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!

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.

Warning: SMOB bugfix

cc-ed on sioc-dev

If some of you are using SMOB publishing / aggregating tools [1],
please consider reading this.
The current prototype used sioc:MicroBlogPost class, while its URI in
SIOC spec is sioc:MicroblogPost.
I fixed it in SVN, but if you update some client or server now, it
won’t work with old data.
A patch to replace old URIs to new ones in existing applications will
be available soon.
But if you start developing code or implementing a server now, please
checkout the new svn code.

Sorry for any inconvenience !

Alex.

[1] http://smob.googlecode.com

3 years later …

Today was my last day of work at EDF R&D. I spend 3 years and 4 months there, during my PhD funding contract, exploring and implementing ways to expose Enterprise 2.0 to Semantic Web technologies, combining unified meta-data modeling with SIOC, machine-readable knowledge with Semantic Wikis, advanced tagging with MOAT, the whole data interlinked in a “semantic ecosystem” offering new browsing, integration and search features. Even if it was not always easy to combine short-term industrial goals with research objectives, I’m really happy getting the chance to work on a real use case with various problems to solve. I hope I showed that Semantic Web could be a smart solution to these problems and would like to thank anyone involved in the projet, especially my co-workers and apologize for speaking about triples, RDF, ontologies and SPARQL all day long !

Tomorrow, I’ll flight to Tenerife for ESWC. A busy (and interesting regarding the program) week that will start sunday morning by presenting some use-cases of FOAF and SIOC during Harry Halpin’s tutorial on GRDDL and social networks, and then switching between SemWiki and SFSW workshops on saturday. I’ll speak on a panel titled “Social Network Portability: Is the Semantic Web Ready?” on wednesday evening and also be in the poster session tuesday to present MOAT. Then, back to Paris to finish writing my thesis, keep presenting some of my work and hopefully start a new position soon. And yes, having some rest could also be an option. Later, maybe.

SIOC-based microblogging

As John Breslin already detailed last week, we (Tuukka Hastrup, Uldis Bojars, John and myself) recently work on SMOB, a semantic microblogging architecture, that will be presented at next SFSW workshop, co-located with ESWC in Tenerife.

While there have been a lot of buzz recently regarding ways to provide open alternatives to Twitter, then fun thing is that we worked on this in last January while I visited DERI. Our main goal was to show how Semantic Web technologies could provide an open-platform for such way of publishing content, mainly using FOAF and SIOC. Moreover, one of our aim was also to demonstrate how such technologies can provide users a way to control, share and remix their data as they want, not depending on a third-party service, a goal also shared by the dataportability project. In that way, SMOB-published data really belongs to the user that wrote it. Indeed, while SMOB servers (which display a faceted view of agregated posts as you can see on the demo server) store data in their local triple-store, this information (i.e. each update) is hosted on the client side and available in RDF.

At the moment, the complete updates dataset is public, and can be browsed with any RDF browser as the picture below shows (with Tabulator) but we plan to introduce more advanced authentication and privacy issues, in which OpenID could have a role to play.

Users can parse it as any RDF data, mash-it up with other information, eg their FOAF profile (SMOB allows to re-use existing FOAF profile as the foaf:maker of each update), or any other RDF data. And most important, if a SMOB server closes, they still own their data.

Moreover, since SMOB content is SIOC-based, it becomes part of the SIOC-o-sphere, and could be merged with your other social media contributions (from any SIOC application) and discovered thanks to recent APIs and WordPress plug-in introduced by Sindice (automatic PTSW / Sindice pings will be soon in the code repository). This is one more advantage of getting a common semantics to model your data wherever they come from.

Finally, we just introduced in SMOB a way to publish not only to a dedicated server, but also to Twitter. So that you’ll get a real-time, self-hosted and long-life archive of your twits in RDF. Isn’t that cool ?

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

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)

SIOC reader (universal) widget

On yesterday’s SIOC brainstorming, Knud Möller mentioned the use of widgets to browse SIOC data.

