindice.com/dev

Semantic tagging with MOAT

http://www.flickr.com/photos/loop_oh/2368779403/ by loop_oh

Tags (as words)

= =

URIs

!=

!=

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple_Inc.

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple_Records

Tagging with URIs ?

• Indexing data with Semantic Web concepts

• Solves common problems thanks to understandable identifiers (tags ambiguity & heterogeneity, linking tagged data)

• Challenges

• How to find URIs related to a given tag ?

• How to let people easily bridge this gap between tagging and semantic indexing ?

MOAT• Meaning Of A Tag (Passant & al, 2008)

• http://moat-project.org

• A model to represent the meaning of tags

• When I tag this post “apple”, I mean the record company, not the fruit

• Using URIs (LOD-based) to define meanings

• A collaborative and open-source framework

• Define and share tags in a community

The MOAT frameworkUser creates content and tag it Client queries the MOAT server

Server returns the setfor global meaning URIs

User chooses local meaning URI

User saves the content

<http://sws.geonames.org/2988507/>

<http://sws.geonames.org/4402452/>

<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Paris_Hilton>

http://example.org/post/1

http://sws.geonames.org/2988507/

http://example.org/tagging/1

Content entersthe Semantic Web

moat:tagMeaning

http://example.org/alex

http://tags.moat-project.org/tag/paris

tags:associatedTag

tags:taggedBy

tags:taggedResource

Benefits of using MOAT

• Tag blog posts using SIOC and MOAT ...

:alex

:blogPost1

sioc:creator_of

sioc:topic

dbpedia:The_Clash

sioct:BlogPost

rdf:type

Benefits of using MOAT

• ... while people tag pictures ...

:alex

:blogPost1

sioc:creator_of

:bob

:picture1

sioc:creator_of

sioc:topic

dbpedia:The_Clash dbpedia:Joe_Strummer

sioc:topic

sioct:BlogPost

rdf:type

exif:IFD rdf:type

Benefits of using MOAT• ... find related content thanks to data

relationships ...

:alex

:blogPost1

sioc:creator_of

:bob

:picture1

sioc:creator_of

sioc:topic

dbpedia:The_Clash dbpedia:Joe_Strummer

sioc:topic

p:pastMembers

sioct:BlogPost

rdf:type

exif:IFD rdf:type

Benefits of using MOAT

• ... from various distributed services

:alex

:blogPost1

sioc:creator_of

:bob

:picture1

sioc:creator_of

sioc:topic

dbpedia:The_Clash dbpedia:Joe_Strummer

sioc:topic

p:pastMembers

sioct:BlogPost

rdf:type

exif:IFD rdf:type

Thanks• http://sioc-project.org

• http://moat-project.org

• Social Data On The Web Workshop at ISWC2008 - http://sdow2008.semanticweb.org

• A few days left for submission !