Planet Semantico

The “Social Semantic Web” is here - yay! The book of the same name, edited by Andreas Blumauer (right) and Tassilo Pellegrini, is now available in stores. Another contributor from SWC is Matthias Samwald (left), who, together with Holger Stenzhorn, discussed the relevance of the Semantic Web for biomedial research in their article for the book.

The publication (in German, with the exception of one article by Narayanan Kulathuramaiyer and Hermann Maurer addressing issues of Data Mining) has four sections:

• a low-threshold introduction to Web 2.0 and social software, covering technological, cultural and social aspects,
• an overview of core technologies and methods, covering e.g. knowledge discovery, expert finders, tag recommendation, etc,
• an overview and discussion of existing applications and their perspectives within the Social Semantic Web, e.g. the Semantic Desktop, Bibsonomy or the perspectives for biomedical research,
• a discussion of phenomena of the Social Semantic Web from the perspective of communication studies and social sciences, e.g. privacy on the social semantic web, or the role of user-generated content for individual empowerment.

We have also created a wiki for the book (using Semantic Media Wiki) which is available at social.semantic-web.at. You can, for instance, browse it by article, by author, or by organisation. Tom Schandl made a few changes to available templates, which he is soon going to blog about.

Image by leobard via FlickrAuthor copies were shipped last week - some of the contributors have already blogged about the book, for instance Leo Sauermann, who, together with Malte Kiesel, Kinga Schumacher and Ansgar Bernardi, contributed an article about the Semantic Desktop and personal knowledge management (image also provided by Leo Sauermann). Jan Schmidt a.k.a “Schmidt with Dee Tee”, in an article he wrote together with Tassilo Pellegrini, approached the Semantic Web from the perspective of Communication Studies; Jan has posted the abstract (in German) and offered a bit of commentary on his blog. Michael Nagenborg, who authored the article about privacy on the Social Semantic Web, announced the book on his website.

Please let us know if you’ve also written a blog post about the book or have resources on Flickr, Slideshare, elsewhere; and/or tag it with “socsemweb08″ so that we can find it. Of course you can also immediately add them to the wiki yourself (page Resonanz).

English Andreas Blumauer, Data mining, Hermann Maurer, Holger Stenzhorn, Jan Schmidt, Knowledge Management, Leo Sauermann, Matthias Samwald, Michael Nagenborg, Narayanan Kulathuramaiyer, social semantic web, social software, social.semantic-web.at, Tom Schandl

Next month, I will begin a tenured lectureship position at the Department of Electronic Engineering here in the College of Engineering and Informatics at the National University of Ireland, Galway. However, I will still do joint research with the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, continuing (amongst other things) to work with the Social Software Unit (on SIOC, SCOT, etc.) and with the TripPlanr project. In my new role, I will also be researching with the NCBES Bioelectronics Research Cluster in NUI Galway.

For those of you who have just come across me and my blog as a result of my work with DERI, you may not know that my background was in electronic engineering, having studied it at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and I also lectured for four years full time in the Department of Electronic Engineering before joining DERI in 2004. When I joined DERI initially, I imagined that I would be working on some intersection between electronic engineering and the Semantic Web. In fact, I fell into the world of the Semantic Web and social software, after an interesting discussion about semantic social networks with Stefan Decker, who was a senior researcher in the Institute at the time. I realised that my “hobby” interests in creating community websites could be combined with interesting research challenges around the Semantic Web, and although I (and then director Dieter Fensel) was unsure about how I would fare in a new research area, I’m glad to say that it worked out okay! Now I’m back to thinking about the convergence between electronics and semantics again, with some social software thrown in the mix (e.g. wearable communities).

Below is a collage of some memories from the past four-and-a-half years: including the FOAF Galway workshop, a Semantic Web cluster meeting, ESWC and a DERI offsite meeting, Wikimania, DERI Stanford, BlogTalk, meeting timbl, BarCamp, DERI drinks, the ITAG awards, and our Social Software summer / christmas parties.

I’ve really enjoyed working with all the smart and cool people in DERI, and I shall continue to do so, while strengthening ties between the Institute and NUI Galway’s College of Engineering and Informatics through my new job. (It’s my last day before holidays, so if you’re in Galway this evening, we’re going out for a few drinks in the Westwood Hotel after work at 5:30…)

English Bioelectronics, christmas, College of Engineering and Informatics, Department of Electronic Engineering, DERI Stanford, Dieter Fensel, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, electronics, Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, semantic social networks, social software, Social Software Unit, Stefan Decker, Web cluster meeting, Westwood Hotel

It’s been three months since my last round-up of all things SIOC-ed, so here is entry number seven in the series:

