Adding Semantics to Social Websites for Citizen Science

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Adding Semantics to Social Websites for Citizen
Science

• Pranam Kolari
• University of Maryland,Baltimore County
• Joint work with Andriy Parafiynyk, Tim Finin,
  Cynthia Parr, Joel Sachs, and Lushan Han
• http//ebiquity.umbc.edu/paper/html/id/365

? http//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0
/ This work was partially supported by DARPA
contract F30602-97-1-0215, NSF grants CCR007080
and IIS9875433
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This talk

• Motivation
• Swoogle Semantic Websearch engine
• Social Semantic Web
• Conclusions

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SOCIAL MEDIA

• Social media describes the online technologies
  and practices that people use to share opinions,
  insights, experiences, and perspectives and
  engage with each other.

Wikipedia 07
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Social Media for agents

• Today social media supports information sharing
  among communities of people - enables Citizen
  Journalism
• An infrastructure based on pings, feeds, content
  aggregators, and filters (e.g. pipes) aids
  scalability
• Social media now accounts for 1/3 of new Web
  content!
• We need to explore how networks of agents can use
  the same strategies to share data and knowledge

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This talk

• Motivation
• Swoogle Semantic Websearch engine
• Social Semantic Web
• Conclusions

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Google has made us smarter
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But what about our agents?

• Agents still have a very minimal understanding of
  text and images.

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But what about our agents?

• A Google for knowledge on the Semantic Web is
  needed by software agents and programs

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• http//swoogle.umbc.edu/
• Running since summer 2004
• 2.2M RDF docs, 434M triples, 10K ontologies,15K
  namespaces, 1.5M classes, 185K properties, 49M
  instances, 800 registered users

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Swoogle Architecture
Analysis

Ranking
SWD classifier
Index
Search Services
Semantic Web metadata
IR Indexer
Web Service
Web Server
SWD Indexer
html
rdf/xml
Discovery
the Web
document cache
SwoogleBot
Semantic Web
Candidate URLs
Bounded Web Crawler Google Crawler
Archive
human
machine
pings
Information flow
Swoogles web interface
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Applications and use cases

• Supporting Semantic Web developers
• Ontology designers, vocabulary discovery, whos
  using my ontologies or data?, use analysis,
  errors, statistics, etc.
• Searching specialized collections
• Spire aggregating observations and data from
  biologists
• InferenceWeb searching over and enhancing proofs
• SemNews Text Meaning of news stories
• Supporting SW tools
• Triple shop finding data for SPARQL queries

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• An NSF ITR collaborative project with
• University of Maryland, Baltimore County
• University of Maryland, College Park
• U. Of California, Davis
• Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory

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An invasive species scenario

• Nile Tilapia fish have been found in a California
  lake.
• Can this invasive species thrive in this
  environment?
• If so, what will be the likelyconsequences for
  theecology?
• Sowe need to understandthe effects of
  introducingthis fish into the food webof a
  typical California lake

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Food Webs

• A food web models the trophic (feeding)
  relationships between organisms in an ecology
• Food web simulators explore consequences of
  ecological changes, i.e., species introduction or
  removal
• Food web are constructed from studies of a
  locations species inventory and the known
  trophic relations.
• Goal automatically construct a food web for a
  new species using existing data and knowledge
• ELVIS Ecosystem Location Visualization and
  Information System

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East River Valley Trophic Web
http//www.foodwebs.org/
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The problem

• We have data on what species are known to be in
  the location and can further restrict and fill in
  with other ecological models
• gt Maybe we can mine social media for species
  observations data?
• But we dont know which of these the Nile Tilapia
  eats of who might eat it.
• We can reason from taxonomic data (similar
  species) and known natural history data (size,
  mass, habitat, etc.) to fill in the gaps.

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Food Web Constructor

• Predict food web links using database and
  taxonomic reasoning.

In an new estuary, Nile Tilapia could compete
with ostracods (green) to eat algae. Predators
(red) and prey (blue) of ostracods may be affected
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Status

• ELVIS (Ecosystem Location Visualization and
  Information System) as an integrated set of web
  services for constructing food webs for a given
  location.
• Background ontologies
• SpireEcoConcepts concepts and properties to
  represent food webs, and ELVIS related tasks,
  inputs and outputs
• ETHAN (Evolutionary Trees and Natural History)
  Concepts and properties for natural history
  information on species derived from data in the
  Animal diversity web and other taxonomic sources.
  250K classes on plants and animals

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This talk

• Motivation
• Swoogle Semantic Websearch engine
• Social Semantic Web
• Conclusions

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• Social media sites have become thebiggest source
  of new content on the Web
• Blogs, Wikis, Photo sites, forums, etc.
• Accounting for 1/3 of new Web content

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• Social media sites embrace new ways of letting
  users add semantic information
• Shows users the potential of semantics
• This graph shows the uptake of tags in blogs

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Social Media and the Semantic Web

• Many are exploring how Semantic Web technology
  can work with social media
• Social media like blogs are typically temporally
  organized
• valued for their timely and dynamic information!
• If static pages form the Webs long term memory,
  then the Blogosphere is its stream of
  consciousness
• Maybe we can (1) help people publish data in RDF
  on their blogs, (2) mine social media sites for
  useful information, (3) exploit new
  infrastructure ideas for sharing Semantic Web
  data.

