Facebook |The Semantic Puzzle

Have you ever read “privacy policy” of your preferred social media?

February 26, 2009 by Andreas Blumauer, Category: Privacy & Information Ethics

Today we had an interview date with Markus Mooslechner from ORF (Austrian Broadcasting). The TV-Show “Newton” will discuss next Saturday how social media affects our lives, especially how one can make sure that private data won´t be used improperly, e.g. by certain internet providers.

My colleague Tassilo Pellegrini gave some nice examples how some providers like Facebook explicitly state in their privacy policy that they are allowed to hand over all personal data to any other third party (“…our service providers may have access to your personal information for use for a limited time in connection with these business activities”).

It´s a shame that some fundamental rights regarding privacy have dissipated in just a few years.

Also today, I asked Chris Bizer, doubtlessly one of the key-players in the semantic web community, some questions for an interview. Among other things I was also wondering if he thinks that the Semantic Web could solve some privacy issues or if Linked Data will rather become a synonym for “transparent user” (Gläserner Mensch).

The Times They Are A-Changin … yes, we can

January 22, 2009 by Marion Fuglewicz-Bren, Category: Internet & Media, Politics

: Image by William WM via Flickr

One of the many ways that the election of Barack Obama as president has echoed that of John F. Kennedy is his use of a new medium that will forever change politics. For Mr. Kennedy, it was television. For Mr. Obama, it is the Internet. Obama´s Internet Campaign Changed Politics. “Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee,” said Arianna Huffington, editor in chief of The Huffington Post.

America´s new president Barack Obama didn’t go out and recruit on facebook, they came to him at first. Did the internet make Obama’s natural “viralness” quicker and more transparent? Obama’s huge victory on Tuesday night was celebrated in Austria and Germany, as it was around the world: German Press on Obama Victory: “The Dream is Alive“. Der Spiegel‘s Gabor Steingart – who for months dismissed the notion that Obama had a real chance for the White House – writes about the Resurrection of the American Dream: “His base note is conciliatory, his overtone is exalted and the harmony is finely balanced. If anyone out there still doubted that the American dream was alive, he called out to his supporters in Chicago, “tonight is your answer.”

However things will happen or not and however the „Change has come to America“: The president´s new official website is online www.whitehouse.gov. And here users are really being involved. We all are involved. Obama means change. Let´s see in what ways this will concern the future of the internet.

KiWi as a Social Wiki Platform for Software Development, Open Ontology Management

November 28, 2008 by Jana Herwig, Category: Knowledge Management, Social Software, Tools & Software

KiWi – Knowledge in a Wiki, Day 2 – Josef Holy from Sun Microsystems Prague led the first part of today’s use case presentation. With the KiWi semantic wiki system (or: wiki on steroids, as Josef Holy put it), they want to be able to increase the productivity of knowledge workers. Sun Microsystems have extensive experience with online and community collaboration and they want Kiwi to become a social wiki platform that is deployable in various contexts, i.e. that ties in with other platforms such as Netbeans or Zembly.

One of Sun’s further assumptions is that users will migrate to KiWi neither immediately nor completely – and that’s an insight anyone developing yet another social platform should take to their heart. What was true in Field of Dreams – “If you build it, they will come” – does not quite apply here. The network effect works in favour of existing communities, and instead of striving to replace an existing platform, one might be better off with mashable contents and services.

The particular benefit of a semantic wiki is that it allows moving from unstructured to structured information (relatively) easily. For KiWi @ Sun (and in favour of mashed information), this means that what is relevant will be structured, both by people and by machines – a process that is going to extend beyond company boundaries. People will bring in structure by creating links from KiWi documents to external systems as well as by writing new facts (which the KiWi system will represent as triples) about external information. What is not relevant, won’t be structured – and will be forgotten. After all, it’s forgetting that makes you remember the important stuff.

