John G Breslin | University of Galway (original) (raw)

Papers by John G Breslin

In this paper we give an overview of the int.ere.st for a social tagging, bookmarking, and sharin... more In this paper we give an overview of the int.ere.st for a social tagging, bookmarking, and sharing service. It is based on the SCOT ontology. The SCOT ontology can represent the structure and semantics for social tagging data and provide methods for sharing and reusing them. We describe how it enables users to participate in a semantic social tagging from functional point of view and show how int.ere.st allows users to save, tag, and search SCOT ontologies. All kinds of user contributions in the system will be exposed as RDF vocabularies that connect them. We believe it is a good starting point to build Semantic Web based society using tagging data.

Tagging has proven to be a successful and efficient way for creating metadata through a human col... more Tagging has proven to be a successful and efficient way for creating metadata through a human collective intelligence. It can be considered not only an application of individuals for expressing one’s interests, but also as a starting point for leveraging social connections through collaborative user participations. A number of users have contributed to tag resources in web sites such as Del.icio.us, Flickr etc. However, there is no uniform structure to describe tags and user’s activities. This makes difficult to share and represent tag data among people. The SCOT (Social Semantic Cloud of Tags) ontology is aimed to represent the structure and semantics of a set of tags and promotes their global sharing. The paper introduce the SCOT ontology and methods of its representation.

Journal of Information Science, 2010

Websites that provide content creation and sharing features have become quite popular recently. T... more Websites that provide content creation and sharing features have become quite popular recently. These sites allow users to categorize and browse content using 'tags' or free-text keyword topics. Since users contribute and tag social media content across a variety of social web platforms, creating new knowledge from distributed tag data has become a matter of performing various tasks, including publishing, aggregating, integrating, and republishing tag data. However, there are a number of issues in relation to data sharing and interoperability when processing tag data across heterogeneous tagging platforms. In this paper we introduce a semantic tag model that aims to explicitly offer the necessary structure, semantics and relationships between tags. This approach provides an improved opportunity for representing tag data in the form of reusable constructs at a semantic level. We also demonstrate a prototype that consumes and makes use of shared tag metadata across heterogeneous sources.

... of ownership). Thirdly, SIOC metadata can be detected on blogs using auto-discovery mechanism... more ... of ownership). Thirdly, SIOC metadata can be detected on blogs using auto-discovery mechanisms, either by metadata crawlers or using browser plugins (a SIOC detector for Firefox will also be highlighted). Fourthly, SIOC can ...

According to a survey we recently conducted, Twitter was ranked in the top three services used by... more According to a survey we recently conducted, Twitter was ranked in the top three services used by Semantic Web researchers to spread information. In order to understand how Twitter is practically used for spreading scientific messages, we captured tweets containing the official hashtags of three conferences and studied (1) the type of content that researchers are more likely to tweet, (2) how they do it, and finally if their tweets can reach other communities -in addition to their own. In addition, we also conducted some interviews to complete our understanding of researchers' motivation to use Twitter during conferences.

The increase of personal digital cameras with video functionality and video-enabled camera phones... more The increase of personal digital cameras with video functionality and video-enabled camera phones has increased the amount of user-generated videos on the Web. People are spending more and more time viewing online videos as a major source of entertainment and “infotainment”. Social websites allow users to assign shared free-form tags to user-generated multimedia resources, thus generating annotations for objects with a minimum amount of effort. Tagging allows communities to organise their multimedia items into browseable sets, but these tags may be poorly chosen and related tags may be omitted. Current techniques to retrieve, integrate and present this media to users are deficient and could do with improvement. In this paper, we describe a framework for semantic enrichment, ranking and integration of web video tags using Semantic Web technologies. Semantic enrichment of folksonomies can bridge the gap between the uncontrolled and flat structures typically found in user-generated content and structures provided by the Semantic Web. The enhancement of tag spaces with semantics has been accomplished through two major tasks: (1) a tag space expansion and ranking step; and (2) through concept matching and integration with the Linked Data cloud. We have explored social, temporal and spatial contexts to enrich and extend the existing tag space. The resulting semantic tag space is modelled via a local graph based on co-occurrence distances for ranking. A ranked tag list is mapped and integrated with the Linked Data cloud through the DBpedia resource repository. Multi-dimensional context filtering for tag expansion means that tag ranking is much easier and it provides less ambiguous tag to concept matching.

