Social, mobile, semantic
Thu, 2008-04-24 06:54 — alex
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 ?
Comments
Another use-case: Imagine
Another use-case:
Imagine you're standing in a shop, looking at a product, trying to decide whether you should buy it or not. You get out your phone, select a special application, from there you take a picture of the barcode on the product, the application analyses the picture and returns the GTIN encoded by the barcode (so, basically you do what they do at the till).
The application will then connect to the internet and ask Semantic Web search engines for statements that have the GTIN as a value of dcterms:identifier (or some sub-property of that). It looks up the subjects of those statements and collects everything it can find: detailed descriptions of the product, technical specifications, ingredients, reviews, prices at other sellers, ...
The application will then display that information through a nice interface. And if it somehow knows your location (integrated GPS, network cell), it could show you a map of nearby sellers that offer the same product (or comparable ones) cheaper! And it could let you enter information about the product and submit it to some database so that others can see it on their maps.
It's one of my favourite SW ideas, since it would be something of interest for everyone and could revolutionise the markets. *dreaming* :-)