Social Web2017

Lecture 3: What DATA looks like on the Social Web?

Davide Ceolin (credits to: Lora Aroyo)The Network Institute

VU University Amsterdam

History of Blogs• evolved from online diaries in 1980’s• ‘weblog’ Jorn Barger (1997) & ‘BLOG’ Peter Merholz (1999)

• used to share the result of Web searches• one of the first ways to contribute (unstructured user-

generated) content on the Web• Justin Hall recognized as pioneer blogger (1994)• Nature: political, technical, art, journalistic, cultural, personal• Software: WordPress, Blogger, LifeJournal

Social Web 2017, Davide Ceolin

• single- or multi-authored• photo-blog, Video-blog, Audio-blog• life (b)log, now - microlifeblog (twitter)• lifecasting: in 2007 by Justin Kan: webcam on a cap• Gordon Bell MyLifeBits: Microsoft SenseCamhttp://www.justin.tv/

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/mylifebits/

Types of Blogs

Social Web 2017, Davide Ceolin

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kables/1220574200/

• Wiki in Hawaiian meaning fast/quick• "the simplest online database that could possibly work" (Ward

Cunningham)1995• first wiki software: WikiWikiWeb (the QuickWeb)• first example for a large scale collaborative editing = software +

process• commonly implemented software package is MediaWiki (known

from Wikipedia)• pages structure & formatting: simplified markup language -

wikitext, or HTMLtags, WYSIWYG editing

Wikis

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikishttp://www.wikimedia.org/

Social Web 2017, Davide Ceolin

Exploiting the crowd• in wiki applications crowd contributes with

collective intelligence (primarily textual)• later also other media & recourses emerged,

e.g., photo, video, music• crowdsourcing

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Mechanical Turk• 1760 Wolfgang von Kempelen: The

Turk• 2005 Amazon:

Amazon Mechanical Turk • marketplace for work; people

perform tasks computers are lousy at, e.g. identifying items in a photo/video, writing product descriptions, transcribing podcasts

• HITs = human intelligence tasks• require little time & offer little

compensation• workers & requesters

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Crowdsourcing Science

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Crowdsourcing History

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Was the $ million Netflix prize a victory for crowdsourcing?

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Folksonomy• On the social web the user-generated content is

organized in light-weight ontologies, i.e., folksonomies

• Community-based semantics = a relationship between Users, Tags & Resources

• user-created, bottom-up classification/categorization of (domain) terms / user-labels, e.g., tags

• tagging = the social process where lay users attach labels to resources (as opposed to annotation by professional experts)

Social Web 2017, Davide Ceolin

Folksonomy

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Folksonomy

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• cleaning messy data• transforming data from one format to another• fetching missing data

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Questions

How critical is the quality of the data on the Web?

Does structured mark-up help?How do we measure the quality?

Social Web 2017, Davide Ceolin

Social Web 2017, Davide Ceolin

Social Web 2017, Davide Ceolin

Structure on the Web• In the evolution of the Web, Semantic Web refers to

an approach to add ‘semantics’ to the web, by naming terms in a domain

• A specification of such terms is called an ‘ontology’• For software: ontologies help to effectively use

content on the Web (like DB schemas)

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Vocabularies on the (Social) Web

• to create interfaces or exchange data between applications the software needs to know the terms in the data

• vocabularies define set of terms in a certain domain, e.g., describing people, relationships, content of different type

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FOAF• FOAF = Friend of a Friend,

http://www.foaf-project.org/,• a machine-readable ontology describing persons,

their activities & their relations to other people and objects

• an open, decentralized technology for connecting social Web sites, & the people they describe

• Since mid-2000• Stable core of classes & properties• New terms may be added at any time• FOAF RDF namespace URI is fixed• http://xmlns.com/foaf/spec/

• model for publishing simple factual data via a networked of linked RDF documents

• FOAF is an attempt to use the Web to:

• integrate factual information with information in human-oriented documents (e.g. videos, books, spreadsheets, 3d models)

• and info that is still in people's heads

• linking networks of information with networks of people

Linked Data & FOAF

Social Web 2017, Davide Ceolin

FOAF Example

• there is a foaf:Person • with a foaf:name property of 'Dan Brickley'• in foaf:homepage and foaf:openid relationships to a thing called

http://danbri.org/ • in foaf:img relationship to a thing referenced by a relative URI of

/images/me.jpg

Create your own FOAF file: http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic

