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<article xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
  <front>
    <journal-meta />
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>OntoBlog: Linking Ontology and Blogs</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Aman Shakya</string-name>
          <email>shakya_aman@nii.ac.jp</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Vilas Wuwongse</string-name>
          <email>vw@cs.ait.ac.th</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Hideaki Takeda</string-name>
          <email>takeda@nii.ac.jp</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Asian Institute of Technology</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Klong Luang, Pathumthani, 12120</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="TH">Thailand</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff1">
          <label>1</label>
          <institution>National Institute of</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Informatics, 2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-8430</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="JP">Japan</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <abstract>
        <p>Semantic blogging attempts to enhance traditional blogging by using Semantic Web technologies. Blog entries are semantically enriched by metadata. However, authoring metadata is not easy for normal users. Currently semantic blogging only offers limited semantic capabilities. It is still difficult to navigate through semantically related entries, search and organize relevant blog entries. OntoBlog attempts to solve these issues by linking blogs to existing ontology maintained using available ontology management environment. OntoBlog is a prototype semantic blogging system which employs semi-automatic semantic annotation of blog entries using ontology instances. Blog entries are automatically mapped to related instances using language processing techniques. The rich structure of ontology with different semantic relations, enhanced by inference, can enable useful semantic capabilities. Semantic navigation allows users to navigate through each blog entry to semantically related blog entries. Semantic search can be employed in blogs. Semantic aggregation collects blog entries relevant to the topic of interest and organizes them meaningfully. A prototype for computer department domain ontology has been implemented.</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
        <kwd>eol&gt;Blogging</kwd>
        <kwd>ontology</kwd>
        <kwd>Semantic Web</kwd>
        <kwd>semantic annotation</kwd>
      </kwd-group>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>-</title>
      <p>In Section 2 we discuss about annotation and semantic
annotation in blogs. In Section 3 we propose OntoBlog1 as an
integrated environment. A motivating scenario is described
in Section 4. Section 5 describes implementation of the
system. Some services offered by the system are discussed in
Section 6. In Section 7, we discuss some initial experiences
testing the system. Section 8 describes some related works.
Finally, we conclude and point out future works in Section
9.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>2. ANNOTATION</title>
      <p>
        Annotations2 are comments, notes, explanations, or remarks
attached to any document or a selected part of the
document. Annotation metadata can be used not only for
describing content, but also to organize and classify it [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">11</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <sec id="sec-2-1">
        <title>1An online demo can be found at</title>
        <p>
          http://dutar.ex.nii.ac.jp/ontoblog/blog/default/
2http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/
Annotation can also help in information retrieval process [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13 ref20">13,
20</xref>
          ] and organizing search results [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">14</xref>
          ].
        </p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>2.1 Automatic Semantic Annotation</title>
      <p>
        Annotation that references an ontology has been termed
semantic annotation. Semantic annotation can enhance
information retrieval and improve interoperability [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref23">23</xref>
        ]. With
manual annotation, the user has the burden of creating
annotations. Providing useful annotation may also depend on
the willingness of stakeholders [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ]. Issues may also arise
about the authenticity and quality of manual annotations.
Automatic or semi-automatic annotation with pre-existing
information can help in solving these issues. Automatic
annotation systems may provide suggestions, but still require
intervention by user; or acquire annotations automatically
on a large scale. Uren et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref23">23</xref>
        ] describe different ways to
provide automatic support for annotation:
• Wrappers can exploit the structure of web pages to
identify pieces of information for annotation.
• IE (Information Extraction) systems using supervised
/ unsupervised learning
• Natural language processing
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>2.2 Semantic Annotation in Blogs</title>
      <p>
        OntoBlog is an application of semantic annotation to blogs.
Blogs are somewhat different from other web information
sources. Blog entries are self-contained snippets [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4">4</xref>
        ] of
information or small contents [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19">19</xref>
        ]. We may consider a blog entry
as a single unit of information. A characteristic of blogs is
dynamic publishing. Blogs are user-oriented and provide an
easy mechanism for frequent publication. Therefore, there
are some considerations for the application of semantic
annotation to blogs.
