Alexandre Passant

We're glad to announce that the second edition of the SPOT workshop - Trust and Privacy on the Social and Semantic Web - will be held at ESWC2010.

More than ever, the Semantic Web is becoming reality as it is an integrated component of the Web we are browsing everyday - be it the Open Linked Data movement that nowadays exposes over 10 billion triples of RDF or the annotated and structured information available on Web pages used by major search engines, such as Yahoo! SearchMonkey and Google. Moreover, social data about people and their interaction is made available in machine-understandable format in projects like FOAF or SIOC. Facing this amount of data, privacy and trust consideration is an important step to take right now. The challenging research questions arising from this movement include:

• How do people know that the data gathered from several sources for reasoning purposes can be trusted?
• How can one avoid that personal data exposed on the Semantic Web will be combined with other available semantic data in a way that sensitive information may be revealed?
• How shall a safe reasoning process look like that does not end up in a conflict only because a single Semantic Web peer exposed a contradiction?

As last year, we expect both theoretical and practical contributions (including demos) on these hot topics.
For more information about the workshop, deadlines, etc. please check the SPOT2010 website.

It has been announcedin the past few weeks but I didn't really blog about it so far. We're hosting a second edition of the Social Data on the Web (SDoW) workshop at the next ISWC2009 in Washington. Here's the call for papers (longer version here).

The 2nd Social Data on the Web workshop (SDoW2009) co-located with the 8th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2009) aims to bring together researchers, developers and practitioners involved in semantically-enhancing social media websites, as well as academics researching more formal aspect of these interactions between the Semantic Web and Social Web.

Since its first steps in 2001, many research issues have been tackled by the Semantic Web community such as data formalism for knowledge representation, data querying and scalability, or reasoning and inferencing. More recently, Web 2.0 offered new perspectives regarding information sharing, annotation, and social networking on the Web. It opens new research areas for the Semantic Web which has an important role to play to lead to the emergence of a Social Semantic Web that should provide novel services to end-users, combining the best of both Semantic Web and Web 2.0 worlds. To achieve this goal, various tasks and features are needed from data modeling and lightweight ontologies, to knowledge and social networks portability as well as ways to interlink data between Social Media websites, leveraging proprietary data silos to a Giant Global Graph.

Following the successful SDoW2008 workshop at ISWC2008, SDoW2009 aims to bring together Semantic Web experts and Web 2.0 practitioners and users to discuss the application of semantic technologies to data from the Social Web.

The workshop welcome submission of short and full papers as well as demos of applications combining Semantic Web and Social Web technologies - all due to the 10th of August.

The Unit Social Software (USS) in DERI is currently looking for Ph.D. candidates. Applications must be sent by the end of the week at hr.ie@deri.org and positions will start in September.
More details in the add below:

The Unit Social Software (USS) at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute - DERI: http://www.deri.ie/ - of the National University of Ireland, Galway invites applications for a 4 years fully-funded PhD fellowship position.

DERI is a leading research institute in semantic technologies that offers a stimulating, dynamic and multi-cultural research environment, excellent ties to research-groups worldwide and standardization bodies, close collaboration with industrial partners and up-to-date infrastructure and resources.

The DERI Unit Social Software focuses on the convergence of Social Software and the Semantic Web by developing models and tools that support and take advantage of these two trends. Achievements of DERI USS include SIOC - Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities - and a large number of publications and tutorials on the topic in international venues and journals. USS Research is performed in collaboration with other DERI units and industrial partners. The PhD position is funded by Science Foundation Ireland (http://sfi.ie) within the Lion2 project and offers for the successful candidate an annual stipend, course fees and conference travel when presenting.

Applicants should have a strong interest in Social Software, Semantic Web and Web Science in general and hold an excellent primary degree or Masters qualification in a relevant discipline (e.g. computer science, information
science, knowledge representation), with an emphasis on practical aspects of research (e.g. industrial project experience, ontology development and open-source software developement being distinct advantages). Selected
candidates are expected to have the willingness to combine formal scientific work with application-oriented research and development in projects funded by national and international (EU) funding agencies, as well as participating in
open-source projects and standardization activities.

