Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities
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© Copyright 2009 Digital Enterprise Research Institute. All rights reserved.
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities
Alexandre Passant
Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway
COIN@MALLOW - Invited Talk 09/11/2009, Torino, Italy
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Introduction
Postdoctoral researcher at DERI, NUIG Since September 2008
Research interests Social Web and Semantic Web
Especially the combination of both
Ph.D. from Université Paris-Sorbonne Semantic Web technologies for Enterprise 2.0
Industrial collaboration with EDF R&D
The following talk is mainly based on my Ph.D. thesis and its viva presentation
More at http://apassant.net
2 of XYZ
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Agenda
Enterprise 2.0 and corporate online communities Tools, applications and social implications
Technical issues with Enterprise 2.0 ecosystems
Using semantics to improve Enterprise 2.0 SemSLATES: A social semantic middleware architecture
Socio-structural metadata
Collaborative ontology population
Semantic tagging
Building new applications
Questions and discussion
3 of XYZ
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Enterprise 2.0
Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers [McAfee, 2006]
Introduction of well-known services and practices such as blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, tagging in the professional sphere Serious usages of Web 2.0 applications
A new Information Ecology [Davenport & Prusak, 1997] Users and online communities are as important
(sometimes more) than the IT components of such ecosystems
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The SLATES acronym
Search Mainly plain-text or tag-based
Links Internal and external
Authoring Simple user-interfaces (e.g. wiki syntax)
Tags User-driven annotation
Extensions Suggesting relevant content
Signals RSS feeds, microblogging, etc.
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Social aspects of Enterprise 2.0
New paradigms with regards to knowledge sharing and communication patterns in organisations E.g. Anyone can edit / remove content from a senior
researcher in a wiki or publicly disagree with him by commenting a blog post
Social aspects are as important as the technical ones Breaking the “Knowledge = Power” schema
“Enterprise 2.0 is a philosophy”
Success depends on a company’s background A study by AIIM showed that 41% of companies do not have
a clear understanding of what Enterprise 2.0 is while this percentage goes down to 15% in KM-oriented ones
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Technical issues of Enterprise 2.0
Based on our experience within an Enterprise 2.0 platform deployed at EDF R&D Information fragmentation
Knowledge modelling and re-use
Tagging issues
Some of these issues are not new per se But Enterprise 2.0 strengthens them by providing more
and more data, voluntary published by end-users
Enterprise 2.0 eases the process of collaboratively publishing information thanks to and within corporate online communities But efficiently exploiting it is a complex issue
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Information fragmentation
Heterogeneity of people, community, services, needs and practices leads to various services and applications being deployed in organisations Generally using different APIs, databases structure, etc.
Information is fragmented over the company’s network E.g. description of a project in a wiki, latest news in blog
posts, partners news in RSS feeds, etc.
Getting the global picture of a given object (people, project, etc.) is difficult Moreover, data integration is a costly task due to
heterogeneity issues
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Knowledge modelling and re-use
Most of Enterprise 2.0 applications acts as independent and closed-world data silos and provide only plain-text information Information is not interoperable
Information is limited to human consumption
Complex queries cannot be answered, even when the information exists ! List all French companies involved in sustainable energies
How many institutes are part of project X
List the latest 10 blog posts written by Bob dealing with a research institute working on Web-based technologies
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Tagging issues
Tag ambiguity apple: fruit, computer brand, or record label ?
Tag heterogeneity Semanticweb, semweb, web_semantique, etc.
Lack of organisation No links between the tags SPARQL and RDF, while there is
obviously a link between the two domains
Leads to various issues when searching for information Noise: content not corresponding to the expected topic
Silence: non-identified content as searched for using a different keyword
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Tagging and expertise
Expertise level in corporate online communities Based on their individual experience and background,
people have different ways to approach a domain and tag related content (basic level [Takana & Taylor, 1991])
Use-case at EDF R&D 194 items tagged with “TF” (= Thin Film, a particular kind
of solar cell) – Only 1% of them tagged with “solar” !