One note about the users of KiWi at Sun: Since this use case focuses on knowledge management for software development, it can be taken for granted that users will have an above-average level of web savvyness. Primary users will be software designers (i.e. the people who design for the users of the final product) and developers – learn more about the different roles in a software development project at Sun here.

Consequently, the User Interface (UI) concept Josef introduced also comprises a social networking unit – things such as a ‘My Contacts’, ‘My Pages’ list, but most importantly an activity feed, which will help users to collaborate, participate, discover activities that others are currently working, develop a mental ‘social map’ of the community. Such an activity stream (similar to Facebook’s News Stream) would contain items such as:

Szaby wrote a blog post
Josef rated document XUI specs: five stars
Peter created document ToDoList KiWi-UI
Stephanie is now a contact of Marek
Klara shared a document with Sebastian

Considering the target group, it is also planned that the UI will be extensible through widgets that users are able to write themselves.

*coffee break*

Above: The KiWi-Team, hailing (officially) from Austria, the Czech republic, Denmark and Germany

After the break, Andreas Blumauer (Semantic Web Company, Vienna) followed up with a talk entitled “Open Ontology Management & Linked Data” which explored the uses of the Web of Data for the Sun usecase.

His argument was that content and topic-centred, open communities should have mechanisms at their disposal for relating content and activities to particular parts of a shared concept model, e.g. of an ontology. In particular in projects like NetBeans, where contents and related processes evolve over time, different NetBeans groups utilizing the KIWI system should be allowed to maintain and share their own concept models. The combination of bottom-up and top-down approaches would, for instance, come as the combination of free tagging (where people often use different labels to refer to the same, or the same label to refer to different things) and concept tagging.

Free concepts can be turned into controlled ones, too, by being inserted into an existing controlled vocabulary, as either a narrower or related concept of any existing controlled concept. Open Ontology Management done this way is a Learning system: Through the combination of a Free Extraction Model (FEM) and a Controlled Extraction Model (CEM), text extraction improves over time.

Andreas also revealed a first glimpse of a project currently in stealth mode, code name ‘PoolParty’, which is an Open Ontology Management System that can be used to enrich local knowledge with data from the web. PoolParty consumes Linked Data and provides Linked Data; in the context of the current use case, it will be able to communicate with the KiWi System. Please contact Andreas if you would like to be notified about the further development of PoolParty.

Session 4: Using the Web of Data [WOD-PD]

October 23, 2008 by Jana Herwig, Category: Conferences & Events, Linked Data & Open Data

This morning’s first session was dedicated to Using the Web of Data, or, as Alan Dix put it: “In the end, it’s not about data – it’s about use!” Alan and Richard Cyganiak were the keynoters for this session.

Alan Dix is a Professor at the Computing Department of Lancaster University, and author (with Janet Finlay, Gregory Abowd, and Russel Beale) of Human-Computer Interaction.

To start with, Alan pointed to the two sides of achieving the web of data: Firstly generating the web of data (a billion triples, as mighty as this may sound, is actually tiny, says Alan) and then, secondly, accessing the web of data.

With regard to generating the Web of Data, Alan distinguished between top down and bottom up approaches, counting to the former the creation of the web of data from legacy sources (i.e. where you take existing data and semantically lift them, e.g. from structured data) or web scraping such as DBpedia‘s extraction of data from Wikipedia.

N.B.: This notion of ‘top-down’ does not imply a hierarchical relationship, but rather means that there is already a plan for what is going to be put on the web of data (e.g. ‘all semi-structured information on Wikipedia’ or ‘dataset XY from project Z’). The bottom-up idea here implies that data is added as the result of an action, or interaction, as the user/s go, e.g. relationships are created as the user expands his or her social network. For instance on Amazon, user interaction is used to generate semantics: People do not tell Amazon what they like, they simply buy it.

Having relationships of course does not imply yet that these relationships are part of the Semantic Web. Or, as Alan put it, “why should I be RDFizing my online presence if none of my friends are?”

