Creating communities around Web conversations: Talk Digger, a Demo.

Frederick Giasson

 

I am pleased to show you the beta version of the help files of the next generation of Talk Digger.

 

For those who do not know, Talk Digger is a new way to find, follow and join discussions evolving on the Web. So you have three elements: (1) finding discussions, (2) following discussions and (3) joining discussions.

With the current version of Talk Digger, users get stuck at step one. These new improvements to Talk Digger will let its users to go ahead with the step two and three.

With these new features, Talk Digger will become a social platform that helps people to connect with other people that follow the same stories (the premise here is that people that follow the same discussions will also have some personal and professional interests in common). It will also become a search engine of its own, and not only a meta-one.

 

These help files are created like a slide show: you have a screenshot of what is going on the Talk Digger web site at the left and a description of the behavior at the right.

The reason I publish this first version of the help files is to show people what will be the next generation of Talk Digger, what they will be able to do with it. What I would also like is to get feedbacks from them: I would like to have your first impressions.

It is sure that they are just screenshot and that you can’t really have the feeling of its usability, however, I would suggest you to subscribe to the private alpha version that will be online by the end of the month or so.

 

There are the help sections I publish for now:

 

I hope you will like what you will see!

 

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Web2.0 concepts are as old as computer, however what make them different?

Frederick Giasson

One person recently asked me this question by email:

“The key part of Web 2.0 is that there is something about these new tools that enable new practices of collaboration,” said John Seely Brown, a consultant and former chief scientist of Xerox, who spoke at the Collaborative Technology Conference in Boston last week. “Web 2.0 is a profoundly participatory medium.”
[…]

My question to experienced bloggers is, what is the something? We had the same functionality 20 years ago, and some 40 yrs ago,
now touted as Web 2.0. What makes the difference in your opinions?

I answered him with:

Quickly, without thinking much about it, I would say the accessibility: anybody has the power to be ear if they have something to say that
worth listening at.

But it’s more than accessibility: it’s global and “easy” to use. I can follow, while reading a blog, what US soldier live in Iraq, or find out what is the feminine condition in Iran, or talk about the World Cup, I can post a photo, using my cell phone, of the London Bombing if I was here, etc. Some click, a connection, something to share, and something magic happen.

I am questioning myself about the emerging “Web2.0” trend. I don’t think it is a question of concepts, but more a question of technological conjuncture: much lower hardware price, Internet connection for everybody, anywhere in the World (I got an Internet Access at 3500m above the sea level in the middle of the Himalaya in the national park of the Everest at about 15 km of it in Namche Bazaar), the emergence of scalable and performing open source software, protocols, systems and architectures (the LAMP architecture for example), etc.

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Talk Digger Alpha Testing Account Subscription

Frederick Giasson

 

Talk Digger has recently evolved. New features have been developed helping people creating communities around Web conversations, finding people with same interests, tracking and joining these evolving conversations.

Now the time to test all that stuff has come and I need your help.

I need about one hundred of hardcore users that will be willing to test this new web site, find and report bugs, suggest layout modifications and new features, and tell me what is wrong with this new version.

 

Would you like to be one of those users?

Then fill this short form and I will contact you back in about one month to start using this totally new version of Talk Digger.

If you know people that would be willing to subscribe to this alpha testing stage, then feel free to send them the link to that subscription page.

Thanks you for your precious help!

 

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How to make the SIOC ontology adopting by the Web community?

Frederick Giasson

Ina asked that question via the SIOC mailing list:

 

“What are the main advantages of SIOC and also disadvantages of the
ontology.”

 

Uldis Bojars answered to that question by saying that “The main challenge to SIOC in my view is the adoption.”

As I said in my reply to Uldis: there is not 100 ways to make SIOC adopting by the Web community. In fact, if we check history, we will probably find that the most important innovations for the mankind have been unnoticed for years, even centuries.

It’s all about the tipping point. We have to reach a state where there is no return point and that it spread everywhere. We have to reach such a state that users even don’t realize that they are using the SIOC ontology.

The best way, in my humble opinion, is to create simple and effective prototypes that show to the World how it could be use, what is its utility and what is the results.

Such tools are starting to appear, just to name a few:

 

Alex’s SIOC browser is particularly interesting for general users because they don’t have to know what SIOC is to use the service.

