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2nd Social Data on the Web (SDoW 2009) workshop

Date: October 25, 2009
Location: Washington, DC (USA)

The workshop, co-located with the 8th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009), 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.

The list of accepted papers is published at the workshop webpage and is also available as RDFa (RDF data extracted from the SDoW 2009 page).

The list includes:

• Continuous Queries and Real-time Analysis of Social Semantic Data with C-SPARQL
• FOAF on Air - Context-aware User Pro?les for the Social Web
• Folksonomy Resources as a Data Source for the Social Data in Semantic Web
• Freemix: Social Networking Meets Data
• Mapping between Digital Identity Ontologies through SISM
• Multiple Personalities on the Web: A Study of Shared Mboxes in FOAF
• Reactivity and Social Data: Keys to Drive Decisions in Social Network Applications
• Semantic History: Towards Modeling and Publishing Changes of Online Semantic Data
• SiocLog: Providing IRC discussion logs as Linked Data
• Social Networks of an Emergent Massively Collaborative Creation Community – Case Study of Hatune Miku Movie on Nico Nico Douga
• The Mobile Wine Agent: Pairing Wine with the Social Semantic Web
• The NoTube Beancounter: Aggregating User Data for Television Programme Recommendation

Looks like this is going to be an interesting workshop.

Note: I am one of the organisers of the workshop, along with Alex, John and Sergio.

Related:

• 1st Social Data on the Web (SDoW 2008) workshop - incl. full proceedings in PDF

SSS’09 is taking place in Stanford, CA starting from today (March 23) until Wednesday, March 25.

More information: Program of the AAAI Social Semantic Web (SSS’09) symposium

See also: Twitter messages about SSS’09

Web 2.0 (aka. social web) applications such as Wikipedia, LinkedIn and FaceBook, are well-known for fast-growing online data production via their network effects. Meanwhile, emerging Web 3.0 applications, driven by semantic web technologies such as RDF, OWL and SPARQL, offer powerful data organization, combination, and query capabilities.

The social web and the semantic web complement each other in the way they approach content generation and organization. Social web applications are fairly unsophisticated at preserving the semantics in user-submitted content, typically limiting themselves user tagging and basic metadata. Because of this, they have only limited ways for consumers to find, customize, filter and reuse data.

Semantic web applications, on the other hand, feature sophisticated logic-backed data handling technologies, but lack the kind of scalable authoring and incentive systems found in successful social web applications. As a result, semantic web applications are typically of limited scope and impact. We envision a new generation of applications that combine the strengths of these two approaches: the data flexibility and portability of that is characteristic of the semantic web, and the scalability and authorship advantages of the social web.

If you need to install Redland Python bindings on Mac OS X then one of the ways is to use MacPorts:

sudo port install redland-bindings +python25

It is just one command and all dependencies will be installed automatically. (Though I usually install python25 with a separate command)

There is a cost to this because MacPorts would compile its own version of Python and as a result the installation might take a while. This is due to MacPorts policy to install all the prerequisites.

Context: I was having issues installing Redland Python bindings on Mac OS X and it seemed that nobody around me had them working either. MacPorts turned out to be the easiest way to do this.

See also:

• Redland RDF library - Python bindings
• redland ports on MacPorts

Claudia has extended our WordPress SIOC exporter and written up a nice report about it: Extended WP SIOC Exporter

She gave her permission to republish this report over here and would be happy to get your feedback.

I extended Uldis Bojars WP SIOC exporter to also export semantic metadata which are embedded in the HTML content of a Posting.

Why is this useful?

Semantic metadata embedded in the HTML of a posting’s content can reveal more information about the topic of a posting (i.e. about what a posting is about). Tools such as Structured Blogging (http://structuredblogging.org) or the Semantic Reblog prototype I am working on, embed semantic metadata directly into the HTML content of postings.

The WP SIOC Exporter relates at the moment the whole plain text of a post’s content with the resource representing the posting itself via the sioc:content property. The html representation of the post’s content is related with the resource representing the post via the content:encoded property. Additionally links are extracted from the post’s content and related with the post via the sioc:links_to property.

My extended version of the exporter also extracts images from posts’s content and relates them via the sioc:embeds property with the resource representing the post. If the image is a flickr image an rdf:seeAlso link is generated that points to the RDF description of the image obtained via Masahide Kanzaki’s  wrapper. Furthermore semantic metadata,  which are embedded in the HTML content of a post, are extracted and relate with the post via a sioc:embeds property. I am not sure if sioc:embeds is the best  property to relate the embedded entities with its container post. Maybe something like sioc:topic would be better. However the URI of the embedded resources are related with the post URI and the parts of the resource description, which has been embedded, are also exposed (because if only parts of a resource’s description are reused or embedded in a post’s content, it might be also interesting for machines to know which parts have been reused/embedded in the posting and if the reused/embedded resource is described via microformats, it might not have an URI which identifies the resource).

I use the ARC2 library (version from 2009-02-12 -> it is important to use this version or higher) which provides a parser to extract different embedded semantic metadata formats such as RDFa, eRDF and MF. I modified the method declaration of the toRDFXML method in the ARC2_Class.php file . Thats why at the moment “my” version of the ARC2_Class.php must be included to the SIOC Exporter arc folder. But Benjamin already told me that the modification will be included in the next ARC2 version.

If you fancy to test this version of the WP SIOC Exporter, download it here.

Any thoughts are of course welcome!

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year!!!

This photo features a moment from the “Staro Rīga” - Riga light festival.