– < 0.5% of “solar” items tagged “TF”
– Clustering algorithms cannot be efficiently applied
Another issue when searching for tagged content Valuable information (written and tagged by domain
experts) gets lost as non-expert cannot access it
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SemSLATES
The SemSLATES methodology A social semantic middleware architecture for Enterprise 2.0
dedicated to solving the previous issues and bringing additional and innovative services to end-users
Middleware Add-ons to existing Enterprise 2.0 ecosystems, do not require
to rebuild the complete architecture
Semantic Based on Semantic Web technologies [Berners-Lee et al., 2001]
Social Online communities play a core role in producing and using
structured knowledge
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The Semantic Web
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SemSLATES overview
Browsing and querying interfaces
Enterprise 2.0 information system
Semantic mediation architecture
(Ontologies, semantic annotations)
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Different layers of annotations
Wiki page 2Blog post
hyperlink
EDF
Company
France
CountryEnergy
is a is aproduces
located in
Blog post
has topic
Wiki page 2has link
Wiki A
is part of
AP
has author
createscontains
Wiki A
Onto
logie
s a
nd S
em
antic a
nnota
tions
Ente
rprise 2
.0 e
cosyste
m
Socio-structural meta-data
Semantic indexingOntology population
located in
Ontologies
EDF
has tag
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Socio-structural metadata
Wiki page 2Blog post
hyperlink
EDF
Company
France
CountryEnergy
is a is aproduces
located in
Blog post
has topic
Wiki page 2has link
Wiki A
is part of
AP
has author
createscontains
Wiki A
Onto
logie
s a
nd S
em
antic a
nnota
tions
Ente
rprise 2
.0 e
cosyste
m
Socio-structural meta-data
Semantic indexingOntology population
located in
Ontologies
EDF
has tag
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
FOAF
FOAF – Friend-Of-A-Friend [Brickley & Miller, 2000]
http://foaf-project.org
An ontology for describing people and the relationships that exist between them From online communities to semantically-enriched online
communities
Particularly suited for social networking purposes
FOAF in Enterprise 2.0 settings Model individuals, teams, relations between both, etc.
As well as linking people to their interests and skills
Identity unification across enterprise applications
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SIOC
SIOC - Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities [Breslin et al., 2005]
http://sioc-project.org
SIOC - Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities
A model to represent activities of online communities and the related content Who is writing what, who is answering to who
Relationships between documents (blog posts, wikis pages) and their container
One core ontology, several modules
Published as a W3C Member Submission in 2007
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The SIOC Ontology
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Producing FOAF and SIOC data
Automatically generated from existing Enterprise 2.0 applications Lots of applications / plug-ins already available
Completely transparent for the end-user
Use-case at EDF R&D: > 20000 instances of sioc:Item created
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Collaborative ontology population
Wiki page 2Blog post
hyperlink
EDF
Company
France
CountryEnergy
is a is aproduces
located in
Blog post
has topic
Wiki page 2has link
Wiki A
is part of
AP
has author
createscontains
Wiki A
Onto
logie
s a
nd S
em
antic a
nnota
tions
Ente
rprise 2
.0 e
cosyste
m
Socio-structural meta-data
Semantic indexingOntology population
located in
Ontologies
EDF
has tag
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Defining domain ontologies
A need to represent particular objects that are being discussed in corporate online communities Industrial domains, projects, agents, etc.
Domain ontologies are required to represent these entities
Depend on the use-casebut SemSLATES offers a set of best practices Re-using existing models from the Web (FOAF, SKOS,
geonames …) to benefit from return on experience and build semantic mash-ups
Use-case at EDF R&D Developed several models, combining lightweight ontology
design and knowledge engineering [Masolo & al., 2005]
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
athena:Constructeur
role:Type
rdf:typeathena:Producteur
rdf:type
athena:Role1
athena:Role2
skos:Concept
rdfs:subClassOf
role:Domain
rdfs:subClassOf
athena:EnergieNucleaire
athena:CentraleNucleaire
rdf:type
skos:broader
athena:EDFathena:PierreGadonneix foaf:member
foaf:Person
rdf:type
foafplus:Company
rdf:type
rdfs:subClassOf
foaf:Agent
rdfs:subClassOf
role:hasRole
role:hasRole
role:hasDomainrole:hasType
role:hasType
role:hasDomain
http://sws.geonames.org/
3017382/
http://sws.geonames.org/
2988507/
geonames:parentFeature
geonames:Feature
rdf:type
rdf:type
geonames:locatedIn
geonames:locatedIn
Role Ontology
SKOS
Geonames
FOAFplus
FOAF
Base de connaissances
Ontologies
athena:part1athena:Areva
rdf:type
partenariat:hasMember
partenariat:hasDomain
partenariat:Partenariat
rdf:type
Partenariat
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Ontology population
Once the ontologies are provided, the related knowledge base(s) must be created and maintained Usual applications for ontology population are dedicated
to advanced users; not suitable in many contexts
Our approach: Semantic Wikis Using online communities and wiki philosophy to build
and maintain structured knowledge bases
An open, collaborative and evolutive vision of ontology population No technical nor knowledge engineering skills required
Anyone can contribute