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foaf:depiction

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FOAF Auto-Discovery

• If you publish a FOAF self-description (e.g. using foaf-a-matic) you can make it easier for tools to find your FOAF by putting markup in the head of your HTML homepage

• Common filename foaf.rdf is a common choice

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SIOC• Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities• ontology for representing rich data from Social Web in RDF• a standard way for expressing user-generated content• methods for interconnecting discussions, e.g., blogs, forums & mailing

lists; and enable the integration of online community information• used in conjunction with FOAF vocabulary for expressing personal

profile & social networking information• http://sioc-project.org/

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<sioc:Post rdf:about="http://jbreslin.com/blog/2006/09/07/creating-connections">

<dc:title>Creating connections between discussion clouds with SIOC</dc:title>

<dcterms:created>2006-09-07T09:33:30Z</dcterms:created>

<sioc:has_container rdf:resource="http://jbreslin.com/blog/index.php?sioc_type=site#weblog"/>

<sioc:has_creator>

<sioc:UserAccount rdf:about="http://jbreslin.com/blog/author/cloud/" rdfs:label="Cloud">

<rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://jbreslin.com/blog/index.php?sioc_type=user&sioc_id=1"/>

</sioc:UserAccount>

</sioc:has_creator>

<foaf:maker rdf:resource="http://jbreslin.com/blog/author/cloud/#foaf"/>

<sioc:content>SIOC provides a unified vocabulary for content and interaction description: a semantic layer

that can co-exist with existing discussion platforms.

</sioc:content>

<sioc:topic rdfs:label="Semantic Web" rdf:resource="http://jbreslin.com/blog/category/semantic-web/"/>

<sioc:topic rdfs:label="Blogs" rdf:resource="http://jbreslin.com/blog/category/blogs/"/>

<sioc:has_reply>

<sioc:Post rdf:about="http://jbreslin.com/blog/2006/09/07/creating-connections/#comment-123928">

<rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://johnbreslin.com/blog/index.php?

sioc_type=comment&sioc_id=123928"/>

</sioc:Post>

</sioc:has_reply>

</sioc:Post>

• A post (1) titled "Creating connections between discussion clouds with SIOC" (2) created at 09:33:30 on 2006-09-07 (3) written by user "Cloud" (4) on topics "Blogs" and "Semantic Web" (5) with contents described in sioc:content.

• (6) More information about its author at http://johnbreslin.com/blog/index.php?sioc_type=user&sioc_id=1

• The post has (7) a reply and (8) detailed SIOC information about this reply can be found at http://johnbreslin.com/blog/index.php?sioc_type=comment&sioc_id=123928

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Follow-ups: W3C SocialWG

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• Activity Pub protocol for modeling activities (e.g., likes, posts) client- server communication

• Activity Streams Core/Vocabulary: JSON-based syntax that is sufficient to express metadata about activities in a rich, human-friendly but machine-processable and extensible manner

• Micropub spec to create content on a server using web or native app clients

• Linked Data Notifications supports sharing and reuse of notifications across applications, regardless of how they were generated.

Semantics in Facebook

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Activity Streams• A list of recent activities performed by someone on a website• Example: Facebook News Feed• Activity Streams project aims at an activity stream protocol

to syndicate activities across social Web applications• Major websites with activity stream implementations have

already opened up their activity streams to developers to use, e.g., Facebook and MySpace

• http://activitystrea.ms/

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Activity StreamsSpecification

• an actor, a verb, an object and a target• person performing an action on/with an object• Geraldine posted a photo to her album• John shared a video

• activity metadata to present to a user in a rich human-friendly format, e.g. constructing readable sentences about the activity that occurred, visual representations of the activity, or combining similar activities for display

• Activities are serialized using the JSON format• There is also an ATOM-oriented specification

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Verbs, Objects, MappingVerbs Objects

http://wiki.activitystrea.ms/w/page/1359319/Verb%20Mapping

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XFN• Xhtml Friends Network• defining a small set of values that describe personal relationshipsIn HTML and XHTML, these are given as values for rel attribute on a

hyperlink. XFN allows authors to indicate which weblogs belong to friends, whom they've physically met, and other personal relationships. XFN values allow to humanize blogrolls and link pages.• using XFN can easily style all links of a particular type, e.g, friends could be

boldfaced, co-workers italicized, etc. • http://gmpg.org/xfn/

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XFN Example

• Joe has a set of five links in his blogroll: his girlfriend Jane; his friends Dave and Darryl; industry expert James, who Joe briefly met once at a conference; and MetaFilter.