Please submit your application (including cover letter, relevant publications or software implementation, full CV and contact details for two referees) to hr.ie@deri.org by 5pm on Friday, July 3rd with the subject line 'PhD Position - DERI USS'. Candidates will be contacted in the first week of July and interviews will be then conducted for successful applications. For further information please contact Alexandre Passant (alexandre.passant@deri.org) and John Breslin (john.breslin@deri.org).

I'm happy to announce CommonTag, a new RDFS vocabulary for Semantic Tagging, designed to bridge the gap between free-text tagging and Linked Data. In a similar way that what I've done in the past with MOAT, CommonTag allows one to create links between his tags (as simple keywords) and the concept they represent, defined as URIs of Semantic Web resources, from public knowledge bases such as Freebase or DBpedia.

What is especially relevant with regards to CommonTag is that the vocabulary aims to be simple to understand, easily accessible, and with an easy RDFa annotation process for end-users and Web developers. On the other hand, it features mappings with existing tagging vocabularies (the Tag Ontology, MOAT, SCOT, SIOC and SKOS) for those who want to go further or use their existing applications with this new model.

But most interestingly, as one can see when browsing the website, a key feature is that CommonTag is not an isolated initiative but supported by various companies involved in the Semantic Web and the Social Web -- and especially in both ! -- namely (for the initial nucleus and by alphabetical order, hope it will grow soon !) AdaptiveBlue, DERI (NUI Galway), Faviki, Freebase, Yahoo, Zemanta and ZigTag - and I must add that was a great experience to design this vocabulary together !

CommonTag is already supported in various applications as you can see on the website and on the following picture, from Zemanta to index your blog posts to Sindice to build applications on the top of it. And there is more to come soon, stay tuned ;-)

Workshop homepage and CFP coming soon !

The program of SDoW2008 has just been published on the workshop website. In addition to the 7 full papers, 2 short papers and 2 demos, there will be two keynotes: the first one by Peter Mika on "Semantic Search and the Social Web" and the second one by Harry Halpin entitled "Beyond Walled Gardens: Open Standards for the Social Web". Attending TPAC this week, I can tell that the second one is really a hot-topic: there were some discussions yesterday in the SWIG group meeting, two related lightning talks today, and an upcoming "Workshop on the Future of Social Networking" lead by the W3C Mobile Web Initiative.

The SDoW proceedings were also officially published today on CEUR-WS, volume 405:
http://CEUR-WS.org/Vol-405. If you're attending the workshop, consider reading it before, as it might help Q/A and discussions. There will also be a lightnight talk session, so that any attendee will be able to present his works / ideas regarding Social Web and the Semantic Web.

Just sent that to sioc-dev, but I guess it worth a larger announcement :

We just made some changes to the SIOC Core ontology and to the related modules:

- Added OWL-DL compliance statements for SIOC Core and the Types / Access / Services modules
- Edited owl:disjointWith statements for some classes of SIOC Core
- Removed domain of sioc:note
- Removed domain of sioc:has_owner and range of sioc:owner_of
- Defined sioc:account_of as inverse property of foaf:holdsAccount
- Defined sioc:avatar as a subproperty of foaf:depiction

So, SIOC is now OWL-DL !
This change was motivated by the current SWANSIOC integration project that will be introduced during the upcoming ISWC tutorial on Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences.

The SIOC Core Ontology Specification has been updated according to the changes.

The other good news regarding SIOC is that Yahoo! SearchMonkey now supports (and recommends !) it in its developer documentation. Moreover, in case you did not already read it, John published the Tales from the SIOC-o-sphere #8 about two weeks ago.

More generally, if you want to join the SIOC community, by developing new applications or APIs, or if you request some help regarding implementing SIOC in your existing tools, feel free to come on #sioc on irc.freenode.net or ask on the sioc-dev ML.