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
From wikis to structured knowledge
Documents
France
EDF
Energyhyperlink
hyperlink
Ontologies and instances
EDFEnterprise
France
Country
Energy
is a
is a
produces
located in
Wiki Semantic wiki
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
UfoWiki
Various semantic wikis prototypes dedicate to ontology population available as open-source apps However, none fulfilled all our requirements, especially in
terms of user-friendliness (i.e. not dedicated to SW-people)
UfoWiki Ontology-based information modeling
Simple form-based user-interfaces
Modeling both domain and structure metadata
Immediately using created knowledge
Using public data to improve browsing interfaces
Use-case at EDF R&D About 25 users, > 350 instances collaboratively maintained
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Maintaining ontology instances
Simple autocomplete
field
Complex instance field
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Semantic tagging
Wiki page 2Blog post
hyperlink
EDF
Company
France
CountryEnergy
is a is aproduces
located in
Blog post
has topic
Wiki page 2has link
Wiki A
is part of
AP
has author
createscontains
Wiki A
Onto
logie
s a
nd S
em
antic a
nnota
tions
Ente
rprise 2
.0 e
cosyste
m
Socio-structural meta-data
Semantic indexingOntology population
located in
Ontologies
EDF
has tag
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
MOAT
MOAT – Meaning Of A Tag [Passant & Laublet, 2008] http://moat-project.org
Using ontologies to support free-tagging activities Using Semantic Web resources (from internal knowledge bases
and from the Web) to represent the meaning of tags
From free-tagging to ontology-based semantic indexing
A model and a framework A model to link each tag to its local and global meaning(s)
A framework to collaboratively manage these meanings in online communities
Use-case at EDF R&D 1176 tags linked to 715 resources, 39 URIs w > 4 related tags!
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
MOAT: Example data
http://example.org/tagging1
http://apassant.net/alex/
http://example.org/tag/apple
http://example.org/post/1
tag:taggedResource
tag:associatedTag
tag:taggedBy
http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple_Inc.
moat:tagMeaning
sioct:BlogPost
Nouvel iPhone disponible
dct:title
rdf:type
foaf:maker
tag:RestrictedTagging
rdf:type
Tag Ontology
MOAT + DBpedia
SIOC + DC
FOAF
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MOAT: Framework
User creates content and tag it Client queries the MOAT server
Server returns the setfor global meaning URIs
User chooses local meaning URI
User saves the content
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple_Inc.>
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple>
<http://example.org/id/myappleresource>
http://example.org/post/1
http://dbpedia/org/resource/Apple_Inc.
http://example.org/tagging1
Content entersthe Web of Data
moat:tagMeaning
http://apassant.net/alex
http://example.org/tag/apple
tags:associatedTag
tags:taggedBy
tags:taggedResource
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Building new applications
Use all the annotations created from different tools Blogs, wikis, RSS feeds …
Combine ontologies, socio-structural metadata and knowledge bases For advanced querying
capabilities
Hide the complexity of tools to the end-users So that everyone can benefit
from it
Browsing and querying interfaces
Enterprise 2.0 information system
Semantic mediation architecture
(Ontologies, semantic annotations)
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
UfoWiki macros
Embedding SPARQL query results in wiki pages without the complexity of such queries Mapping between macro syntax and SPARQL (inspired by
Semantic MediaWiki)
E.g. [onto|members] to list all members of a company
Taking context into account E.g. Listing related blog posts from a wiki page (via MOAT)
Support a subset of RDFS inference E.g. Listing enterprise and research institutes when asking
for organisations in general
Different ways of browsing the results XHTML snippets, Geolocation, Faceted browsing
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Semantic mashups
Re-using RDF data from the LOD cloud internally Low-cost Semantic mash-ups
E.g. Geolocation of internal wiki data using Geonames
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Semantic Search
Solving the information fragmentation issue Delivering all information about a particular object in a
single page
Using different level of annotations
Hiding RDF(S)/OWL and SPARQL to the users
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athena:Solaire :NonExpertfoaf:maker:post1moat:taggedWith
athena:TF ::Expertfoaf:maker:post2moat:taggedWith
skos:broader
foaf:Personsioc:Postskos:Concept
Non-expert level
Expert level
Ontologies
rdf:type rdf:type rdf:type
Solving the Expertise Gap
Defining rules to extend information retrieval by suggesting nearest entities for a given search Solving the issues of free-tagging related to heterogeneous
expertise levels in online communities
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Conclusion
Enterprise 2.0 enables interactions in corporate online communities and ease content-generation But introduces new issues / emphasizes existing ones
Semantic Web technologies can help Various ontologies for distinct levels of representation
Lightweight software add-ons for semantic annotations
New applications can be build on the top of it Consuming RDF(S)/OWL data to solve the initial issues
And bring new services to online communities
Some more challenges need to be solved … Trust, context-awarness, privacy, etc.
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Thank you !
Questions and discussion
Contact [email protected]
http://apassant.net (blog, papers, etc.)