      </p>
      <p>
        Integrated authoring environment. Blogging provides
an easy platform for publishing. Annotation would become
easy if we can integrate it with the publishing platform.
An integrated environment providing a single point of entry
interface for publication and annotation has been pointed
out as a requirement for semantic annotation systems by
Uren et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref23">23</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>Automation. Automation makes the process of
annotation fast and easy for the blogger. Utilizing existing
ontology instances for annotation can be considered as automatic
metadata creation for blog entries.</p>
      <p>Integrated services. As blog entries are scattered in the
form of small discrete entries, it becomes essential to provide
some services to relate these pieces of information together
and present them to the user as an organized collection.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>3. THE ONTOBLOG INTEGRATED PLAT</title>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-6">
      <title>FORM</title>
      <p>We propose OntoBlog as an integrated authoring platform
which links existing ontology to blogs. It incorporates the
following features into blogging.</p>
      <p>Semantic annotation. We propose to use existing
ontologies and instances to semantically annotate blog entries.
Integrated authoring. Semantic annotation is integrated
with the authoring environment of the blog which helps the
author to annotate entries easily at the time of blogging.
Semi-automatic annotation. The system automatically
discovers related instances when blog entries are added and
provides suggestions to the author.</p>
      <p>Feedback for ontology maintenance. The users may
suggest new concepts and instances if the system does not
contain appropriate ones related to the blog entry. It can
be used as a feedback channel which would be helpful to the
administrator to improve and maintain the knowledge base
up-to-date.</p>
      <p>Integrated services. The system demonstrates how
semantic capabilities may be incorporated to utilize blog
contents properly, by some example services. Semantic
navigation and search services are provided to retrieve and browse
related blog entries. Organization of related blog entries is
provided by exploiting semantic relations in the ontology.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-7">
      <title>4. EXAMPLE SCENARIO</title>
      <p>As an example domain, we consider the case of a
computer department of a university. The department
maintains an ontology with concepts like course, topic, teacher,
research, etc. The ontology is maintained by the ontology
engineer or administrator using available ontology
management software. The knowledge base has been populated
with instances of courses, topics, teachers, etc. The
department also maintains a community blog as illustrated in Fig.
1. Registered users can easily publish entries on the blog.
When publishing or updating a blog entry, the system
automatically suggests instances related to the blog entry. The
user may accept the suggestions or modify some choices as
appropriate. If a related instance or concept is not shown by
the system, the user may type in appropriate instance name
as suggestion and select the proper concept, or suggest a
new concept. The list of suggestions posted by users can
be viewed by the administrator. He/she can evaluate the
suggestions of various users and make appropriate additions
or improvements to the ontology.</p>
      <p>The users can access the blog entries effectively with the
help of semantic capabilities provided. When a blog entry is
viewed, semantic navigation links are shown as related links.