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A BioBlitz involves going out to an area and
recording every organism you see
The OWL icon links to the data in RDF
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Heres the posts RDF data
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A good Semantic Web opportunity

• We want to make it easy for scientists to enter
  and collect information from social media
• Professionals, students and amateurs!
• Some early examples
• SPOTter a tool to add Semantic Web data to
  blogs
• Splickr a system to mine Flickr for images of
  organisms
• RDF123 an application and Web service to render
  spreadsheets as RDF data

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SPOTter SPire Observation Tool

• Weve developed some simple components to help
  people add RDF data to blogs and ping Swoogle to
  get it indexed.
• SPOTter is an initial prototype that uses the
  ETHAN ontology and is being used in some BioBlitz
  activities with students.
• Were working toward a version that uses Twitter
  so that people can make the blog entries from the
  cell phones via SMS
• The SPOTter agent will get the entries (via RSS)
  and index the data

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SPOTter button
Once entered, the data isembedded into the blog
postand Swoogle is pinged to index it
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• We can draw a bounding box onthe map and find
  observations
• An RSS feed provided for eachquery

Prototype SPOTter Search engine
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Flickr

• The Flickr photo sharing site has millions of
  photographs
• Many of plants and animals
• Most of them have descriptions, timestamps, tags
  and even geo-tags
• Flickr has even introduced machine tags that
  can be mapped into RDF
• Any Flickr users (humans or bots) can add
  comments and annotations
• Theres a good API
• It could be a good source of ecological
  information

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Results for people and machines
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RDF123

• An application and web service to generate RDF
  data from spreadsheets

Graphically create edit spreadsheet to RDF map
MAP
map spreadsheet gt RDF data
CSV or Googledoc
Some metadata can Be embedded in spreadsheet
See http//ebiquity.umbc.edu/project/html/id/82/
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RDF123

• The Bioblitz project needed a way to collect and
  share observational data from students
• Spreadsheets selected as a common data format and
  templates developed
• RDF123 application and web service developed to
  ease exporting the data as RDF for a Maryland
  BioBlitz group
• Supports a web service to generate RDF given URLs
  for the sheet and map
• Works on CSV files and also Google spreadsheets

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A map provides a template for an RDF subgraph for
each row
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The map is also represented in RDF
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Heres the RDF thats produced from the
spreadsheet
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Metadata, including the URI of a map, can be
embedded in the spreadsheet
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Ping and Feed Design Pattern

• The Web uses a ping and feed design pattern that
  is a variant of publish and subscribe
• It accounts for the scalable, smooth function of
  the Blogosphere and related social media systems
• Pings push and feeds pull
• We can use the same approach to managing volumes
  of Semantic Web data

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Pings and Feeds in the Blogosphere

• Content provider send pings to ping servers when
  they have a new item
• Ping servers aggregate pings and stream them to
  aggregators and indexers, like Google
• Indexing sites retrieve new items from content
  providers feed

C1
PingServer
Search Engine
C2
C3
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Pings and Feeds in the Semantic Web

• Content provider send pings to ping-the-semantic-w
  eb when they have new RDF data
• PTSW aggregates pings and streams them to SW
  aggregators and indexers, like Swoogle
• Indexing sites retrieve new RDF data from content
  providers feed

C1
PTSW
Swoogle
C2
C3
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Semantic Web Feeds drive Mashups

• As in the regular web, sites and query engines
  use feeds to capture queries
• Accessing a feed runs the query and produces a
  list of the first N results (usually 10 N 20)
• Such query feeds can drive mashups
• Systems like Yahoo pipes make it easy to compose
  feeds

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This talk

• Motivation
• Swoogle Semantic Websearch engine
• Social Semantic Web
• Conclusions

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Conclusion

• The web will contain the worlds knowledge in
  forms accessible to people and computers
• We need better ways to discover, index, search
  and reason over SW knowledge
• SW search engines address different tasks than
  html search engines
• So they require different techniques and APIs
• Swoogle like systems can help create consensus
  ontologies and foster best practices
• Social media provide new challenges and
  opportunities for the Semantic Web

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For more information
http//ebiquity.umbc.edu/
Annotatedin OWL