KWTR: Social Networks and the Semantic Web

[edit] Trends in theories and methods: short term (0-3 years)

There is a strong connection between social networking services and semantic community portals. The Friend of a Friend (note 5) (FOAF) Semantic Web ontology has been utilised by a number of SNS sites including Tribe and Ecademy for describing member profiles and their relationships. The use of the FOAF ontology is leading to interoperability between the various standalone social networking spaces. This will in turn increase the number of “happy chances” or serendipity occurring between people using these online worlds by bringing them all together in a universal social network (as a sum of its SNS parts). For this to become a reality, more SNS sites will be required to use FOAF, SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) and other related ontologies, making the data within them distributed and decentralized as opposed to being locked into proprietary sites or applications.

[edit] Trends in theories and methods: medium term (3-6 years)

[edit] Trends in theories and methods: long term (6-12 years)

The content of Semantic community portals is easier to aggregate, reuse and misuse than the content of conventional Web portals. Therefore, additional trust and security policies and practices need to be established for Semantic community portals. Within such practices, ontology-based algorithms can be applied to describe, analyse and adequately render aggregated information. For example, after analysis of social networks of trust [Golbeck et al., 2004], information from less trusted sources can be automatically displayed in a less highlighted manner compared to the information from more trusted sources.

[edit] Trends in tools: short term (0-3 years)

There are some ontology engineering tools available freely (such as Protégé) and commercially (such as Ontostudio). Another example is Oyster (which can be freely downloaded at http://oyster.ontoware.org) is a Java-based system that exploits semantic web techniques in order to provide an innovative and useful solution for exchanging and reusing ontologies, providing facilities for managing, searching and sharing ontology metadata in a P2P network, thereby implementing the OMV* (Ontology Metadata Vocabulary) proposal for the standard set of ontology metadata (http://ontoware.org/projects/omv/). In any case, most of them can still only handle a limited amount of data. Finally, the main tools in this area at the moment are social networking tools, such wikis and blogging. Most of these tools are free, even if some commercial ones are sold on the market at reasonable prices.

As we have already indicated, ASPL/Magpie operates as a learning support tool for learners
wanting to familiarize themselves with the Semantic Web Studies domain. An earlier version of
Magpie has already been successfully deployed as part of the Climateprediction project
(http://www.climateprediction.net/) and is being used as part of the educational
infrastructure for an Open University course on climate change. We have also had interest from
online journal providers.

[edit] Trends in tools: medium term (3-6 years)

Identity itself is fairly straightforward but in the online world it can be fairly ambiguous and far more complicated. A digital profile is a representation of an individual that grows over time. Many online communities require a user to register and a digital profile is created from this registration. If the user’s profiles are machine processable then systems can be used for extracting meaning from online content improving the power of searches. Most community sites are standalone and many individuals struggle to remember the passwords for the number of accounts or struggle with the lengthy registration of logging into yet another social network. Tools to handle the problem are starting to appear, e.g., Sxip (note 12). Another issue will be the Community-driven ontology management. A fully fledged framework for community-driven ontology management would go beyond simple tagging and merge community portals with established practices for ontology management. The areas involved would be ontology development and population, storage, matching and versioning. The objective of community-driven ontology management is to provide means and motivations for a large number of users to “weave” and adopt the Semantic Web via ontology management practices.

[edit] Trends in tools: long term (6-12 years)

The merging of Semantics, Communities, Multimedia, Web and Ubiquitous Computing. Tools which support the efficient integration of all the existing and near future developments in mobile, real life environments will appear. Many scalability and context problems will be resolved.

[edit] Trends in services and applications: short term (0-3 years)

[edit] Trends in services and applications: medium term (3-6 years)

A recent trend comprises very popular portals allowing communities to create their own vocabularies and tag the items/information they want to exchange with arbitrary tags from their vocabularies. The following applications fall in category of such portals:

- http://del.icio.us – This community portal allows communities to tag, share and search their bookmarks;

- http://www.43things.com and http://www.43places.com – These community Web portals allow description by community-created tags and sharing information about the things people do (http://www.43things.com) and about the places where people travel or want to travel (http://www.43places.com).

- http://www.flickr.com – This community portal allows community members to tag with arbitrary tags, search for and share photos.

- http://base.google.com – This community application was recently launched (in November 2005) and provides the most advanced community-driven functionalities among the portals mentioned above. The application allows regular Web user to contribute their arbitrary items (pictures, text, ads, websites) for searching and sharing and to annotate these items using pairs of an arbitrary attribute and an arbitrary value. Most popular/shared attributes and attribute values come up in the upper level of Google search interfaces and are proposed to be used for searching and browsing the available items.

Though none of the portals above is directly based on Semantic Web technologies, they clearly show the massive trend of the Web in becoming more structured and annotated in a community-driven manner, via social processes and contributions of regular Web users. Certain portals also start to employ semantic technologies to reach their communities. For example, http://www.43places.com provides RSS feeds to get updates on the information appearing at the portal, e.g., on entries about a particular place, entries from a particular user, etc.

[edit] Trends in services and applications: long term (6-12 years)

emantics and Communities will get to Physical Worlds. Semantics and communities will be merged with robotics and mobile communication. This trend will take away routine tasks from a person by delivering many helpful gadgets, e.g. kitchen appliances acting on your behalf. For example, your fridge will be online finding out from fridges of your friends and friends of your friends which nice food is available around. Then your fridge will order needed food for you with a minimum of expenses, via a Web agent working with food distributors.