International journal of health geographics, 2011

Wikification of GIS by the masses' is a phrase-term first coined by Kamel Boulos in 2005, two yea... more Wikification of GIS by the masses' is a phrase-term first coined by Kamel Boulos in 2005, two years earlier than Goodchild's term 'Volunteered Geographic Information'. Six years later (2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011), OpenStreetMap and Google Earth (GE) are now full-fledged, crowdsourced 'Wikipedias of the Earth' par excellence, with millions of users contributing their own layers to GE, attaching photos, videos, notes and even 3-D (three dimensional) models to locations in GE. From using Twitter in participatory sensing and bicycle-mounted sensors in pervasive environmental sensing, to creating a 100,000-sensor geo-mashup using Semantic Web technology, to the 3-D visualisation of indoor and outdoor surveillance data in real-time and the development of next-generation, collaborative natural user interfaces that will power the spatially-enabled public health and emergency situation rooms of the future, where sensor data and citizen reports can be triaged and acted upon in real-time by distributed teams of professionals, this paper offers a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of the overlapping domains of the Sensor Web, citizen sensing and 'human-in-the-loop sensing' in the era of the Mobile and Social Web, and the roles these domains can play in environmental and public health surveillance and crisis/disaster informatics. We provide an in-depth review of the key issues and trends in these areas, the challenges faced when reasoning and making decisions with real-time crowdsourced data (such as issues of information overload, "noise", misinformation, bias and trust), the core technologies and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards involved (Sensor Web Enablement and Open GeoSMS), as well as a few outstanding project implementation examples from around the world.

Early intervention in psychiatry, 2008

Background: Intervening early in the course of psychotic illness may improve the long-term outcom... more Background: Intervening early in the course of psychotic illness may improve the long-term outcome. Early intervention requires early recognition, and one factor that influences early recognition is the level of mental health literacy (MHL) in the population.Aim: To investigate the level of MHL regarding depression and psychosis in an Irish population.Method: We invited the registered users of Ireland's most popular community website (http://www.boards.ie) to participate in an online survey. Two standardized vignettes depicting depression and psychosis were presented, and respondents were asked about what they thought the conditions were and who might be best placed to help the person. Participants were asked a series of knowledge-based questions about psychosis.Results: Nine hundred and ninety-eight (770 males, 228 females) people participated. Using a case vignette model, 78% and 93% of respondents correctly identified depression and psychosis/schizophrenia, respectively. However, half of the participants described schizophrenia as a ‘split personality disorder’. Neither age nor urbanicity influenced the probability of correctly identifying the diagnosis, but females and university students were more likely to correctly identify the diagnosis. More than 90% believed intervening early in psychosis is likely to improve outcome.Conclusion: The Internet users in this survey have high levels of MHL, identify appropriate pathways to care, and their views on management are consistent with evidence-based treatments.

In late 2004, a new method of publishing multimedia broadcasts on the Internet became popular cal... more In late 2004, a new method of publishing multimedia broadcasts on the Internet became popular called 'Podcasting'. Podcasting incorporates existing feed description formats, namely RSS 2.0, to deliver various enclosed files. This allows users to subscribe to feeds, receiving updates periodically. Originally intended for selfpublishing and syndication of audio files, usage of Podcasting for video files has become quite popular. Indeed, thousands of Podcast feeds are now available, reaching a wide range of listeners and viewers. The rapid development of such a technology proves the demand for structured formats of describing multimedia data, facilitating location and retrieval of desirable media for consumers. This paper proposes such a format, using Semantic Web technologies, that has been used in a prototype application for the intelligent location and retrieval of Podcasts.