What I’ll try to do in the near future is to develop a sort of pinging (or anything else) system with Alex to let Talk Digger communicate with his SIOC browser. That way, we would have a proof of concept of the cross-community power of the SIOC ontology.

What we have to do is continuing to develop such tools, to implement the ontology in many different communities until we reach a point where we have great tools and enough content to show to the World its power and how it can really help interaction between online Web communities.

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Implementing and visualizing relationships between Talk Digger’s SIOC and FOAF documents

Frederick Giasson

Some days ago I was checking how I could use the SIOC (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities) ontology to broadcast/share Talk Digger’s content in a meaningful way. (read more: Using SIOC ontology to connect Talk Digger with other online communities)

 

The implementation using RDF

Now it’s time to implement it by formatting that content using RDF/XML following the ontology’s guideline.

To create a good ontology you have to process by iteration: refining the ontology with testing and peer reviews.

Implementing an existing ontology in a system (such as Talk Digger) also has that process: generating a RDF file accordingly to the ontology and then trying to figure out how to link everything together (defining URI classes, defining resources, linking to resources, etc.) to optimize the graph (optimizing the relations betweens the resources to have as much meaning (easy to query) as possible).

 

Visualizing the RDF graph using IsaViz

The tool I used to implement the SIOC and the FOAF ontologies in Talk Digger is a RDF editor/visualization tool called IsaViz.

My procedure was simple:

  1. Generating the RDF/XML files (accordingly to SIOC and FOAF) with Talk Digger’s content database.
  2. Importing the RDF/XML file in IsaViz.
  3. Visualizing and analyzing the resulting graph.
  4. I checked all the relations between the resources and tried to figure out if it was possible to cut/add some of them to simplify/optimize the resulting graph.
  5. I checked all the anonymous nodes (bNodes) of the graph and checked if it was possible to relate them to an existing resource.
  6. I performed these 5 steps until I was satisfied by the resulting graph.

 

Playing with URIs and xml:base

What is great is that I can distribute Talk Digger’s content anywhere on the Web (with different URLs) and a crawler can download all these snipped of content (FOAF profiles, conversations content, etc.), aggregate them and merge them in a unique RDF graph. That way they can have their hands on all the relations that exist in the Talk Digger system and then querying it(the RDF graph) in useful and meaningful ways.

All that magic is possible by the fact that we can define a different URI for a given RDF/XML document using the xml:base attribute. That way I can:

 

  • Host a RDF/XML document at the URL http://talkdigger.com.com/a.php
  • Define the xml:base with the URI “http://talkdigger.com.com/db/”
  • Host a RDF/XML document at the URL http://talkdigger.com.com/b.php
  • Also Defining the xml:base with the URI “http://talkdigger.com.com/db/”

 

Then if a crawler downloads both RDF documents “a.php” and “b.php”, it can merge them to recreate the single RDF document defined at “http://talkdigger.com.com/db/”. By example, this merged RDF document would be the graph of all relations defined between Talk Digger’s content.

 

Talk Digger’s URI classes

I refer to a “URI class” when I talk about a “part” of a URI that is general to many URI “instances”. I refer to an “URI instance” when I talk about a URI that refer to a resource.

By example, the “URI class” of Talk Digger subscribed users is:

http://www.talkdigger.com/…/user.php?nick=

But an “instance” of that “URI class” would be the URI that describe a particular Talk Digger user:

http://www.talkdigger.com/…/user.php?nick=fgiasson

In that example, this “instance” refers to a resource that is the Talk Digger subscribed user called “fgiasson”.

There are the “URI classes” defined in Talk Digger:

  • URI class referring to a conversation container (work as a container for the conversation components)

http://www.talkdigger.com/…/conversation.php?url=[$url]

  • URI class referring to a conversation

http://www.talkdigger.com/…/conversation.php?url=[$url]#conversation

  • URI class referring to a usergroup (a group of users tracking that conversation)

http://www.talkdigger.com/…/conversation.php?url=[$url]#usergroup

  • URI class referring to a subscribed user

http://www.talkdigger.com/…/foaf.php?nick=[$nick]

 

SIOC and FOAF instances generated with Talk Digger content

In the next sections I will show you how Talk Digger will use the SIOC and FOAF ontologies to broadcast/share its content.