I take a look today at the Universal Widget API from Netvibes and wrote a simple widget, that will query any SPARQL endpoint of your choice (need to support JSON output for SELECT queries) for fresh SIOC data. There’s certainly a lof of funniest things we can do with SIOC and widgets (eg: find similar posts in all the sioc-o-sphere when browsing a blog, related pictures, people …), but that’s a starting point. Here’s what it looks like in iGoogle

You can setup the number of items you want to retrieve, as well as the type (default sioc:Post) and the property used to match the date (since I noticed that some SIOC data use dct:modified while others juste use dct:created - it’s time for a SIOC-best practices guide !). Just go to the widget editing interface to change the values. By default, the widget uses one of the Talis platform endpoint URL, thanks a lot to Keith Alexander for quickly setting a JSON-enabled endpoint so that I debugged the widget !

The widget constructs the following query according your parameters:

SELECT ?post ?title
WHERE {
  ?post rdf:type $type ;
    ?post dc:title ?title ;
    ?post $date ?date .
}
ORDER BY DESC (?date) LIMIT $limit

This is the kind of widget that would be cool to plug to a SPARQLPress endpoint to get a quick overview of the activity of your social network, i.e. what are the last thing your friends twit, post, or listened to.

To use it, just go there and you’ll be able to add it to iGoogle or netvibes. If you want to use a standalone version or put it on your blog, you may need additonal resources. I can’t make it work on Dashboard yet, but I hope it will be ok soon.

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.

One FOAF fits all

A few years ago, I created my FOAF profile with FOAF-O-Matic. But actually, I almost never updated it and its foaf:knows list.

So, now, I’ll let external websites manage those informations.
I have exports in RDF of my flickr, twitter and facebook accounts, as well as this weblog (in progress), and in most of them, I define those relationships to the people I know. Since all those files define a URI for myself, I can use my main (I mean hosted by my own) FOAF file as a reference profile that will link myself to my other URIs using owl:sameAs, and also add rdfs:seeAlso links to the related files (as described here), eg:

<owl:sameAs
  rdf:resource="http://apassant.net/home/2007/12/flickrdf/people/33669349@N00"
  rdfs:seeAlso="http://apassant.net/home/2007/12/flickrdf/data/people/33669349@N00"/>

<owl:sameAs
  rdf:resource="http://twitter.com/terraces"
  rdfs:seeAlso="http://tools.opiumfield.com/twitter/terraces/rdf"/>

And I’ll get a decentralized foaf:knows network, as shown on this graph:

Then, I can grab all these profiles in a local RDF store, or even better, use a dedicated Semantic Web “social graph manager” as Knowee or Beatnik to get all my contacts locally, get their e-mail, query profiles, or as David said, integrates in other desktop apps and sync with my iphone (ok, I don’t have one yet ) …

And if services as linked-in or bibliography repositories export FOAF URIs for anyone, as the FOAF/DBLP service already offers, I could even link to people I worked with. In case all those services exports data with only foaf:knows and I want to be more precice, I can refine relationships in my profile using the RELATIONSHIP vocabulary, or maybe even include rules in my profile that could then be taken into consideration by agents that will query it ? Something like:

( GRAPH <http://linkedin/foafexport/mygraph> { #me foaf:knows ?x } )
=>
( #me rel:collaboratesWith ?x )

that will be in my profile itself.

Finally, since I can create a link to this FOAF profile from my OpenID, I can reuse this graph in many applications. And when login to a new service, ask him “is there anyone here that I know from flickr ?”.

More than social network, I can also link from the same profile (or, actually, from the profiles that have been linked to the reference one) to various things I wrote or done on the Web, as data from last-fm, revyu or flickr, thanks to SIOC, as explained here.

So: One reference profile. Lots of distributed information. One Giant Global Graph.

NB: Also check some of Dan Brickley’s experiments about related topics.

NB2: I did not take trust issues in consideration in that post, i.e. how can we be sure that the owl:sameAs relationship is linked to an URI which is really *me*. I think one solution would be to authenticate on those websites using OpenID so that it can find my FOAF file, then my URI, and add an owl:sameAs link in the other direction. Both files should also be signed, and I think that will be ok (?).

Next Page →

• About

  This is the personal website of Alexandre Passant, PhD student in the Semantic Web and Social Software area.

• Websites

  • doap:store
  • FOAFMap
  • MOAT Project

• Current highlights

  

• Recent Posts

  • ESWC2008 slides
  • IC2008: 19e Journées Francophones d’Ingénierie des Connaissances
  • testtt
  • Fixig SMOB
  • Warning: SMOB bugfix