First workshop on Social Data on the Web at ISWC2008
As you may have already read, the 1st workshop on Social Data on the Web (SDoW2008) will be held at next ISWC, at the end of October in Karlshrue and I’m really glad to co-chair it with Uldis, John and Sergio.
If you work on a related field, either as a researcher, industrial or developer, you’re more than welcome to submit a paper, a poster or a demo until the 25th of July via easychair. More information about the topics and organization of the workshop it can be found on the SDoW2008 website.
While talking about the Social Web, the proceedings of the SAW2008 workshop that was held tuesday in Innsbruck will be online soon on CEUR-WS website (Vol. 333). Here are also the slides of our talk I gave here, and the one I gave in the main conference about another paper (that should be soon uploaded here).
Tags: bis2008, dataportability, iswc2008, saw2008, sdow2008, slideshare, socialgraph
Semantic Web talks in Innsbruck
I’ll present a paper co-written with Uldis Bojars, John Breslin and Stefan Decker - and with Dan Brickely’s valuable feedback - titled “Social Networks and Data Portability using Semantic Web technologies” on the 2nd Social Aspects on the Web workshop (SAW2008) next tuesday in Innsbruck. As you can guess, the talk will show how FOAF and SIOC can provide efficient and normalized ways to model social networks and user contributions on the Web and thus achieve (some of) the data portability goals. Uldis will also give a related talk on Friday at XTech in Dublin.
Some Semantic-Web related talks also occur in the main BIS conference, with some keynotes on this topic and various talks related to ontologies on monday afternoon, some of them also linking to Web 2.0 aspects as tagging and wikis. It should be interesting to see how the social semantic web (call it web n.0) is spread in organizations. I’ll also present here the use of a form-based Semantic Wiki in corporate environment. Think of it as “hidden semantics” or how to let people manage ontology instances and re-use it without any knowledge of RDF. BTW, the great talk by Denny Vrandečić about Semantic MediaWiki in the WWW2008 Dev-Track also showed how SMW could be used that way, with a nice example :-). Once again, I really enjoyed the experience of being there, meeting some of the people I knew only on the Web, listening to great talks (I especially liked Google’s keynote about cloud computing, querying and fuzzy-logic, Web 2.0 and learning , W3C SW track, Dev-track and SW panel, and of course the LDOW workshop) and presenting some of my works in front of such an audience.
Next steps, ESWC2008 and related workshops, IC, and of course, finish writing my PhD thesis… you were right Tom, it really takes a long time!
Social, mobile, semantic
Monday’s DBpedia mobile presentation at LDOW2008 impressed me a lot. Actually, while I never worked on it, I’m really interested in ways to combine mobile applications, Semantic Web / Linked Data technologies and social networking. Here’s a use case I have in mind for a long time and I’d like to share.
Imagine in can embed a FOAF profile on my mobile phone, or just an URI with owl:sameAs / rdfs:seeAlso links to my main URI / RDF file. When joining a conference, a restaurant or any place where there are some people (and when I’m in a good mood), I allow my phone to deliver my presence and this URI (+ related data) to anyone, while at the same time searching for available URIs and data.
Then, I got a list of URIs, and my phone will suggest me that there’s some people nearby that I must meet regarding some criterias and how our URIs are interlinked. A simple way would be to configure the application with kind of (statement, depth) tuples. For example (foaf:interest, 2) would suggest me all people where one of my foaf:interest is link to one of their foaf:interest with a maximum path of 2. And of course, those paths should be computed using Linked Data and considering the whole SW graph, or GGG, e.g. going through DBpedia, GeoNames of any dataset from the LOD cloud if needed.
But, in some case, paths are not enough, as they can result to unrelevant results (depending on the start URI the path may quickly go towards too generic URIs), or sometimes too much people. For example, at a SW event, I guess it would have suggest me to meet anything since I have dbpedia:Semantic_Web in my profile. A solution could be to have an intelligent context manager in the mobile phone that will check my iCal, find that I’m attending a workshop (or even better, use GPS location, browse upcoming.org or other services to find which event I’m attending), retrieve the workshop homepage in which organizers embedded some RDF data about topics of the workshops (as they eat their own dogfood :), and exclude those URIs (and paths that goes through). To be more accurate, instead of those path tuples, I could also define complex queries, as for example: “People that will present some paper at a conference I’ll attend next month”.
