This article is an aggregation of thoughts I had while working on one of my recent semantic web projects. I have no idea what these ideas worth, but I hope to open a discussion regarding the problematic described bellow.   The problematic What is beautiful with the semantic web is that anyone can define anything about anything. I can define myself; I can define a project; I can define a car; Etc. What is so beautiful and powerful is also a huge problem and probably the bigger weakness of the semantic web. In fact, I can define myself with a FOAF profile. This FOAF profile describes relations about me. But nothing stops anybody to define other relations about me. One can describe good things about me, but one can describe bad things as well.   How does it happen? Readers: you will need some understanding of semantic web concepts to read the rest of that article.

Basically, I can use any URI (unique resource identifier) to describe relations about me. But anybody can define new relations with that URI as well.

The problem arises if I get each RDF files from these two people and that I index them in the same triple store. Then I would get many relations (defined by two different people) for the same subject: me.

Do you see what the situation is starting to look like?

 

Same as Wikipedia

Yeah, the problem seems to be the same as Wikipedia’s. In fact it is the same thing, except that Wikipedia is centralized on a same infrastructure, and that the semantic web is a decentralized over the Web.

Since we can’t restrict people to use a URI to describe it, we have to find another solution.

 

Some possible solutions

Possible solutions exist. By example, people indexing these documents could only index URI that are dereferenceable (this mean an URI I can look up over the HTTP protocol to get a RDF file about the identified resource).

That way, they would restrict Bob to define anything about my URI from another web server than my own.

A variant of that solution would be to get documents only from a list of trusted resources (like most of the current memetrackers does).

However all these solutions downgrade the power of RDF: defining anything about anything. This mean that if I want, I can define everything about my dog “bud” even if he is not resolvable over HTTP.

 

Another solution: a Wikipedia like supervising authority

One solution could be to create an authority that would supervise the evolution of the description of URIs in the semantic web.

You should see the interface as the one of Wikipedia expect that we would not use WikiWords but URI to define things.

So people could register to that “authority”. They could define things about these URIs. Conflicted URIs could be tagged as is. Discussions about URI description could be open, Etc.

 

How such a system could be use as a solution to the problematic?

The authority could create an ontology to define that “meta-information” about URIs. Then, they would get all the information from the service and publish it in RDF using the ontology.

From that point, everybody that display information about URIs could add the “meta-information” about URIs in their results. That way, their users would see if false information is included into the result, if the things defined for the URI (the subject) are conflicted, etc.

 

Conclusion

For semantic web developers this solution is as simple as indexing RDF data into a triple store: (1) download (2) index (3) query and (4) display.

This solution is not perfect, but it could help developers to display meaningful information to their system users while keeping the description power of RDF.

 

Technorati: Semantic | web | wikipedia | description | uri | spam | subjects | topics | entities |

Sergio Fernández and Iván Frade lately started a really interesting experience called Futil. This is a small computer program that got Sergio’s FOAF profile as seed person to discover new people from its relations (the friend of a friend of a friend, etc). The experience is to discover how much people you can find only starting from people you know. So far, Sergio’s Futil program found about 600 000 people. I guess that it should discover around 2 500 000 people before it finishes.

The experience is quite interesting in many ways. It gives some insight on how people are connected together, and even more important in today’s web, how communities of users are interacting with the Web.

The graph bellows show how Futil is discovering these profiles. The Y-axis represent the number of pool of people it has to get from the Web and the X-axis is number of profiles it got so far.

The first 50 000 people Futil found were coming from different places on the web. It could be a personal web page, the web page of an organization, etc. Then, eventually, Futil found a couple of links to people belonging to an online community called Tribe. People of that community only link to other people of the same community. What is interesting is that as soon as Futil started to crawl a couple of people of that community, it eventually found all the 200 000 people belonging to that community. Now the same thing is currently happening with another community, much bigger, called Livejournal, with about 2 million of users.

Why Futil only crawled people from the same community? The answer is easy: because these communities are closed. They don’t interact with the rest of the Web. So one user can only link to other community users.

 

How to open a community and let its users interact with other users, of other online communities?

A first step would be to let people describing their relationship with other people outside of their community.

One example of such an online community is Talk Digger. This system let its users importing (and synching) their FOAF profile from another location on the Web. It also let its users defining their relationship with other people outside of the community. By example, a user can say that he knows the people X and Y on Talk Digger; but it can also specifies that he knows a person Z from outside of the community, or from another online community.

In fact, if other online communities would add such a feature to their system, inter-communities communications and relationships could then be possible.

You can read an old blog post that explains how Talk Digger is handling FOAF profiles.

 

Why online communities system should open themselves?

Why a user will use an online community and not the other? It depends; I would say that it principally depends on: the topic(s) of the community, the people he knows in that community, and the user interface of that community (after all, one interface don’t work for everybody).

So, why online communities shouldn’t let their users interacting with other online communities users?

I think it is an error caused by the fear of loosing users and it explains why Futil behaved that way: because current online communities doesn’t let its users interacting with people from outside of the community.

 

Futil is pinging Pingthesemanticweb.com as well

Well, each time Futil discover a new FOAF profile it pings Pingthesemanticweb.com. So far it pinged about 300 000 new FOAF profiles. It is a good example of how this semantic web pinging service can be used.

Now, everybody has access to these new FOAF files. The best thing would be that such online communities (like Tribe.net and Livejournal.com) would ping the service each time there is a new user, or each time a user update its profile. But in the mean time, independent crawlers such as Futil do the job very well.

 

Conclusion

The thing I wish now is that future online communities start to let their users interacting with users from other communities. A good start in that direction would be to let them describing their relationship not only with people of the same community, but also with people from outside of the community. By then, meta-communities should start to emerge.

Technorati: Foaf | semantic | web | tribe | livejournal | online | communities | interaction | people | pingthesemanticweb | talkdigger |