This short paper provides an overview of the architecture and features of SMOB 2http://smob.me -,... more This short paper provides an overview of the architecture and features of SMOB 2http://smob.me -, a platform for open, semantic and distributed microblogging combining Social Web principles and state-of-the-art Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies.

IEEE Expert / IEEE Intelligent Systems, 2008

Wikis are popular collaborative hypertext authoring environments, but they neither support struct... more Wikis are popular collaborative hypertext authoring environments, but they neither support structured access nor information reuse. Adding semantic annotations helps to address these limitations. We present an architecture for Semantic Wikis and discuss design decisions including structured access, views, and annotation language. We present our prototype SemperWiki that implements this architecture.

Online community sites have replaced the traditional means of keeping a community informed via li... more Online community sites have replaced the traditional means of keeping a community informed via libraries and publishing. At present, online communities are islands that are not interlinked. We describe different types of online communities and tools that are currently used to build and support such communities. Ontologies and semantic web technologies offer an upgrade path to providing more complex services. Fusing

There is a growing interest on how we represent and share tagging data for the purpose of collabo... more There is a growing interest on how we represent and share tagging data for the purpose of collaborative tagging systems. Conventional tags are not naturally suited for collaborative processes. Being free-text keywords, they are exposed to linguistic variations like case (upper vs lower), grammatical number (singular vs. plural) as well as human typing errors. Additionally, tags depend on the personal views of the world by individual users, and are not normalized for synonymy, morphology or any other mapping. The bottom line of the problem is that tags have no semantics whatsoever. Moreover, even if a user gives some semantics to a tag while using or viewing it, this meaning is not automatically shared with computers since it's not defined in a machine-readable way. With tagging systems increasing in popularity each day, the evolution of this technology is hindered by this problem, since tagging metadata is not readily generated and shared. In this paper we discuss approaches to represent collaborative tagging activities at a semantic level, and present conceptual models for collaborative tagging activities and folksonomies. We present criteria for the comparison of existing tag ontologies and discuss their strengths and weaknesses in relation to these criteria.

IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, 1998

Switching circuits, operating at high frequencies, have led to considerable reductions in the siz... more Switching circuits, operating at high frequencies, have led to considerable reductions in the size of magnetic components and power supplies. Nonsinusoidal voltage and current waveforms and high-frequency skin and proximity effects contribute to power transformer losses. Traditionally, power transformer design has been based on sinusoidal voltage and current waveforms operating at low frequencies. The physical and electrical properties of the

Journal of Web Semantics, 2008

Large volumes of content (bookmarks, reviews, videos, etc.) are currently being created on the "S... more Large volumes of content (bookmarks, reviews, videos, etc.) are currently being created on the "Social Web", i.e. on Web 2.0 community sites, and this content is being annotated and commented upon. The ability to view an individual's entire contribution to the Social Web would be an interesting and valuable service, particularly important as social networks are often being formed through created content and things that people have in common ("object-centred sociality"). SIOC is a Semantic Web research project that aims to describe online communities on the Social Web. This paper describes how SIOC and the Semantic Web can enable linking and reuse scenarios of data from Web 2.0 community sites, and introduces a SIOC Types module to further specify the type of content items and act as a "glue" between user posts and the content items created and annotated by users.

Wikis are becoming popular knowledge management tools. Analysing knowledge management requirement... more Wikis are becoming popular knowledge management tools. Analysing knowledge management requirements, we observe that wikis do not fully support structured search and knowledge reuse. We show how Semantic wikis address the requirements and present a general architecture. We introduce our SemperWiki prototype which offers advanced information access and knowledge reuse.