Actually, it’s just a matter of providing all the data, open it, and of course, interlink. But well, “Linked Data is the Semantic Web done as it should be. It is the Web done as it should be“, no ?
Tags: foaf, ldow2008, linkeddata, mobile, rdf, socialnetwork
Attending WWW2008
I’m currently in Beijing, enjoying WWW2008.
Sunday, Uldis, John and myself gave a tutorial about “Interlinking Online Communities and Enriching Social Software with the Semantic Web“, in which we detailed current state of the art regarding SIOC and related works, like how Enterprise 2.0 or data portability can be enhanced thanks to the Semantic Web, as well as describing various tools that produce or consume Social Semantic Web data. The slides can be browsed online here.
Today, I gave two talks at the LDOW workshop, the first one about the flickrdf exporter, the second one about MOAT, while Uldis talked about SIOC and Linked Data. Slides of both of my presentations are online. It was a great workshop, lots of interesting papers and concrete applications demo. That’s really interesting and encouraging to see so much people deploying Semantic Web technologies in various contexts and for various purposes, from biology to enterprise data integration, and also facing new research issues as URI identification and mappings.
Tomorrow starts the main conference, and I guess - and I hope - that it will be as intense and interesting as those first two days. For those interested in MOAT, I’ll give a talk in the Dev Track - Semantic Web II session on friday morning. And for those who’ve been at the LDOW workshop today, the slides will be a bit different, so you can come one more time 
Tags: bejing, ldow2008, moat, sioc, www2008
SemwebCampParis numéro 2
Vendredi dernier avait lieu la seconde édition du SemanticCampParis. J’ai enfin pu voir une démo live de Beatnik par Henry, à surveiller pour tous ceux qui cherchent un moyen de gérer leurs contacts de manière ouverte, en apprendre un peu plus sur Nepomuk avec Stéphane et découvrir le projet Feedbooks.
Par manque de temps, l’après-midi a été moins complete que prévu, mais ça n’a pas empeché un des deux groupes de discuter réseaux sociaux, portabilité de données et tags. Voila les slides que j’ai présenté à cette occasion (… ok, j’ai triché, j’ai rajouté le dernier pour les pointeurs vers les projets relatifs aux tags et au WS qui ont été évoqués)
Tags: barcamp, dataportability, foaf, sioc
CV et (dé)-motivation
Tout ça pour signaler que ma copine femme cherche en ce moment du boulot, en tant que chargée de projet en vulgarisation scientifique / organisation d’évènements. Son CV est disponible à cette adresse, des infos sur certains de ses anciens projets sont en ligne ici et là et elle peu commencer immédiatement.
Pour les fans de Dilbert, la suite ici.
Tags: cv, emploi, médiation, scientifique, vulgarisation
RDFa profile and new URI
I just added a short profile about myself embedding RDFa that aims to replace my old FOAF file, in which I already moved some things (i.e. relationships) to external services.
I also gave me a nicer URI, http://apassant.net/alex that uses content-negociation to redirect either to the HTML version of this profile or to the extracted RDF one, depending on the Accept header, combining some rewrite rules that Ivan Herman defined for the SW Faq and the .htaccess used for the Flickr wrapper. My old foaf.rdf file is also now redirected to this extracted profile, and I’m using an owl:sameAs in RDFa link to be compliant with services that uses my old URI.
# Old foaf.rdf compliance
RedirectPermanent /foaf.rdf http://www.w3.org/2007/08/pyRdfa/extract?uri=http://apassant.net/about/
# RDF redirect for my URI
RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} application/rdf\+xml
RewriteRule ^alex$ http://www.w3.org/2007/08/pyRdfa/extract?uri=http://apassant.net/about/ [R=303,L]
# HTML redirect for my URI
RewriteRule ^alex$ about [R=303,L]
I’m also wondering, since this profile is used as http://apassant.net homepage which is also my OpenID URL, how it will work when loggin on websites using SparqlPress + OpenID as ARC2 embeds an RDFa extractor so that it should discover my FOAF data without using any autodiscovery link.
