Social Web Meets Sensor Web: From User-Generated Content to Linked Crowdsourced Observation Data

The reach of dominating social media like Facebook and Twitter in the current population is enormous, and these media have long been leveraged for diverse applications. In particular, for some citizen science projects, existing social media increasingly become platforms on which participants interact and contribute. These user contributions, often termed User-Generated Content (UGC), can be a mix bag of posts, comments, images, and other media. We report in this paper a work-in-progress in formalizing user contributions from a large Facebook group (more than 4,000 users) established for biodiversity observation. A major part of our work is to extract structured datasets with welldefined semantics from unstructured UGC collections. We use common vocabularies from Darwin Core (DwC), Friendof-a-friend (FOAF), Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC), Semantic Sensor Network (SSN), among ∗This research is supported in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology (grant no. 102-2627-M-001-009) and by the Endemic Species Research Institute, Council of Agriculture, Taiwan. We are grateful to Te–En Lin and his group at the Endemic Species Research Institute for their help with the collected data. †Dong–Po Deng is also a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Geo–Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente. ‡Tyng–Ruey Chuang is also affiliated with the Research Center for Information Technology Innovation and the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences (Center for Geographic Information Science), both at Academia Sinica. This paper is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. You are free to share and adapt this paper for any purpose, even commercially, as long as you give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. These freedoms cannot be revoked as long as you follow the license terms. For a copy of the license, please visit . Linked Data on the Web (LDOW2014), April 8, 2014. Seoul, Korea. . others, to formalize the extracted datasets, hence, make them readily linkable. A nice consequence of this approach is that a multi-faceted browser can be quickly built to explore biodiversity information in large collections of UGC.