The Future of Social Web Sites: Sharing Data and Trusted Applications with Semantics

In recent years, there has been an explosion in the number of Social Web sites which allow the creation of knowledge through simplified user contributions via blogs, wikis, and the deployment of online social networks. As more Social Web CES IN COMPUTERS, VOL. 76 121 Copyright © 2009 Elsevier Inc. 65-2458/DOI: 10.1016/S0065-2458(09)01004-3 All rights reserved. 122 S. KINSELLA ET AL. sites form around the connections between people and their objects of interest, and as these ‘‘object-centered networks’’ grow bigger and more diverse, more intuitive methods are needed for representing and navigating the objects in these sites: both within and across Social Web sites. Also, to better enable user access to multiple sites, interoperability among Social Web sites is required in terms of both the expressed data (content objects, person-to-person networks, etc.) and the social applications in use (e.g., widgets) on each site. This requires representation mechanisms for data and applications on the Social Web in an interoperable and extensible way. The Semantic Web provides such representation mechanisms: it can be used to link people and objects by representing the heterogeneous ties that bind us all to each other (either directly or indirectly). In this chapter, we will describe methods that build on agreed-upon Semantic Web formats to describe people, content objects, the connections that bind them together explicitly or implicitly, and embeddable application widgets on Social Web sites, thereby enabling these sites to interoperate by appealing to some common semantics. We will also focus on how a social aspect can be added to data such as software project and widgets descriptions, so that one can combine social networking, trust, and relationship aspects with those representation models. We will also look at how developers can use the Semantic Web to augment the ways in which they create, reuse, and link content on social networking sites and Social Web sites. In particular, we will see how both data and applications can be shared on the Web, thanks to these semantics. 1. I ntroduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 2. S ocial Web Sites and Approaches to Add Semantics . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 2.1. S ocial Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 2.2. L everaging Semantics in ‘‘Object-Centered’’ Social Networks . . . . . . . 129 2.3. B logs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 2.4. A dding Semantics to Blogs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 2.5. W ikis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 2.6. A dding Semantics to Wikis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 2.7. T ags, Tagging, and Folksonomies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 2.8. A dding Semantics to Tags and Related Objects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 2.9. S oftware Project Descriptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142 2 .10. A dding Semantics to Software Project Descriptions . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 3. P roducers of Social Semantic Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 3.1. F OAF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146 3.2. S IOC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 3.3. D OAP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 FUTURE OF SOCIAL WEB SITES 123 4. C ollectors of Social Semantic Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154 4.1. T he Web as a Source of Social Network Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 154 4.2. C ollecting and Aggregating Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 4.3. C rawling and Browsing Software Descriptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 4.4. I nferring Relationships from Aggregated Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 5. C onsumers of Social Semantic Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 5.1. S ocial Network Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 5.2. Q uerying an RDF Graph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 6. F uture Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 6.1. L everaging Semantics in Multimedia-Enabled Social Web Sites . . . . . . 166 6.2. P rivacy and Deliberate Fragmentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 6.3. U sing Wikipedia as a Reputation System with Embedded Semantics . . . 168 6.4. A Common Social Networking Stack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 7. C onclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 A cknowledgment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 R eferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172