Hosting problems
As you may seen, I had a lot of hosting problems recently. Moreover, since I was away, I did not have time to check what’s wrong and since gandi beta hosting still have some issues about rebooting servers I was not able to restart it easily. Now I’m back, I finally restarted my box, updated Apache config (fingers crossed now), but still looking on how to optimize, as it takes most of the memory and seems to make other services unavailable (especially ssh and mysql).
All my apologies to those who where trying to access this website and one of the other website hosted there (MOAT, foafmap, doapstore) during the last two weeks.
MOAT, Sindice and the Tag Ontology
I just commited two updates for the MOAT module for Drupal 5:
First, in order to add new URIs for a tag, the plugin now uses the sindice Widget that will query Sindice.com and suggests URIs for the used keyword. Then, simply chose the URI, and it will be added as a new meaning for your tag. A big thanks to the Sindice team and especially Adam for modifying the JS regarding the needs of the plugin (and for cool discussions we had about SW 
) !
The next step I want to add in this plug-in is the social networking aspect (since all Meaning instances are related to people that define it, the plug-in could list in priority meanings defined by your friends, using foaf:knows). I’ll certainly need some people to be part of the experiment, so if you’re interesting in it, drop me a mail here or on moat-dev - comment here.
Second change, the plug-in now exports RestrictedTagging objects, while the previous version only exports sioc:topic links. Here’s an example of such an export. It also implied some changes on the sioc module, so you’ll need to update both from cvs if you want to try it. I hope this example (since the website documentation is not that clear at the moment) can help to solve some misunderstood about MOAT, eg (from this this interesting post from Kanzaki Masahide):
You might think this looks more natural if a Tagging has a Meaning, and a person is associated with Tagging, not Meaning. However, since a Tagging can have multiple associatedTag, it is not possible to establish such one-to-one mapping.
Indeed, tagging do not have direct link(s) to Meaning instances, since the Meaning class is context independant (i.e. representing all the meanings a tag can have). Yet, each tagging can have a tagMeaning property, that links to the needed URI. Moreover, to represent this tagging, MOAT implies to use a RestrictedTagging instance, and not a Tagging one, so that there’s only one associated Tag. Person are associated with Tagging (thanks to SIOC in the example, but could be extended with FOAF), and the reason to keep Person associated with the Meaning, is to contextualize it (see the social networking part I mention just before):
<tag:RestrictedTagging> <tag:taggedResource rdf:resource=“http://apassant.net/drupal/drupal-5.5/?q=node/6″/> <sioc:has_creator rdf:resource=“http://apassant.net/drupal/drupal-5.5/?q=sioc/user/1%23_user”/> <tag:associatedTag rdf:resource=“http://tags.moat-project.org/tag/sparql”/> <moat:tagMeaning rdf:resource=“http://dbpedia.org/resource/SPARQL”/> </tag:RestrictedTagging>
Hope that’s more clear, and - this time, for sure - I’ll update the website with more relevant schemas / documents !
FOAF hacks of the day
A bit of hacking tonight, after a lot of interesting talks this afternoon about FOAF, OpenID and online identity (and certainly more to come tomorrow):
- Added queries to retrieve user accounts from FOAF profile and display them in comments with SparqlPress. Once again, it’s done by SPARQLing the FOAF URI of the user logged-in on this blog using an OpenID URL. To be displayed, the account must either have a URI (i.e. not to be a blank node) or a foaf:accountProfilePage (BTW, this one is not in the specs while it seems most people agreed on it - and already use it. Dan, what about it ?). Also added icons for some well-knows services. Live example here, and screenshot:
- Updated the simple network browser script to be compliant with the new release of a GraphGear (1.2). The component has new interesting features that can be set in the xml file, as setting the size of the nodes, and adding images. I updated the script to benefit from those features, and so it now display pictures and smaller nodes, which make the script run faster. The image detection only handles foaf:img at the moment, so this is something that whould need more work (e.g. retrieve sioc:avatar from the related online account …). Yet, here’s a sreenshot of the new rendering that you can browse there:
Time to sleep now …
Tags: foaf, graphgear, sparql, sparqlpress, wordpress