Suppose our blog entry is related to databases. Then we will
have a link for the ‘Database’ course and further links like
taught by ‘Prof. Vilas Wuwongse’ and has prerequisite ‘Data
structures’. When the user clicks on ‘Data structures’, all
blog entries related to that course are listed. Search results
are augmented by semantic search. Further, if the user is
interested in some topic, he/she may use semantic aggregation
to gather blog entries relevant to the topic and organize the
collection. Instances are shown inter-related to each other as
a directed graph. Implicit relations may also be revealed by
enabling inference. The graph serves as a table of contents
for the topic of interest.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-8">
      <title>5. IMPLEMENTATION</title>
      <p>The system architecture is shown in Fig. 2. The system is
built upon a blogging infrastructure backed up by an RDF
metadata store. The Blojsom blogging platform has been
used in the system. Blojsom3 offers extensibility with
plugin architecture. Users post blog entries to the system. The
blog entries may also contain some metadata. The system
has a text search engine which indexes the blog entries and
performs keyword based search for user queries. Blog entries
are linked to related ontology instances by the blog-ontology
linking component. The component automatically suggests
related instances for blog entries and saves the selected
annotations in the metadata store. The inference engine can
deduce implicit relations between instances. Search results
are augmented with related blog entries by finding linked
related instances from the ontology. All the related blog
entries obtained are finally organized meaningfully into a
navigable collection by the organizer based on the structure
of the ontology. The system also exports blog entries in RSS
format with embedded metadata.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-9">
      <title>5.1 Publishing Metadata</title>
      <p>Besides normal text contents, semantic blog entries may also
contain metadata as shown in Fig. 3. In our test installation
we used some publication types from the SWRC ontology4
for the metadata schema. We can use any other metadata
provided that an appropriate schema is available. Metadata</p>
      <sec id="sec-9-1">
        <title>3http://blojsom.sourceforge.net/</title>
        <p>
          4http://ontoware.org/projects/swrc/
is stored in the RDF metadata store as described in our
other work [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref22">22</xref>
          ]. The RDF metadata store uses a MySQL
relational database to store RDF metadata. This provides a
scalable storage unlike using a single RDF file for all
metadata (as in [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4 ref5">5, 4</xref>
          ]). The Jena framework5 has been used to
manage operations on the RDF metadata store. Blog entries
and metadata can be entered by several users thus
harnessing the collective intelligence in the community. Further,
publishing metadata in RSS feeds makes way for
aggregation of information from multiple blogs.
        </p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-10">
      <title>5.2 Ontology and Inference</title>
      <p>
        The ontology contains various concepts from the domain
and a wide variety of relations, not just a topic hierarchy. A
simple example ontology of a computer science department
was constructed for testing the system. The ontology was
created referring to the SHOE Computer Department
Ontology6. However, only few parts of the ontology have been
used including concepts and relations depicted in Fig. 4.
Instances of the ontology are populated in the knowledge
base. We can also expect the availability of suitable
knowledge bases. There are many knowledge bases in various
domains about real world entities being maintained by
several groups and enterprises [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13 ref20">13, 20</xref>
        ]. The knowledge base
maintained in a server can easily be shared by multiple
distributed blogs.
      </p>
      <p>Various mature ontology management software packages are
available which can be used to create and maintain the
knowledge base. Prot´eg´e7 has been used to create and
maintain the ontology and instances.</p>
      <p>The OWL Micro reasoner from the reasoning subsystem
in Jena has been used for inference. It can be replaced
easily by other reasoners if more powerful inference is
desired. The example ontology uses some axioms for inference.</p>
      <sec id="sec-10-1">
        <title>5http://jena.sourceforge.net/inference/index.html</title>
        <p>6http://www.cs.umd.edu/projects/plus/SHOE/onts/cs1.1.html
7http://protege.stanford.edu/
For e.g. - “for course and has topic are inverse relations”,
“is broader than and is narrower than are inverse relations”,
“teaches and taught by are inverse relations”, “has prerequisite
and is broader than are transitive”, etc.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-11">
      <title>5.3 Blog-Ontology Linking</title>
      <p>
        The system links blogging to an existing ontology system
by semi-automatic semantic annotation. Annotation can be
automated by language processing of the blog entries.
Language processing may not be as sophisticated as techniques
like information extraction and wrapper mechanisms.
However, simple lexical analysis can be very fast and quite
effective for annotating by existing instances [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ]. The Porter
stemming algorithm has been used (as in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4 ref5">5, 4</xref>
        ]).
Stemming is a widely used technique in information retrieval and
though it is a simple method, produces quite good results.
The system provides automatic suggestions to the user for
annotation. The user can easily modify the options if some
suggestions are not appropriate. Automatic annotation
cannot be perfect even with other available sophisticated
techniques. Moreover, relevance is a subjective matter and not
possible for perfect automatic judgment. Providing
suggestions to the user keeps the system flexible instead of making
it totally automatic and rigid.
      </p>
      <p>A “keywords” element has been added to each concept in the
ontology. For each instance, the “keywords” element
contains a collection of words related to that instance.
Whenever an entry is added or updated, the “keywords” for each
instance are stemmed and matched against the stemmed
blog entry. If any of the “keywords” is found in the stemmed
text, the blog entry is considered as related to that instance.
