semantic web for distributed social networks

Semantic Web for Distributed Social

Networks

David Peterson BoaB interactive

http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthewfield/






Semantic Web

• What?

• Hype - Scientific American 2001

• “... will unleash a revolution of new possibilities... ”

• Reality - Scientific American 2007

• “The Semantic Web In Action”

http://www.flickr.com/people/davidsethp/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dan_dan/


Shared Meaning




Information is object & collection based

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mcbeth/



Distributed Social Network

• You own the data

• You control access

• You can pull it/change it

• You can delete it

• You can decide what is best

• “YOU”

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tychay/



Ingredients

• Shared Understanding

• Central Identity

• Global Graph

Shared

http://www.flickr.com/photos/belmore/



Tagging

• Labelling our stuff

• Now what?

• What does ‘Paris’ and ‘Paris’ *really mean*?

Shared linking != shared understanding

• technorati tags

• Drupal, Wordpress, Live Writer, etc...

• Creates some sort of emergent meaning, but still we are just talking about matching strings of characters :-(

Concept Tagging

• Freebase

microformats to the rescue

• Organic formation

• Actual meaning is being encoded

• Structure emerges

http://www.flickr.com/photos/samoube/



Now we are cooking with gas... shared

meaning

http://www.flickr.com/photos/eole/



But wait. What happens when I want more...

• hCard

• hCalendar

• hReview

• hListing

• hResume

• XFN

• rel-licensehttp://www.flickr.com/photos/jcocinero/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcocinero/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jcocinero/

Vocabularies

• Now we can describe anything but what do we name it?

• Roll your own

• Or better yet, re-use

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sir_fish/



Ontologies

http://www.flickr.com/photos/iskanderstruck/



Ontologies

• Umbrella Ontologies help create strong and weak ties




Ontologies


• UMBEL




Ontologies


• UMBEL

• Dbpedia




Ontologies


• UMBEL

• Dbpedia

• OpenCyc




• http://www.visuwords.com/search.php

FOAFhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/beija-flor/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/beija-flor/


FOAF It’s all about who you know ...




and who you don’t want to ...

• OpenID

• RDFauth




http://www.flickr.com/people/hotmeteor/



GLOBALhttp://www.flickr.com/people/19877537@N00/



GRAPHimage: Cognitive Science Research Unit - Universite Libre de Bruxelles





“It's not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important. Obvious, really.”

Tim Berners-Lee

http://www.flickr.com/people/tscarlisle/



From the web of documents to the web of things

http://www.flickr.com/photos/vardhana/



“If the graph of people is cool, imagine a graph

of everything” Dries Buytaert

“the value of your information grows exponentially with your ability to combine it with new information”

– Henry Story, Sun Microsystems

http://www.flickr.com/people/mk1971/



Linked Data

image: Richard Cyganiak - http://dowhatimean.net/



Mobile dbpedia

it's all coming together now

How can we build this thing?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/m500/



Tools

• Semantic Mediawiki

• Drupal

• Simile Exhibit & Timeline

• D2RQ

• PHP - ARC & Triplify

• .Net - linq2RDF

• Java - Sesame & Elmo

SMW

• Structured data

• Linked data

• SPARQL querying

• Semantic forms

• Semantic maps

Chickipedia is the world's largest web-based, women-based, wiki-based database of hot chicks

on the planet. It is entirely user generated, making it the first female-only encyclopedia of the

people, by the people, and for the people ext

The Trouble with SMW





• Why not use this as the only thing?






• Permissions, or actually, the lack thereof







• Almost impossible to really lock it down








• lots of hacking and then patching








• lots of hacking and then patching

• and still things come through




Drupal 5

Drupal 5

• FOAF

Drupal 5

• FOAF

• Neologism

Drupal 5

• FOAF

• Neologism

• RDFCCK

Drupal 5

• FOAF

• Neologism

• RDFCCK

• Open Calais

Drupal 5

• FOAF

• Neologism

• RDFCCK

• Open Calais

• MOAT

The trouble with Drupal 5





• It’s not 6





• It’s not 6

• Weird to-and-fro, confusion





• It’s not 6


• Some modules no longer maintained





• It’s not 6


• Some modules no longer maintained

•A lot of the good stuff is in 6 & 7




Drupal 6




Drupal 6

• Way better than 5




Drupal 6


• RDF API




Drupal 6


• RDF API

• SPARQL




Drupal 6


• RDF API

• SPARQL

• Open Calais




Drupal 6


• RDF API

• SPARQL

• Open Calais

• RDFCCK




Drupal 6


• RDF API

• SPARQL

• Open Calais

• RDFCCK

• Exhibit




The trouble with 6!!

http://www.flickr.com/people/psmithson/




• It is not 5!





• It is not 5!

• Core features are still in RC and beta stages??? WTF





• It is not 5!


• Some important modules are still 5 only





• It is not 5!



• Panels, FOAF, MOAT





• It is not 5!



• Panels, FOAF, MOAT

• A lot of the good stuff is coming in 7 (sound familiar?)




Why can’t we be friends...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/greentea/



Triplify

SPARQL queries

• Federated / distributed search

• Structured search

• Security via HTTP auth

http://www.flickr.com/photos/girl-inchoate/



RDFa and microformats

• Indexed by Sindice and Search Monkey

• Sindice is the global query engine of the Structured Web (aka Semantic Web)

Some RDFa users

• Creative Commons

• DIGG

For instance, Creative Commons has recently started to deploy RDFa across the web in the form of copyright and licensing information. Every time a Creative Commons user selects a CC license, the generated HTML badge contains RDFa markup indicating the nature of the license. The Creative Commons Infobar uses this data to selectively trigger on pages that declare their license using structured markup: DIGG

RDFa

• What does it look like?

• Web links for presentation can be found at http://davidseth.net/


http://davidseth.net

http://davidseth.net



semantic web for distributed social networks

Technology

smw http

shared http

confusion http

sharedmeaning http

web of things http

shared meaning http

reuse http

richard cyganiak http