The Social Semantic Web

by Breslin, John G.; Passant, Alexandre; Decker, Stefan

• ISBN13: 9783642011719
• ISBN10: 3642011713
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-10-04
• Publisher: Springer-Verlag New York Inc

Summary

The Social Web (including services such as MySpace, Flickr, last.fm, and WordPress) has captured the attention of millions of users as well as billions of dollars in investment and acquisition. Social websites, evolving around the connections between people and their objects of interest, are encountering boundaries in the areas of information integration, dissemination, reuse, portability, searchability, automation and demanding tasks like querying. The Semantic Web is an ideal platform for interlinking and performing operations on diverse person- and object-related data available from the Social Web, and has produced a variety of approaches to overcome the boundaries being experienced in Social Web application areas.After a short overview of both the Social Web and the Semantic Web, Breslin et al. describe some popular social media and social networking applications, list their strengths and limitations, and describe some applications of Semantic Web technology to address their current shortcomings by enhancing them with semantics. Across these social websites, they demonstrate a twofold approach for interconnecting the islands that are social websites with semantic technologies, and for powering semantic applications with rich community-created content. They conclude with observations on how the application of Semantic Web technologies to the Social Web is leading towards the "Social Semantic Web" (sometimes also called "Web 3.0"), forming a network of interlinked and semantically-rich content and knowledge.The book is intended for computer science professionals, researchers, and graduates interested in understanding the technologies and research issues involved in applying Semantic Web technologies to social software. Practitioners and developers interested in applications such as blogs, social networks or wikis will also learn about methods for increasing the levels of automation in these forms of Web communication.

Author Biography

John Breslin is a researcher and adjunct lecturer at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His research interests include social software, online communities, and the Semantic Web. He is founder of the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) project, and he also co-founded Irish community site boards.ie Ltd.Stefan Decker is a professor at and director of DERI at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His research interests include the Semantic Web, digital libraries, and the social semantic desktop. Stefan has a PhD in computer science from the University of Karlsruhe. His dissertation work was quoted as one of the inspirations for the DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) program, which spans the Semantic Web effort.Alexandre Passant is a post-doctoral researcher at DERI at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His research interests are Semantic Web and Social Software. Alexandre also feeds his own blog under www.apassant.net