Instances related to the blog entry are automatically
discovered and suggested to the user. The discovered relations,
after user’s approval, are encoded in the related-to property,
as shown in Fig. 5. In the example, the blog entry with
permalink “RMI.html” has been linked to
“Java Technologies” and “Remote Method Invocation”in the
ontology. Section 6 further illustrates how blog entries are
linked to ontology instances to enable semantic capabilities.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-12">
      <title>5.4 Feedback for Ontology Maintenance</title>
      <p>In case some related instances or concepts are not defined
in the ontology, users may suggest a suitable instance or
concept. The system provides a web-based form for new
suggestions along with the automatic suggestions for
blogontology linking described in the previous section. The user
may enter the name for the new instance, select the
appropriate concept (or suggest a new concept) and post some
remarks. The list of suggestions posted by various users
can be accessed by the administrator on the blogging
system itself. The feedback thus collected is useful for the
administrator to maintain the ontology up-to-date by adding
missing concepts and instances in the ontology or refining
them. The administrator uses an existing ontology
management software to make updates based on the suggestions.
The suggestion also shows the permalink of the concerned
blog entry so that it can easily be annotated with the newly
defined instance.</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-13">
      <title>6. SEMANTIC SERVICES</title>
      <p>Semantic annotation of blog entries allows us to relate
different blog entries using the structure of the ontology as
illustrated in Fig. 6. In the figure, instances (I1-I7) in the
ontology are represented by different shapes, each shape
representing a concept. Instances are connected to each other
by different relations (indicated by the solid arrows).
Linking blog entries to ontology serves to link related blog entries
implicitly. Blog entries (A to F) are annotated by the
ontology by linking them to the instances, as shown by the
dash-dotted lines. Blog entries ‘A’ and ‘B’ are related to
each other because they are both mapped to the same
instance ‘I1’. A blog entry may be related to multiple
instances (like ‘E’ related to ‘I6’ and ‘I7’). Instance ‘I1’ is
related to ‘I2’. Hence, blog entry ‘A’ is indirectly related to
‘C’, which has been mapped to ‘I2’. Instances may also be
linked by implicit relations (shown by dashed arrow) that
can be discovered by inference. Instance ‘I4’ is related to
‘I6’ by an inferred link. Thus, blog entry ‘D’ (mapped to
‘I4’) is related to ‘E’ (mapped to ‘I6’).</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-14">
      <title>6.1 Semantic Navigation</title>
      <p>Semantic navigation helps the user to browse through
related blog entries. The following algorithm is used for the
purpose.</p>
      <p>1. While viewing a blog entry B, get all related instances
from the Blog-Ontology relations. Let I be the set of
these instances.</p>
      <sec id="sec-14-1">
        <title>2. For each instance i in I</title>
        <p>(b) For each relation r in R, find instances related to
i by r.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-14-2">
        <title>3. Render all instances with hyperlinks.</title>
        <p>For example, suppose we view a blog entry B about “Database
Programming”. The blog entry may be connected to, I =
“computer programming”, “databases”, “software
development”, “Prof. Takeda” .... “Computer programming” may be
involved in R = “is taught by”, “has prerequisite”,.... Thus,
there may be links like
[computer programming]
– is taught by – [Prof. Takeda]
– has prerequisite – [databases],etc.</p>
        <p>Clicking on [databases] will lead to the blog entries related
to databases. When a blog entry is opened, the semantic
navigation links are shown in a collapsible “Related to” block
(shown in Fig. 7).</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-15">
      <title>6.2 Search</title>
      <p>
        The system provides indexed text search and metadata search.
These are further augmented by semantic search. Semantic
search attempts to augment and improve traditional search
results using data from the Semantic Web. Guha et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">9</xref>
        ]
have presented extensive research on semantic search along
with sophisticated implementation. We do not intend to
reproduce or extend the research on semantic search. Rather
OntoBlog just provides a simple implementation of semantic
search for demonstration of its applicability. The algorithm
is outlined below.