• Version 1.0 of a SIOC API for Perl has been released on CPAN! The CPAN page for the SIOC API is here. A description of the project itself is available here. Thanks to Jochen Lillich, Thomas N. Burg, and also to Internet Privatstiftung Austria (IPA) for funding this work.
• A new RDF API module for Drupal has been announced that will include sub-classes / sub-properties of popular terms from SIOC, DC, etc. (Drupal creator Dries Buytaert has also said that an RDF API will appear in the core of Drupal 7; see this video.) Stephane Corlosquet has also made an RDF Schema proposal for Drupal (which includes SIOC) and has received very positive feedback. Some potential RDF use cases for Drupal have also been described.
• Gautier Poupeau has written a useful guide (en Français) on how to RDF-ise your blog in two parts: the theory and the practice. It uses RDFa and vocabularies including SIOC, SIOC Types, DC Elements, DC Refinements and XSD.
• SIOC data is now being produced by memoQ by Yuki Matsuoka and Hideaki Takeda of the National Institute of Informatics, Japan.
• Keith Alexander at Talis has described (and shown) how it is possible to create client-side Semantic Web applications using their Convert service. For example, on this page comments functionality is added to a section identified with a “sioc:has_reply” property using a short piece of embedded widget code.
• ASP.net developer John Dyer has written a nice post on DataPortability and its standards, talking about OpenID, FOAF, SIOC, APML, etc. Daniel Lewis has also written a good overview of DP. More recently, John announced the DataPortability pack for BlogEngine.NET that produces SIOC, APML and FOAF. BlogEngine.NET founder Mads Kristensen has also written about data portability and making an API to your website.
• OpenLink’s Personal Data Space Explorer now also exposes SIOC, FOAF and other RDF data. See Kingsley’s post on linked data via FOAF and SIOC.
• Uldis Bojars, Alex Passant and I will present a tutorial entitled “Interlinking Online Communities and Enriching Social Software with the Semantic Web” at the 14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008) in Beijing this month.
• I did an interview with SemanticWeb.com called “SIOC-ing the Semantic Web” in January, and talked to PCWorld about data portability and SIOC. Uldis recorded a podcast with Talis in February with SIOC as one of the main topics. (Eric Miller also described in another Talis podcast how FOAF and SIOC are useful not only for getting at historical content, but for providing fine-tuned content-delivery systems connecting people interested in various aspects of a particular domain.)
• Alex has produced a universal SIOC reader widget. The widget can query for SIOC data from any SPARQL endpoint that provides a JSON output for SELECT queries. (Alex has also released the Meaning of a Tag ontology which links with SIOC and SCOT.)
• Phillip Rhodes has been working on the OpenQabal “social software operating system” which integrates a set of applications (including Roller and JavaBB ) via single sign-on (SSO), a common look-and-feel, and SIOC.
• Sean Palmer has written an interesting article entitled “One Semantic Application, One UI?” in which he talks about Tabulator and its interfaces, including application specific panes for FOAF, SIOC and DOAP.
• Tim Berners-Lee talked about FOAF and SIOC in an interview with Marie Boran from Silicon Republic for the Irish Independent: “A project that started back in 2000 called Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) represents relationships between people, as well as basic contact details. SIOC does this for groups: it extends the FOAF idea to being able to talk about whole groups of people. Groups are a very important part of the Web because online communities are where we form our trust. It is very useful to build tools that apply to all the online communities so they can all generate this social trust information. I am excited about SIOC because you can use that information to determine trust, to let people in. If someone is in a group that a friend of mine is part of, I can create another relationship based on that.”
• Uldis, Tuukka Hastrup and Thomas Schandl are updating Uldis’ WordPress SIOC Importer, which allows you to create blog posts based on SIOC data ported from weblogs, mailing lists, forums, IRC, etc.
• Chris Bizer, Richard Cyganiak and Tom Heath have published a very useful document called “How to Publish Linked Data on the Web” (mentions vocabularies to use like FOAF, DC, SIOC, DOAP, SKOS, MO, Rev and CC). See also Leo Sauermann and Richard’s “Cool URIs for the Semantic Web“.
• In the area of collaborative work environments, SIOC is being used in the Ecospace project to export metadata from both BSCW and BC. Here is a BSCW SIOC export service, and there is also a CWE version of the SIOC Explorer (which includes data from both BSCW and BC).
• Sören Auer’s team have produced Triplify, which enables simple mapping of RDB to RDF data in a variety of web applications. Using Triplify, SIOC and FOAF data can be produced from Drupal 5, WordPress, WackoWiki, and Open Journal Systems.
• The new version of BoardTracker will have an API to export data using SIOC.
• The Sindice group will soon release the SWPop widget for WordPress that allows you to view posts, comments, topics, etc. made by any blog commenter across the SIOC-o-sphere (as indexed by Sindice). You can see a preview here.
• This is an interesting post by Andrew A. Peterson on how semantic standards like RSS, FOAF and SIOC (SIOD!) can provide sustainable SEO for websites, referencing the Yahoo! Search announcement regarding support for RDF and microformats.
• Ben O’Steen describes a Pylons interface to carry out CRUD functionality where items are linked together semantically using SIOC.
• Leigh Dodds has a fun FOAF (and SIOC) tale about Bee Node (told using SPARQL)!
• I’ve presented at WebCamp on DataPortability, web standards, SIOC and FOAF and recorded a related video on DataPortability and me. It pales in comparison to this one from Danny Ayers!

Previous SIOC-o-sphere articles:

#6 http://sioc-project.org/node/310
#5 http://sioc-project.org/node/294
#4 http://sioc-project.org/node/272
#3 http://sioc-project.org/node/271
#2 http://sioc-project.org/node/138
#1 http://sioc-project.org/node/79

English Alex Passant, Andrew A. Peterson, API, ASP.net, Beijing, Ben O Steen, BlogEngine.NET, British Columbia, Chris Bizer, content-delivery systems, Daniel Lewis, Danny Ayers, Dries Buytaert, Enriching Social Software, Eric Miller, Hideaki Takeda, Informatics, Internet Privatstiftung Austria, Irish Independent, Japan, Jochen Lillich, John Dyer, Keith Alexander, Leigh Dodds, Leo Sauermann, Marie Boran, Missouri, National Institute of Informatics, Online Communities, Open Journal Systems, operating system, Perl, Phillip Rhodes, RDF, Richard Cyganiak, Sean Palmer, Search announcement, SKOS, social software, Stephane Corlosquet, Thomas N. Burg, Thomas Schandl, Tim Berners-Lee, Tom Heath, Web applications, Web Conference, web standards, Yahoo, Yuki Matsuoka