Please take a look at the PDF of the Alan’s slides (2,4 MB) – what I cannot reproduce here is a chart he developed, which was very useful for describing current scenarios on the web and which posed a twofold question:

Does a website/platform have the web of data implemented? YES/NO
Is the web of data on ta website/platform apparent to the user? YES/NO

The possible combinations (YES/YES, YES/NO, NO/YES, NO/NO) provide a good heuristic tool for describing what is currently available, with and without the Semantic Web. Take, for instance, the shiny interface of Talis’ Project Cenote: Cenote’s vision is to “make library data visible in many contexts, inside and outside of the library, making the data much more accessible and visible to a wider audience – benefiting current and potential users of library services wherever they are.” On Cenote, the user doesn’t see that it’s got the Web of Dat in it – it is actually implemented, but not in a way that is apparent to the user.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have a platform like Facebook: Alan referred to Facebook as “the user’s own web of data”, i.e. web of relationships: The user is aware of these relationships (they actually shape his interaction and communication with the site), and the (numerous!) apps on Facebook continually add relationships, but, regrettably, insulated from one another and not using RDF (and don’t you try to take data out of Facebook!).

Two examples of public data that Alan cited and that grow as people/institutions add data do them are Freebase (the “open database of the world’s information” – see previous posts on this blog about Freebase) and Swivel. Swivel allows people, institutions, anyone to upload and explore data, also featuring official data sources such as (links go to their Swivel pages): New York Federal Reserve Bank, UNESCO Institute for Statistics, DukeResearch or EUROSTAT. According to Alan, there is already more data on Swivel now than in the whole Linked Data cloud.

Alan also mentioned the Social Graph API – o yesterday evening Luca Hammer (one of the web 2.0 people who had joined the Open Hacking Session) introduced me to the WordPress Plugin “Meet your commenters” – Meet you commenters uses Social Graph to find social relations on the web, and adds these data to the commenter profiles it creates in WordPress.

Image via WikipediaOn a different note: I took sometime today to explore Alan’s homepage and found the cute Christmas Cracker’s application which was first developed in 1999 and which is now also available on Facebook. As trivial as it may sound at first – sending virtual Christmas Crackers (with more than 5000 possible combinations!) is a good showcase for developing Human Interaction Scenarios, and a number of papers have been written about the application. Here is the casestudy which Alan recommends to begin with: Designing experience – virtual Christmas Crackers.

The abstract and a list of links to all websites and demos Alan discussed can be found here. Full reference: A. Dix and R. Cyganiak (2008). Using the Web of Data. Keynote at WOD-PD 2008 | Web of Data Practitioners Days, Vienna, Austria – Oct 22-23, 2008. http://www.hcibook.com/alan/papers/WOD-PD-2008/

Even if you have not met Richard Cyganiak in person, you have certainly come across one of his creations: The Linked Data Cloud. Richard is a research assistant at DERI Galway. In his demo, he gave us the opportunity to gain hands on experience, introducing a tool he dubbed Snorql, which is basically an easier to use version of a SPARQL-endpoint, as it already has the required prefixes ‘pre-installed’:

Using the Snorql interface, we could explore the dataset we had created collaboratively during Keith Alexander and Yves Raimond’s session. Writing SPARQL queries manually can be a challenge, but is next to impossible if you (like me) don’t know the syntax. But today we could just copy and paste all the queries from a website Richard had put up prior to his session – thanks a lot for the excellent preparation and demonstration!

Richard also showed a couple of RDF browsers in action, e.g. the Tabulator Plugin (“a Firefox extension which allows Firefox to handle data as well as documents”), or the Marbles Linked Data browser which is running right on beckr.org/marbles; enter, for instance http://api.talis.com/stores/wod-pd-sandbox/items/People/JanaHerwig (learn more about Marbles here).

Thank you, Alan and Richard – the combination of talk and demo was indeed a perfect intro towards using the Web of Data.

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