• MetaFilter gets no value since it is not an actual person

http://gmpg.org/xfn/introSocial Web 2017, Davide Ceolin

Open Graph• protocol originally developed in Facebook, “Like”

button• enables web pages to become a rich object in a social

graph, i.e. any web page to have the same functionality as any other object on Facebook

• prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns#" specifies the OGP vocabulary

Social Web 2017, Davide Ceolin

Social Web 2017, Davide Ceolin

Microformats• Simple, open data formats built upon existing widely

adopted standards• Designed for humans first & machines second• Highly correlated with semantic XHTML (aka the

real world semantics, lowercase semantic web, lossless XHTML)

• “An evolutionary revolution”, by ryan king• It attempts to re-use existing HTML tags to portray meta

information and other attributes in website pages.

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Your First Microformat• You can put a microformat on your website in less than 5 mins• Example: putting an hCard (online business card) on your site

http://microformats.org/get-started

1. Find your name somewhere on your website2. Wrap your name in an fn (formatted name)

<span class="fn">Jamie Jones</span>

3. Wrap it all in a vcard (declares that everything inside is the hCard microformat):

<span class="vcard"><span class="fn">Jamie Jones</span></span><address class="vcard"><span class="fn">Jamie Jones</span></address>

The address element indicates that the person in the hCard is the contact for the page

<p class="vcard">My name is <span class="fn">Jamie Jones</span> I dig microformats!</p>

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HTML Microdata• Allows machine-readable data to be embedded in HTML documents in an easy-to-write manner, with an unambiguous parsing model

• Compatible with numerous data formats, including RDF and JSON

• Consists of a group of name-value pairs. the groups are called items, and each name-value pair is a

property• itemscope is used to create an item• itemprop is used to add a property to an item

• Microdata DOM API• http://www.w3.org/TR/microdata/• It is used to incorporate semantics into existing microformat

content on web pages.

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schema.org

• Google, Yahoo!, Bing• a common vocabulary for

structured data markup on web pages

• improve how sites appear in major search engines

• Google rich snippets of reviews, people, recipes, events in 2005

• superseded MicroformatsSocial Web 2017, Davide Ceolin

Add Schema.org to HTML using Microdata<div>

<h1>Avatar</h1> <span>Director: James Cameron (born August 16, 1954)</span> <span>Science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html">Trailer</a></div>

<div itemscope itemtype ="http://schema.org/Movie"> <h1 itemprop="name"&g;Avatar</h1> <div itemprop="director" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Person"> Director: <span itemprop="name">James Cameron</span> (born <span itemprop="birthDate">August 16, 1954)</span> </div> <span itemprop="genre">Science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html" itemprop="trailer">Trailer</a></div> Social Web 2017, Davide Ceolin

RDFa• Another syntax for RDF• HTML5 extension for People, Places, Events, Recipes, Reviews markup

specify that a text is the name of a product, or person, or event = “adding semantic markup”.• RDFa 1.1 = specified for XHTML and HTML5 (for any XML-based language,

e.g., SVG)• RDFa Lite = “a small subset of RDFa consisting of a few attributes that may

be applied to most simple to moderate structured data markup tasks.” • Publish your data as Linked Data through RDFa --> link to other URIs (others

can link to your HTML+RDFa)

http://rdfa.info/play/

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Quick Structured Data for Your website

Social Web 2017, Davide Ceolin

Social Web 2017, Davide Ceolin

Knowledge Graph

• graph that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings

• more than 70 billion facts about and relationships between these different things

• tuned based on what people search for

• http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge.html

results in 2013

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Knowledge Graph

results in 2014

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results in 2017

results in 2013 results in 2014

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results in 2014

results in 2013

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Question?

For which things on the social web would more vocabularies for embedded

semantics be needed (besides what we have already seen)?

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Deadlines• 24/02 (Fri), 10:00 - Post your

questions• 24/02 (Fri), 17:00 - Vote your

questions• 26/02 (Sun) 23:59 – Portfolio part I

(first 3 chapters, via BB)

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image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bionicteaching/1375254387/

Hands-on Teaser• mining data in various social web formats • see the differences in what each of the formats

can contain & what purpose they serve• start: simple search where we pull in some XFN

data and visualise a graph of people that we find on a website

• check: software you will be working with on the website

Social Web 2016, Davide Ceolin