Alexandre Passant

In addition to the Social Semantic Web, you probably know that one of my main research interest concerns Linked Data, not only in publishing but also in consuming it. And well, I also enjoy music and the possibilities that LOD offers in that context, as we've wrote with Yves mid-2008.

So, I recently worked deeper on the use of Linked Data for music recommendations and I'm happy to announce dbrec, a service providing recommendations for the 39,000+ artists available in the DBpedia dataset (i.e. identified as instances of dbpedia-owl:MusicalArtist or dbpedia-owl:Band). The recommendations are computed using an algorithm for Linked Data Semantic Distance and take into account the various links that connect two resources, either directly (e.g. artists having played together) or indirectly (e.g. being on the same label or having covered the same song). Moreover, dbrec, explains the recommendations to the user, by keeping in mind the various links that have been used to compute the recommendations. For instance, the following screenshot shows why Big Brother and the Holding Company is suggested for a search on Janis Joplin.

dbrec is fully based on Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies and, in addition, exposes all the recommendations publicly (under a Creative Commons license) in RDFa using the dedicated LDSD ontology. For more details, you can check the homepage of the service, and start exploring the recommendations. Hey ! Ho ! Let's Go !

About 2 years ago, we designed SMOB, a Semantic Microblogging client and server application, in order to demonstrate how Semantic Web and vocabularies like FOAF and SIOC could be used to provide a more open microblogging experience.

While we did not improve is much since then, there have been a lot of work on it these last months (about 250 SVN commits since end of October, when we decided to revive it) and I'm happy to announce that SMOB v2.0 is now officilay out, after some internal beta-testing during the last weeks.

Overall, it has been a complete code rewriting and architecture redesign since the previous release. While the initial version relied on clients and servers to respectively publish and aggregate data, this new version is based on the concept of distributed and independent hubs that communicate each other to exchange data, being microblog posts as well as followers / following lists.

As you can guess, SMOB is entirely based on Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies. Then, each hub locally stores its data as native RDF (using ARC2, also providing a SPARQL endpoint per hub) and the communication between hubs is provided via SPARQL/Update over HTTP. In addition, each hub provides RDFa information about itself and the microblog posts it contains, using SIOC, FOAF and OPO as well as interlinking with the Linking Open Data cloud using MOAT and CommonTag. Regarding that later aspect, the UI has also been improved and the system now suggest URIs from DBpedia and Sindice (new wrappers can easily be added) as soon as you use any #tag when writing your posts, and the mappings between tags and URIs are remembered for further usage in other posts. Finally, new content is posted to Sindice to enable discovering and querying microblog posts across the (Semantic) Web.

For those who want to get a preview before installing their own hub, here are two screenshots of the interface, the first one about publishing data, where you can see #tag mappings, as well as broadcasting to Twitter.

And in that second one, you can see a list of posts, with links to RDF data, hashtags mapped to URIs, etc.

You can also have a look at my SMOB hub here.

SMOB v2.0 is available through its download page and is licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL as its previous release. In addition, we are happy to provide commercial support for it, such as development of new features or custom integration of SMOB for enterprise microblogging purposes. For any enquiry about these commercial services, simply send an e-mail to at alexandre.passant[AT]deri.org, indicating [SMOB Support] in the subject line.

Oh, and finally, SMOB graduated and now got its own domain at http://smob.me. Enjoy Semantic Microblogging !

Any status update posted to Twitter from a SMOB client now features a 'from SMOB' link, a good way for semwebbers to promote it.

A v0.1 release is planned soon, but if you already want to use it, just get the latest svn version.This one also features the firsts steps of RDFa integration in the client homepage, as you can see

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.