New York Times Research and Development Group / New York / 29th June 2010

1. The social semantic web:
new york times edition
John breslin

2. lecturer at Nui galway
Engineering and
informatics

3. Researcher at Deri, nui galway

4. Co-founder of Boards.ie

5. Socialmedia.net editor, owner

6. Social media
is exploding!
image from tinyurl.com/nuketest

7. Breakdown of ugc visits
• .61 = social networks
• .11 = forums
• .11 = UG content sites, e.g. UrbanDictionary.com
• .10 = UG marketplaces, e.g. Craigslist.org
• .03 = Blogs
• .01 = UG reviews, e.g. ApartmentRatings.com
• .01 = Wikis
• .02 = Other
Text from tinyurl.com/briscougc

8. Sites go up...
image from tinyurl.com/rocket15

9. Facebook and twitter

10. ...and sites come down
image from tinyurl.com/elhell

11. bebo

12. It's the social objects we
create…
• Discussions
• Bookmarks
• Annotations
• Microblogs
• Multimedia

13. …that connect us
to other people

14. Social media sites are like data
silos
image from pidgintech.com

15. Many isolated communities of
users and their data
image from pidgintech.com

16. Need ways to connect these
islands
image from pidgintech.com

17. Allowing users to easily move
from one to another
image from pidgintech.com

18. Enabling users to easily bring
their data with them
image from pidgintech.com

19. image from tinyurl.com/orionw

21. Semantics

22. Social Semantic Web

23. Two-way street: semantic web
can help social web, vice versa
• Can Use semantic web to describe people,
content objects and the connections that
bind them all together so that social sites
can interoperate via semantics
• In the other direction, object-centered
social websites can serve as rich social
data sources for semantic applications
image from tinyurl.com/highway2

24. Foaf (friend of a friend)

25. What's foaf?
• An ontology for describing people and the
relationships that exist between them:
– foaf-project.org
– Identity, personal profiles, social networks
– Can integrate with other SW vocabularies
– Used on LiveJournal, MyOpera, identi.ca,
MyBlogLog, hi5, Fotothing, Videntity,
FriendFeed, Ecademy, Typepad
image from tinyurl.com/friendship2

26. Distributed identities with FOAF
Image by sheila kinsella

27. FOAF (Friend-of-a-Friend)

28. FOAF (Friend-of-a-Friend)

29. Image by dan brickley

30. SIOC, pronounced shock
image from tinyurl.com/siocshock

31. Semantically-Interlinked Online
Communities (SIOC)
• Goal of the SIOC ontology is to address
interoperability issues on the Social Web
• sioc-project.org
• SIOC has been adopted in a framework of
60 applications or modules deployed on
hundreds of sites
• Web 2.0, enterprise information
integration, HCLS, e-government

33. Some of the SIOC core ontology
classes and properties

35. Some applications using sioc

36. From last October
36

37. RDFA (Sioc, FOAF) in drupal 7
• Drupal is a cms used by various sites:
– whitehouse.gov, warnerbrosrecords.com,
uk.sun.com, motogp.com...
• Five Alpha versions of drupal 7 released
already, semantic web support built-in
– Release candidate version on its way
image from tinyurl.com/drupaper

38. Rdfa on newsweek.com

39. Rinse, repeat, beautiful hair

40. Semantic search

41. Opo (Online presence ontology)
• aims to unify presence information and
status notification processes across
different services:
– Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc.
• Help solve the information overload issue
at the same time, by providing a means
to identify who / which community the
information should reach: sharing spaces

42. MOAT (meaning of a tag)
• moat-project.org
• A model to define "meanings" of tags
– SPARQL → dbpedia.org/resource/SPARQL
• User-driven interlinking
• Tagged content enters Linked Data web
• Collaborative approach towards the
sharing of meanings in a community
image from tinyurl.com/whichapple

43. An ontology stack for the social
semantic web

44. Distributed
Architecture
(Smob)

45. Semantic
#hashtags

46. Stuff that looks exciting
image from tinyurl.com/fireflames

47. Facebook open graph
• Allows metadata from external pages to
be embedded (claimed) within facebook
• E.g. metadata about a restaurant (name,
location, contacts) could be imported into
a facebook news feed via a like button
• Good for facebook, good for the semantic
web? Yes!

48. OGP in RDF (FOAF, DC, SIOC, GR)

49. Twitter Annotations
• forthcoming initiative by Twitter:
– attach arbitrary metadata to any tweet
– overall limit for the metadata payload
– May be able to attach RDF-type statements
• Going beyond geotemporal annotations:
– "type":{"attribute":"value"}
– "movie":{"title":"avatar"}
image from tinyurl.com/twannotation

50. image from knightriderfestival.com
What If your car could tweet

53. image from tinyurl.com/starshiptr

54. our new book
now at amazon.com

55. Twitter.com
/johnbreslin
Johnbreslin.com
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