The ability to send and retrieve information over the Web using traditional and ubiquitous comput... more The ability to send and retrieve information over the Web using traditional and ubiquitous computing methods has changed the way we work and live. Web portals, as content aggregators, act as gateways to pertinent and upto-date information. Social networking portals are a recent development, allowing a user to create and maintain a network of close friends or business associates for social and/or professional reasons. In this paper we suggest a classification schema for the main types of social networking sites and conduct an evaluation in terms of features and functionality.

International Journal of Web Based Communities

Online communities are islands that are not interlinked, where complementary discussions can exis... more Online communities are islands that are not interlinked, where complementary discussions can exist on disparate systems but it is difficult to exploit this available distributed information. A Semantically Interlinked Online Community (SIOC) can enable efficient information dissemination across such communities through the use of an ontology which will be created to model the concepts identified in discussion methods. Data instances of these concepts will be provided from a community site interface, allowing connections between local and remote instances. The connections between communities will be weighted for searching and matching purposes. SIOC is a prerequisite for a search engine that will answer questions rather than providing links to possibly relevant information.

This paper presents a framework for the reuse and extension of existing, established vocabularies... more This paper presents a framework for the reuse and extension of existing, established vocabularies in the Semantic Web. Driven by the primary application of expert finding, we will explore the reuse of vocabularies that have attracted a considerable user community already (FOAF, SIOC, etc.) or are derived from de facto standards used in tools or industrial practice (such as vCard, iCal and Dublin Core). This focus guarantees direct applicability and low entry barriers, unlike when devising a new ontology from scratch. The Web is already populated with several vocabularies which complement each other (but also have considerable overlap) in that they cover a wide range of necessary features to adequately describe the expert finding domain. Little effort has been made so far to identify and compare existing approaches, and to devise best practices on how to use and extend various vocabularies conjointly. It is the goal of the recently started ExpertFinder initiative to fill this gap. In this paper we present the ExpertFinder framework for reuse and extension of existing vocabularies in the Semantic Web. We provide a practical analysis of overlaps and options for combined use and extensions of several existing vocabularies, as well as a proposal for applying rules and other enabling technologies to the expert finding task.

In this paper we give an overview of the int.ere.st for a social tagging, bookmarking, and sharin... more In this paper we give an overview of the int.ere.st for a social tagging, bookmarking, and sharing service. It is based on the SCOT ontology. The SCOT ontology can represent the structure and semantics for social tagging data and provide methods for sharing and reusing them. We describe how it enables users to participate in a semantic social tagging from functional point of view and show how int.ere.st allows users to save, tag, and search SCOT ontologies. All kinds of user contributions in the system will be exposed as RDF vocabularies that connect them. We believe it is a good starting point to build Semantic Web based society using tagging data.

Tagging has proven to be a successful and efficient way for creating metadata through a human col... more Tagging has proven to be a successful and efficient way for creating metadata through a human collective intelligence. It can be considered not only an application of individuals for expressing one’s interests, but also as a starting point for leveraging social connections through collaborative user participations. A number of users have contributed to tag resources in web sites such as Del.icio.us, Flickr etc. However, there is no uniform structure to describe tags and user’s activities. This makes difficult to share and represent tag data among people. The SCOT (Social Semantic Cloud of Tags) ontology is aimed to represent the structure and semantics of a set of tags and promotes their global sharing. The paper introduce the SCOT ontology and methods of its representation.

Journal of Information Science, 2010

Websites that provide content creation and sharing features have become quite popular recently. T... more Websites that provide content creation and sharing features have become quite popular recently. These sites allow users to categorize and browse content using 'tags' or free-text keyword topics. Since users contribute and tag social media content across a variety of social web platforms, creating new knowledge from distributed tag data has become a matter of performing various tasks, including publishing, aggregating, integrating, and republishing tag data. However, there are a number of issues in relation to data sharing and interoperability when processing tag data across heterogeneous tagging platforms. In this paper we introduce a semantic tag model that aims to explicitly offer the necessary structure, semantics and relationships between tags. This approach provides an improved opportunity for representing tag data in the form of reusable constructs at a semantic level. We also demonstrate a prototype that consumes and makes use of shared tag metadata across heterogeneous sources.