A follow-up to my previous LODr introduction post, and as you might guess with the title, one more way to show the value of RDF-based applications in general. Or more precisely, open-RDF-based and LOD-compliant:

• By open-RDF-based, I mean using RDF but also publishing it, eitheir through a SPARQL endpoint, Semantic sitemaps or RDFa. What I want to focus on here is that using RDF 'inside-only' doesn't make your service be part of the Semantic / Linked Data Web, while it can indeed be considered as Semantic-Web based - I hope that's clear enough. If you don't expose anything, you can have the better RDF infrastructure that you want, you will still be a Web-of-Documents application. (Some related thoughs here);
• Regarding LOD-compliance, I refer to reusing or interlinking existing resources in order to benefit from it within your application. The value of your service can then reside not only on the data you provide, but on the way you interact with - and reuse - other datasources. Moreover, this can also concern corporate environments.

What I want to stress in that post is how such applications can become components of a general infrastructure (the Semantic Web itself) that will provide new services to end-users. Especially, regarding LODr, it lets users interlink popular Web 2.0 content to Semantic Web resources and such interaction can then be used for data discovery. For instance, the following query will retrieve all Slideshare presentations related to the Semantic Web, i.e. linked to a resource that is itself linked to the SW category in DBpedia. This query involves various vocabularies, as SIOC (to retrieve the item), FOAF (its author), the Tag Ontology (its tags), MOAT (tags meanings) and a DBpedia URI as an entry point to find related topics.

SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?author ?date ?tag ?meaning
WHERE {
  ?item a sioc:Item ;
  dct:created ?date ;
  sioc:has_space <http://slideshare.net> ;
  foaf:maker ?author .
  [] a tags:RestrictedTagging ;
    tags:taggedResource ?item ;
    tags:taggedWithTag [
      tags:name ?tag .
    ] ;
    moat:tagMeaning ?meaning .
  ?meaning ?p <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Category:Semantic_Web> .
}
ORDER BY DESC(?date)
LIMIT 5

You can browse the answer here, formatted in HTML.

Of course, the URIs that you can use in LODr and with MOAT in general are not restricted to DBpedia ones. You can use URIs defining some of your friends, conferences you attended, etc. Consequently, those URIs can be used in queries patterns, as well as other interlinked URIs. For instance, the following one will retrieve all pictures from Flickr linked to an event that happened in Tenerife, and in that case it will use the ESWC2008 URI, going through some Geonames data:

SELECT DISTINCT ?item ?author ?date ?tag ?meaning
WHERE {
  ?item a sioc:Item ;
  dct:created ?date ;
  sioc:has_space <http://flickr.com> ;
  foaf:maker ?author .
  [] a tags:RestrictedTagging ;
    tags:taggedResource ?item ;
    tags:taggedWithTag [
      tags:name ?tag .
    ] ;
    moat:tagMeaning ?meaning .
  ?meaning foaf:based_near <http://sws.geonames.org/2522437/> .
}
ORDER BY DESC(?date)
LIMIT 5

Answer

Finally, while all those queries involve the lodr.info endpoint, each LODr intance comes with its own triplestore (and related endpoint), so that one can add some more RDF in it for advanced mash-ups. And as it also provides RDFa and semantic sitemap support, semantic web crawlers and indexes as SWSE or Sindice can also consume it and then deliver it when you look for a particular URI.

This is a long time since I have not posted here but I must admit I spend the last weeks (maybe the last month) away from that blog.

Indeed, I moved from Paris to Galway at the end of August, and so was packing / traveling and then started my new job. As you can guess when reading Galway in a semweb-related blog, I'm now in DERI, where I will keep working - mainly - on the Social Semantic Web, i.e.

Gautier (aka lespetitescases) just hacked his SMOB client to make it post on identi.ca as well as on twitter. He's using the new laconica API combined with the same method that SMOB uses at the moment to post on twitter (CURL + HTTP-Auth).