Social Music meets the Semantic Web
No much time to blog at the moment, as I’m mainly concentrated on writing my PhD thesis (and so I wish best of luck - and motivation - to the ones in the same case !)
Yet, I gave a talk at a Center For Digital Music seminar last week, invited there by Yves Raimond. The goal was to showcase how the usual suspects of the Social Semantic Web (FOAF / SIOC / MOAT / LOD) can be used in the context of music-related services and can provide new ways regarding music recommendation. If you’re interested in music-related computing (not only from a SW point of view), you may also be interested in browsing the lab homepage and various projects they host (as the Giant Instrument and others like 3D-sound modeling, automatic mixing or human-synth beat-box)
Tags: foaf, lastfm, linkeddata, moat, sioc, socialmusic
ESWC2008 slides
I finally uploaded the slides of the various talks I gave at last ES(W)C in Tenerife:
- “FOAF and SIOC applications“, invited talk at Harry Halpin’s “Social Networks” tutorial (embeds at the end of that post)
- “MOAT: Meaning Of A Tag“, lightning talk at the LOD BOF
- “Towards and Interlinked Semantic Wiki-Farm“, SemWiki2008 (paper will be online later on the workshop proceedings and was awarded best paper - thanks for the kiwis
) - “Microblogging: A Semantic Web and Distributed Approach“, SFSW2008 (paper)
- “Social Network Portability panel introduction“
As you can see, it was a busy but - once again - really valuable week. Lots of quality papers, especially, from my point of view, the ones about querying (esp. distributed approaches like DARQ - more details on Orri Erling’s blog), LOD-related (Semantic Sitemaps) and the OntoGame one. Readers of this blog should also be interested in xOperator, an approach combining LOD, social networking and instant messaging.
Interesting things were also presented during the workshops, as SWOOKI (a Semantic P2P wiki), ACEWiki (a wiki using controlled natural language to model both ontology and instances from the wiki, with reasoning capabilities using Pellet) and the use of semantic wikis for mathematics, which was particulary interesting from the use-case point of view, as for Flyspeck. Also nice (and sometimes fun) papers and demos in the SFSW workshop (congrats to Benjamin!) and in the demo session, as RDBToOnto that mine ontologies (and instances) from relational databases.
Another interesting fact for LOD-ers are the first steps of voiD, a vocabulary to describe datasets (which could efficiently combined with the previously mentioned work on distributed SPARQL: send your query on the Web, let the system find datasources, query and merge).
Finally, as in Beijing, it was a great opportunity to meet people I knew only online. Hope to see you in Karlsruhe!
Tags: eswc, eswc2008, moat, semwiki, sfsw2008, sioc, smob
IC2008: 19e Journées Francophones d’Ingénierie des Connaissances
Mercredi, jeudi et vendredi (18-19-20 Juin) auront lieu à Nancy (au LORIA plus pécisément) les 19e Journées Francophones d’Ingénierie des Connaissances, IC2008. Le programme annonce plusieurs présentations liées au Web Sémantique (aussi bien sur le lien Web 2.0 / WS - ou je parlerai notamment d’une utilisation combinée de SIOC, MOAT et de wikis sémantiques - que sur la conception et l’utilisation d’ontologies, requêtes ou webservices) et une keynote d’Ivan Herman intitulée “Etat des lieux du WS” aura lieu jeudi matin.
Toujours dans ce cadre d’IC2008 aura lieu demain l’atelier IC 2.0 que je co-organise. L’objectif principal est d’étudier les changements introduits par les usages du Web 2.0 dans les pratiques de gestion des connaissances. Les résumés des interventions sont en ligne, et là aussi le Web Sémantique est bien représenté.
Si vous êtes en Lorraine ces prochains jours et que ces sujets vous intéressent, vous savez ce qu’il vous reste à faire.
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
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 !
MOAT module for Drupal 5
A first release of the MOAT module for Drupal 5 is available on drupal.org (get from cvs for latest features).
It features a simple interface that will query a server for the tags you used and show the available URIs that have been defined by yourself or by other users of the same server. At the moment, it makes no distinction between both, neither between your friends’URIs and other people ones.
You can also add a new URI, which will be automatically sent to the server so that anyone can re-use it later.
It outputs the node with the SIOC module and a sioc:topic link (output example), a next release will feature “moat-augmented” RetrictedTagging objects from the Tag ontology.
And so, if your application pings PTSW or someone browe the page with Semantic Radar, its content will be available almost instantaneously for semweb applications.
Introducing MOAT
I’m happy to announce the MOAT project:
MOAT (Meaning Of A Tag) provides a Semantic Web framework to publish semantically-annotated content from free-tagging.
While tags are widely used in Web 2.0 services, their lack of machine-understandable meaning can be a problem for information retrieval, especially when people use tags that can have different meanings depending on the context.
MOAT aims to solve this by providing a way for users to define meaning(s) of their tag(s) using URIs of Semantic Web resources (such as URIs from dbpedia, geonames … or any knowledge base), and then annotate content with those URIs rather than free-text tags, leveraging content into Semantic Web, by linking data together. Moreover, tag meanings can be shared between people, providing an architecture of participation to define and exchange potential meanings of tags within a community of users.
To achieve this goal, MOAT relies on an architecture that can be deployed for any organisation or community and that involves a lightweight ontology, a MOAT server, and some third-party clients .
More details about the framework and its implementation are described on the project website. A demo server is available here, and updates should be done soon (code and documentation).
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Current highlights