... of ownership). Thirdly, SIOC metadata can be detected on blogs using auto-discovery mechanism... more ... of ownership). Thirdly, SIOC metadata can be detected on blogs using auto-discovery mechanisms, either by metadata crawlers or using browser plugins (a SIOC detector for Firefox will also be highlighted). Fourthly, SIOC can ...

According to a survey we recently conducted, Twitter was ranked in the top three services used by... more According to a survey we recently conducted, Twitter was ranked in the top three services used by Semantic Web researchers to spread information. In order to understand how Twitter is practically used for spreading scientific messages, we captured tweets containing the official hashtags of three conferences and studied (1) the type of content that researchers are more likely to tweet, (2) how they do it, and finally if their tweets can reach other communities -in addition to their own. In addition, we also conducted some interviews to complete our understanding of researchers' motivation to use Twitter during conferences.

The increase of personal digital cameras with video functionality and video-enabled camera phones... more The increase of personal digital cameras with video functionality and video-enabled camera phones has increased the amount of user-generated videos on the Web. People are spending more and more time viewing online videos as a major source of entertainment and “infotainment”. Social websites allow users to assign shared free-form tags to user-generated multimedia resources, thus generating annotations for objects with a minimum amount of effort. Tagging allows communities to organise their multimedia items into browseable sets, but these tags may be poorly chosen and related tags may be omitted. Current techniques to retrieve, integrate and present this media to users are deficient and could do with improvement. In this paper, we describe a framework for semantic enrichment, ranking and integration of web video tags using Semantic Web technologies. Semantic enrichment of folksonomies can bridge the gap between the uncontrolled and flat structures typically found in user-generated content and structures provided by the Semantic Web. The enhancement of tag spaces with semantics has been accomplished through two major tasks: (1) a tag space expansion and ranking step; and (2) through concept matching and integration with the Linked Data cloud. We have explored social, temporal and spatial contexts to enrich and extend the existing tag space. The resulting semantic tag space is modelled via a local graph based on co-occurrence distances for ranking. A ranked tag list is mapped and integrated with the Linked Data cloud through the DBpedia resource repository. Multi-dimensional context filtering for tag expansion means that tag ranking is much easier and it provides less ambiguous tag to concept matching.

International journal of health geographics, 2011

Wikification of GIS by the masses' is a phrase-term first coined by Kamel Boulos in 2005, two yea... more Wikification of GIS by the masses' is a phrase-term first coined by Kamel Boulos in 2005, two years earlier than Goodchild's term 'Volunteered Geographic Information'. Six years later (2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011), OpenStreetMap and Google Earth (GE) are now full-fledged, crowdsourced 'Wikipedias of the Earth' par excellence, with millions of users contributing their own layers to GE, attaching photos, videos, notes and even 3-D (three dimensional) models to locations in GE. From using Twitter in participatory sensing and bicycle-mounted sensors in pervasive environmental sensing, to creating a 100,000-sensor geo-mashup using Semantic Web technology, to the 3-D visualisation of indoor and outdoor surveillance data in real-time and the development of next-generation, collaborative natural user interfaces that will power the spatially-enabled public health and emergency situation rooms of the future, where sensor data and citizen reports can be triaged and acted upon in real-time by distributed teams of professionals, this paper offers a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of the overlapping domains of the Sensor Web, citizen sensing and 'human-in-the-loop sensing' in the era of the Mobile and Social Web, and the roles these domains can play in environmental and public health surveillance and crisis/disaster informatics. We provide an in-depth review of the key issues and trends in these areas, the challenges faced when reasoning and making decisions with real-time crowdsourced data (such as issues of information overload, "noise", misinformation, bias and trust), the core technologies and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards involved (Sensor Web Enablement and Open GeoSMS), as well as a few outstanding project implementation examples from around the world.

