Enhancing the Web Experience

Copyright 2009 Digital Enterprise Research Institute.All rights reserved.

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Enhancing the Web Experience:DERI, Social Semantic Web and SIOC

John Breslin, Digital Enterprise Research Institute

College of Engineering and Informatics, NUI Galway

Engineers Ireland Annual Conference / Tullamore / 23rd April 2009


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• The world’s largest Semantic Web research institute• Founded June 2003 with 1 fulltime member (green field)• Members as of April 2009:

– About 120 people (from 27 nations)

• Total research grants of about €38M• Over a hundred research partners• More than 500 research publications:

– Number 1 organisation in its core space

• Participates in 12 standards groups• Prominent technologies:

– Semantic Digital Libraries, Social Semantic Desktop (in Linux), Semantic Web Search Engine, Global Sensor Network, SIOC

DERI in brief


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Some of our SFI and EI-funded research projects

• Líon II:– SFI CSET– Core industrial partners

include Nortel, Ericsson and Cisco (supported at headquarters level)

• eLite:– EI ILRP– €3 million over three years– 8 eLearning companies

• Clique:– SFI SRC– Graph and network analysis

• Widgelix:– Widget platform (with Cyntelix)

• Firefly:– EI Technology Development

(commercialisation planned)– Time-based eLearning

environment

• Sedici:– EI Proof of Concept– Zero-knowledge proof

• Pegasus:– Semantic search in MS

SharePoint (with Storm Technologies)

• TagBuilder:– EI Innovation Partnership (with

a start-up company)


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Research units and streams in the DERI house


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The Social Web lets like-minded people connect through shared photos, slides, books, whatever…


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Explosion of social / collaborative websites

(disconnected)


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Social websites are like data silos

* Source: Pidgin Technologies, www.pidgintech.com

Need ways to connect users / data on these islands


Allowing users to easily move from one to another


Enabling users to easily bring their data with them



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What is the Semantic Web?

• Sir Tim Berners-Lee et al., Scientific American, 2001:– “An extension of the current web in which information is given

well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.”

• “Entrepreneurs see a Web guided by common sense”, John Markoff, New York Times, 2006:– “Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very

idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable vision. But the underlying technologies are rapidly gaining adherents, at big companies like IBM and Google as well as small ones.”

• Requires web pages to have metadata with underlying ontologies


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It’s all a big graph of triples!

#Bob#Bob

#Alice#Alicedbpedia.org/

resource/Guitar

dbpedia.org/resource/

GuitarAlice CooperAlice Cooper

knows

interestname

interest

Metadata

Ontologyxmlns.com/

foaf/0.1/Person

xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person

xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person

xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person www.w3.org/

1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#

resource

www.w3.org/1999/02/

22-rdf-syntax-ns#resource

www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#Literalwww.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#Literal

knows

interestname

interest

type

type

type


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Towards a Social Semantic Web


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Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC)

• An effort from DERI to discover how we can create and establish ontologies on the Semantic Web

• Goal of the SIOC ontology is to address interoperability issues on the (Social) Web

• SIOC has been adopted in a framework of 50 applications or modules deployed on over 400 sites

• http://sioc-project.org


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The steps taken

1. Develop an ontology of terms for representing rich data from the Social Web

2. Create a food chain for producing, collecting and consuming SIOC data

3. As well dissemination via papers about SIOC, provide docs and examples at sioc-project.org

• SIOC aims to enrich the Web infrastructure:– During the next upgrade cycle, gigabytes of semantically-

enriched community data become available!


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1. The SIOC ontology

• The main classes and properties are:


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2. The SIOC food chain


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Navigating across SIOC-enabled sites via Sindice


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Collaborative workspace interoperability with SIOC


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3. Dissemination


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Quotes about SIOC

• “I […] think the concept is HOT” – Robert Douglass, Drupal Developer

• “It just dawned on me that the burgeoning SIOC-o-sphere (online communities exporting and exposing content via SIOC Ontology) is actually: Blogosphere 2.0” – Kingsley Idehen, Founder and CEO of OpenLink Software

• “SIOC has the potential to become one of the foundational vocabularies that make Semantic Web applications useful” – Ivan Herman, W3C / ERCIM

• “FOAF represents relationships between people, as well as basic contact details. SIOC does this for groups: it extends the FOAF idea to being able to talk about whole groups of people. I am excited about SIOC because you can use that information to determine trust, to let people in.” – Tim Berners-Lee, Creator of the World Wide Web

• “I think SIOC is the kind of data model we want that tracks the dollar instead of the person across disparate web sites” – George Thomas, Chief Architect, General Services Administration, US Government


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Obama SIOC!


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Some examples of where SIOC is already in use


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Networking knowledge via a Social Semantic Web


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• For more, read our Social Semantic Web book:– Autumn 2009, available to pre-order on Amazon.com– www.socialsemanticweb.net

– www.deri.ie

Thanks!