Table of Contents

Introduction to the book	p. 1
Overview	p. 1
Aims of the book, and who will benefit from it?	p. 3
Structure of the book	p. 4
Motivation for applying Semantic Web technologies to the Social Web	p. 5
Introduction to the Social Web (Web 2.0, social media, social software)	p. 5
Adding semantics to the Web	p. 6
Discussions	p. 6
Knowledge and information sharing	p. 6
Multimedia sharing	p. 7
Social tagging	p. 7
Social sharing of software	p. 7
Social networks	p. 8
Interlinking online communities	p. 8
Social Web applications in enterprise	p. 8
Towards the Social Semantic Web	p. 9
Motivation for applying Semantic Web technologies to the Social Web	p. 11
Web 2.0 and the Social Web	p. 11
Addressing limitations in the Social Web with semantics	p. 13
The Social Semantic Web: more than the sum of its parts	p. 15
A food chain of applications for the Social Semantic Web	p. 17
A practical Social Semantic Web	p. 19
Introduction to the Social Web (Web 2.0, social media, social software)	p. 21
from the Web to a Social Web	p. 21
Common technologies and trends	p. 25
RSS	p. 25
AJAX	p. 27
Mashups	p. 28
Advertising	p. 30
The Web on any device	p. 32
Content delivery	p. 34
Cloud computing	p. 35
Folksonomies	p. 38
Object-centred sociality	p. 39
Licensing content	p. 42
Be careful before you post	p. 42
Disconnects in the Social Web	p. 44
Adding semantics to the Web	p. 45
A brief history	p. 45
The need for semantics	p. 47
Metadata	p. 51
Resource Description Framework (RDF)	p. 52
The RDF syntax	p. 54
Ontologies	p. 56
RDF Schema	p. 59
Web Ontology Language (OWL)	p. 61
SPARQL	p. 62
The 'lowercase' semantic web, including microformats	p. 64
Semantic search	p. 66
Linking Open Data	p. 67
Semantic mashups	p. 69
Addressing the Semantic Web 'chicken-and-egg' problem	p. 71
Discussions	p. 75
The world of boards, blogs and now microblogs	p. 75
Blogging	p. 76
The growth of blogs	p. 77
Structured blogging	p. 79
Semantic blogging	p. 81
Microblogging	p. 85
The Twitter phenomenon	p. 88
Semantic microblogging	p. 89
Message boards	p. 91
Categories and tags on message boards	p. 92
Characteristics of forums	p. 94
Social networks on message boards	p. 97
Mailing lists and IRC	p. 100
Knowledge and information sharing	p. 103
Wikis	p. 103
The Wikipedia	p. 105
Semantic wikis	p. 105
DBpedia	p. 110
Semantics-based reputation in the Wikipedia	p. 111
Other knowledge services leveraging semantics	p. 112
Twine	p. 112
The Internet Archive	p. 115
Powerset	p. 117
OpenLink Data Spaces	p. 119
Freebase	p. 119
Multimedia sharing	p. 121
Multimedia management	p. 121
Photo-sharing services	p. 122
Modelling RDF data from Flickr	p. 123
Annotating images using Semantic Web technologies	p. 125
Podcasts	p. 126
Audio podcasts	p. 127
Video podcasts	p. 129
Adding semantics to podcasts	p. 131
Music-related content	p. 133
DBTune and the Music Ontology	p. 133
Combining social music and the Semantic Web	p. 134
Social tagging	p. 137
Tags, tagging and folksonomies	p. 137
Overview of tagging	p. 137
Issues with free-form tagging systems	p. 140
Tags and the Semantic Web	p. 142
Mining taxonomies and ontologies from folksonomies	p. 143
Modelling folksonomies using Semantic Web technologies	p. 144
Tagging applications using Semantic Web technologies	p. 148
Annotea	p. 148
Revyu.com	p. 149
SweetWiki	p. 151
int.ere.st	p. 151
LODr	p. 152
Atom Interface	p. 153
Faviki	p. 154
Advanced querying capabilities thanks to semantic tagging	p. 155
Show items with the tag 'semanticweb' on any platform	p. 155
List the ten latest items tagged by Alexandre on SlideShare	p. 155
List the tags used by Alex on SlideShare and by John on Flickr	p. 157
Retrieve any content tagged with something relevant to the Semantic Web field	p. 158
Social sharing of software	p. 159
Software widgets, applications and projects	p. 159
Description of a Project (DOAP)	p. 160
Examples of DOAP use	p. 161
Crawling and browsing software descriptions	p. 164
Querying project descriptions and related data	p. 166
Locating software projects from people you trust	p. 166
Locating a software project related to a particular topic	p. 167
Social networks	p. 169
Overview of social networks	p. 169
Online social networking services	p. 173
Some psychology behind SNS usage	p. 175
Niche social networks	p. 177
Addressing some limitations of social networks	p. 179
Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF)	p. 181
Consolidation of people objects	p. 184
Aggregating a person's web contributions	p. 186
Inferring relationships from aggregated data	p. 187
hCard and XFN	p. 189
The Social Graph API and OpenSocial	p. 190
The Social Graph API	p. 190
OpenSocial	p. 192
The Facebook Platform	p. 193
Some social networking initiatives from the W3C	p. 194
A social networking stack	p. 194
Interlinking online communities	p. 197
The need for semantics in online communities	p. 197
Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC)	p. 198
The SIOC ontology	p. 201
SIOC metadata format	p. 203
SIOC modules	p. 205
Expert finding in online communities	p. 206
FOAF for expert finding	p. 208
SIOC for expert finding	p. 209
Connections between community description formats	p. 211
Distributed conversations and channels	p. 212
SIOC applications	p. 215
A food chain for SIOC data	p. 216
SIOC producers	p. 218
SIOC collectors	p. 223
SIOC consumers	p. 224
RDFa for interlinking online communities	p. 231
Argumentative discussions in online communities	p. 234
Object-centred sociality in online communities	p. 236
Data portability in online communities	p. 238
The DataPortability working group	p. 238
Data portability with FOAF and SIOC	p. 240
Connections between portability efforts	p. 241
Online communities for health care and life sciences	p. 242
Semantic Web Applications in Neuromedicine	p. 243
Science Collaboration Framework	p. 244
bio-zen and the art of scientific community maintenance	p. 246
Online presence	p. 246
Online attention	p. 247
The SIOC data competition	p. 247
Social Web applications in enterprise	p. 251
Overview of Enterprise 2.0	p. 251
Issues with Enterprise 2.0	p. 255
Social and philosophical issues with Enterprise 2.0	p. 255
Technical issues with Enterprise 2.0	p. 258
Improving Enterprise 2.0 ecosystems with semantic technologies	p. 262
Introducing SemSLATES	p. 262
Implementing semantics in Enterprise 2.0 ecosystems	p. 263
SIOC for collaborative work environments	p. 266
Towards the Social Semantic Web	p. 269
Possibilities for the Social Semantic Web	p. 269
A community-guided Social Semantic Web	p. 271
Wisdom of the crowds and the Semantic Web	p. 272
A grassroots approach	p. 273
The vocabulary onion	p. 275
Integrating with the Social Semantic Desktop	p. 278
Privacy and identity on the Social Semantic Web	p. 279
Keeping privacy in mind	p. 279
Identity fragmentation	p. 280
The vision of a Social Semantic Web	p. 281
Acknowledgments	p. 285
Dedication from John	p. 287
Biographies	p. 289
References	p. 291
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