I’ll use 3 RDF documents for my presentation:

  1. sioc-fgiasson.rdf. This file describe the conversation evolving around my personal website [fgiasson.com] (in fact it is only a snippet for the example’s sake).
  2. foaf-fgiasson.rdf. This file is the FOAF profile of my Talk Digger user [fgiasson].
  3. sioc-blogspot.rdf. This file describe the conversation evolving around a specific blog post on a Blogspot blog called “Guilty of being…”. This blog post refers to an article I wrote on my blog.

All the RDF graphs have been exported in SVG files from IsaViz. Many mainstream applications like Visio or CorelDraw can read these files. If you don’t have access to one of these software you can refer to that list of tools to read SVG files (I am unfortunately not able to find any tool to convert a SVG file into a huge JPEG or GIF file).

Note: the path of the interesting results I found in these graphs are highlighted in red.

 

The SIOC document describing the conversation evolving around fgiasson.com

You can download the RDF document here: sioc-fgiasson.rdf.

The resulting RDF graph of this document is available here: fgiasson-conversation.svg

What is interesting in that graph is the interaction between

-a sioc:User
-[http://www.talkdigger.com/…/user.php?nick=fgiasson]

-a sioc:Usergroup
-[http://www.talkdigger.com/…/conversation.php?url=fgiasson.com#usergroup]

-some sioc: Post
-[http://www.talkdigger.com/…/conversation.php?url=fgiasson.com#comment-1]

-a sioc:Site
-[http://talkdigger.com]

-a sioc:Forum
-[http://www.talkdigger.com/…/conversation.php?url=fgiasson.com#conversation]

 

Merging a FOAF document with this SIOC document

Now I merged the FOAF document that describe more in deep my sioc:User fgiasson.

You can download these RDF documents here: sioc-fgiasson.rdf, foaf-fgiasson.rdf

The resulting RDF graph of these documents is available here: fgiasson-conversation-foaf.svg

The link between the FOAF to the SIOC document is made using the foaf:holdsAccount property. The result is:

[http://www.talkdigger.com/…/foaf/foaf.php?nick=fgiasson]
— foaf:holdsAccount —>
[http://www.talkdigger.com/…/user.php?nick=fgiasson]

The link between the SIOC to the FOAF document is made using the rdfs:seeAlso property. The result is:

[http://www.talkdigger.com/…/user.php?nick=fgiasson]
— rdfs:seeAlso —>
[http://www.talkdigger.com/…/foaf/foaf.php?nick=fgiasson]

If you take a closer look at the resulting RDF graph, you will see that I highlighted a “loop” in red. This is one of the really interesting results when you merge different ontologies.

What is happening here? By merging the FOAF document of the “fgiasson” user with the SIOC document of the “fgiasson.com” conversation, I uncovered some interesting relations.

In fact, the sioc:User “fgiasson” is a friend of “dgiasson” another sioc:User. However, it was impossible to know that fact before merging the two documents because that information is held in the FOAF document and not the SIOC one! At the same time, we know that “fgiasson” and “dgiasson” also belong to the same sioc:Usergroup
[www.talkdigger.com/…/conversation.php?url=fgiasson.com#usergroup].

That way we are able to extend the power of our queries because we are able to know who are the people that belongs to a sioc:Usergroup and that are also friends. We could possibly even extend that feature by using the “relationship” ontology and then developing some type of trust networks by analyzing the relationships between people belonging to a same group.

 

Merging a new SIOC document to that RDF graph

Finally I merged another SIOC document that describes a conversation evolving around a blog post that link-back to the conversation about “fgiasson.com”.

You can download these RDF documents here: sioc-fgiasson.rdf, foaf-fgiasson.rdf, sioc-blogspot.rdf

The resulting RDF graph of these documents is available here: fgiasson-conversation-foaf-other-conversation.svg

In this graph I highlighted in red the fact that a sioc:User “fgiasson” is a member of two different sioc:Usergroup and that a sioc:Forum is the parent of another sioc:Forum.

 

Conclusion

In this blog post I described how I would use the SIOC and the FOAF ontologies to share the content available on Talk Digger.

There are probably some glitches, errors, or best-practices (I don’t follow) in the way I handle some classes and/or properties of these ontologies (specially about how to relate a sioc:User and a foaf: Person). Considering this it would be really appreciated to report any glitch/errors/best-practices you find to help me improving this implementation in Talk Digger.

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