Early intervention in psychiatry, 2008

Background: Intervening early in the course of psychotic illness may improve the long-term outcom... more Background: Intervening early in the course of psychotic illness may improve the long-term outcome. Early intervention requires early recognition, and one factor that influences early recognition is the level of mental health literacy (MHL) in the population.Aim: To investigate the level of MHL regarding depression and psychosis in an Irish population.Method: We invited the registered users of Ireland's most popular community website (http://www.boards.ie) to participate in an online survey. Two standardized vignettes depicting depression and psychosis were presented, and respondents were asked about what they thought the conditions were and who might be best placed to help the person. Participants were asked a series of knowledge-based questions about psychosis.Results: Nine hundred and ninety-eight (770 males, 228 females) people participated. Using a case vignette model, 78% and 93% of respondents correctly identified depression and psychosis/schizophrenia, respectively. However, half of the participants described schizophrenia as a ‘split personality disorder’. Neither age nor urbanicity influenced the probability of correctly identifying the diagnosis, but females and university students were more likely to correctly identify the diagnosis. More than 90% believed intervening early in psychosis is likely to improve outcome.Conclusion: The Internet users in this survey have high levels of MHL, identify appropriate pathways to care, and their views on management are consistent with evidence-based treatments.

In late 2004, a new method of publishing multimedia broadcasts on the Internet became popular cal... more In late 2004, a new method of publishing multimedia broadcasts on the Internet became popular called 'Podcasting'. Podcasting incorporates existing feed description formats, namely RSS 2.0, to deliver various enclosed files. This allows users to subscribe to feeds, receiving updates periodically. Originally intended for selfpublishing and syndication of audio files, usage of Podcasting for video files has become quite popular. Indeed, thousands of Podcast feeds are now available, reaching a wide range of listeners and viewers. The rapid development of such a technology proves the demand for structured formats of describing multimedia data, facilitating location and retrieval of desirable media for consumers. This paper proposes such a format, using Semantic Web technologies, that has been used in a prototype application for the intelligent location and retrieval of Podcasts.

This short paper provides an overview of the architecture and features of SMOB 2http://smob.me -,... more This short paper provides an overview of the architecture and features of SMOB 2http://smob.me -, a platform for open, semantic and distributed microblogging combining Social Web principles and state-of-the-art Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies.

IEEE Expert / IEEE Intelligent Systems, 2008

Wikis are popular collaborative hypertext authoring environments, but they neither support struct... more Wikis are popular collaborative hypertext authoring environments, but they neither support structured access nor information reuse. Adding semantic annotations helps to address these limitations. We present an architecture for Semantic Wikis and discuss design decisions including structured access, views, and annotation language. We present our prototype SemperWiki that implements this architecture.

Online community sites have replaced the traditional means of keeping a community informed via li... more Online community sites have replaced the traditional means of keeping a community informed via libraries and publishing. At present, online communities are islands that are not interlinked. We describe different types of online communities and tools that are currently used to build and support such communities. Ontologies and semantic web technologies offer an upgrade path to providing more complex services. Fusing

There is a growing interest on how we represent and share tagging data for the purpose of collabo... more There is a growing interest on how we represent and share tagging data for the purpose of collaborative tagging systems. Conventional tags are not naturally suited for collaborative processes. Being free-text keywords, they are exposed to linguistic variations like case (upper vs lower), grammatical number (singular vs. plural) as well as human typing errors. Additionally, tags depend on the personal views of the world by individual users, and are not normalized for synonymy, morphology or any other mapping. The bottom line of the problem is that tags have no semantics whatsoever. Moreover, even if a user gives some semantics to a tag while using or viewing it, this meaning is not automatically shared with computers since it's not defined in a machine-readable way. With tagging systems increasing in popularity each day, the evolution of this technology is hindered by this problem, since tagging metadata is not readily generated and shared. In this paper we discuss approaches to represent collaborative tagging activities at a semantic level, and present conceptual models for collaborative tagging activities and folksonomies. We present criteria for the comparison of existing tag ontologies and discuss their strengths and weaknesses in relation to these criteria.

IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, 1998

Switching circuits, operating at high frequencies, have led to considerable reductions in the siz... more Switching circuits, operating at high frequencies, have led to considerable reductions in the size of magnetic components and power supplies. Nonsinusoidal voltage and current waveforms and high-frequency skin and proximity effects contribute to power transformer losses. Traditionally, power transformer design has been based on sinusoidal voltage and current waveforms operating at low frequencies. The physical and electrical properties of the

Journal of Web Semantics, 2008

Large volumes of content (bookmarks, reviews, videos, etc.) are currently being created on the "S... more Large volumes of content (bookmarks, reviews, videos, etc.) are currently being created on the "Social Web", i.e. on Web 2.0 community sites, and this content is being annotated and commented upon. The ability to view an individual's entire contribution to the Social Web would be an interesting and valuable service, particularly important as social networks are often being formed through created content and things that people have in common ("object-centred sociality"). SIOC is a Semantic Web research project that aims to describe online communities on the Social Web. This paper describes how SIOC and the Semantic Web can enable linking and reuse scenarios of data from Web 2.0 community sites, and introduces a SIOC Types module to further specify the type of content items and act as a "glue" between user posts and the content items created and annotated by users.

Wikis are becoming popular knowledge management tools. Analysing knowledge management requirement... more Wikis are becoming popular knowledge management tools. Analysing knowledge management requirements, we observe that wikis do not fully support structured search and knowledge reuse. We show how Semantic wikis address the requirements and present a general architecture. We introduce our SemperWiki prototype which offers advanced information access and knowledge reuse.

The ability to send and retrieve information over the Web using traditional and ubiquitous comput... more The ability to send and retrieve information over the Web using traditional and ubiquitous computing methods has changed the way we work and live. Web portals, as content aggregators, act as gateways to pertinent and upto-date information. Social networking portals are a recent development, allowing a user to create and maintain a network of close friends or business associates for social and/or professional reasons. In this paper we suggest a classification schema for the main types of social networking sites and conduct an evaluation in terms of features and functionality.

International Journal of Web Based Communities

Online communities are islands that are not interlinked, where complementary discussions can exis... more Online communities are islands that are not interlinked, where complementary discussions can exist on disparate systems but it is difficult to exploit this available distributed information. A Semantically Interlinked Online Community (SIOC) can enable efficient information dissemination across such communities through the use of an ontology which will be created to model the concepts identified in discussion methods. Data instances of these concepts will be provided from a community site interface, allowing connections between local and remote instances. The connections between communities will be weighted for searching and matching purposes. SIOC is a prerequisite for a search engine that will answer questions rather than providing links to possibly relevant information.

This paper presents a framework for the reuse and extension of existing, established vocabularies... more This paper presents a framework for the reuse and extension of existing, established vocabularies in the Semantic Web. Driven by the primary application of expert finding, we will explore the reuse of vocabularies that have attracted a considerable user community already (FOAF, SIOC, etc.) or are derived from de facto standards used in tools or industrial practice (such as vCard, iCal and Dublin Core). This focus guarantees direct applicability and low entry barriers, unlike when devising a new ontology from scratch. The Web is already populated with several vocabularies which complement each other (but also have considerable overlap) in that they cover a wide range of necessary features to adequately describe the expert finding domain. Little effort has been made so far to identify and compare existing approaches, and to devise best practices on how to use and extend various vocabularies conjointly. It is the goal of the recently started ExpertFinder initiative to fill this gap. In this paper we present the ExpertFinder framework for reuse and extension of existing vocabularies in the Semantic Web. We provide a practical analysis of overlaps and options for combined use and extensions of several existing vocabularies, as well as a proposal for applying rules and other enabling technologies to the expert finding task.