      </p>
      <p>1. Find all instances in the ontology with keywords
matching the search text. Let the set of instances obtained
be I.
2. Set final list of instances L = I.</p>
      <sec id="sec-15-1">
        <title>3. For each instance i in I</title>
        <p>(a) Let J be the set of instances directly related to i.
(b) L = L union J
4. For each instance in L, get all related blog entries from</p>
        <p>Blog-Ontology relations.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-15-2">
        <title>5. Return the total blog entries as result.</title>
        <p>Semantic search may be particularly useful when text search
alone does not produce enough results. It may be better to
have more results than just few accurate results.
Semantic search can be enabled or disabled using configuration
settings. Further, the depth of semantic search can also
be controlled. If semantic search produces excess results in
some cases, the search depth can be decreased or semantic
search can be disabled altogether.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-16">
      <title>6.3 Semantic Aggregation</title>
      <p>Semantic aggregation can be introduced in the system to
collect and organize search results relevant to a topic of
interest. A simple algorithm for semantic aggregation is outlined
below.</p>
      <sec id="sec-16-1">
        <title>1. Get all relevant blog entries from search.</title>
        <p>2. Find the set of instances S from the Ontology linked
to each blog entry.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-16-2">
        <title>3. Find all relations between the instances in S</title>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-16-3">
        <title>4. Visualize the related instances as directed graphs.</title>
        <p>For example, let the search results for some search contain
following blog entries.
entry A - related to - Computer programming, data
structure
entry B - related to - XML, database, Prof. Takeda
entry C - related to - Java, OOPS, etc
Then, S = Computer programming, data structure, XML
.... The instances in S may be related with each other by
relations like prerequisite, broader/narrower, taught by, is
related to, etc.
Prefuse8 has been used to visualize the graphs. GraphML9
has been used to represent the semantic aggregation graphs.
Semantic aggregation is depicted in Fig. 8. The user runs
semantic aggregation by searching on a topic of interest. The
search results are listed on the right-hand side frame.
Related instances from the ontology are aggregated and
visualized on the left-hand side frame. The relation type between
instances is identified by the color of the link and shown in
an index. When a node is clicked, blog entries related to
that node are displayed on the right-hand side frame.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-17">
      <title>6.4 Other Features</title>
      <p>
        The system generates RSS feeds with embedded metadata.
As demonstrated in our other work [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref22">22</xref>
        ], RSS feeds from
multiple blogs in the community can be aggregated.
However, the new ontology-based features are yet to be applied
on such aggregate from multiple blogs. The system also
provides a bi-directional commenting mechanism, employs
bookmarklet for easy publishing and generates FOAF
profile for interconnecting the community as described in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref22">22</xref>
        ].
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-18">
      <title>7. SOME EXPERIENCES</title>
      <p>We attempted to test some features of the system by
conducting simple experiments. The data for populating
instances in the ontology was mostly adapted from the
website of the Computer Science and Information Management
department of the Asian Institute of Technology10. Data
about 15 courses, 93 topics, 8 faculty members, 10 researches
and 15 universities have been entered. About 100 dummy
blog entries related to different courses, topics, researches,
etc were populated manually. 10 students from the
department used the system to help in experiments. Statistical
treatment was not possible at this stage due to the limited
number of users.</p>
      <p>Automatic blog-ontology linking. While populating
blog entries, right and wrong suggestions were noted. The
relevance of the suggestions to the blog entries was judged by
human subjects. The result showed about 84% right
suggestions and 16% wrong suggestions. We cannot expect perfect</p>
      <sec id="sec-18-1">
        <title>8http://prefuse.sourceforge.net/</title>
        <p>9http://graphml.graphdrawing.org/
10http://www.cs.ait.ac.th/ (retrieved April, 2006)
results from simple language processing like stemming alone.
“Keywords” defined to identify an instance, also affects the
process. It is difficult to exhaustively list keywords related
to any instance.</p>
        <p>Semantic search. Semantic search was tested with a
number of search texts related to some course or topic as shown
in Table 1. The table verifies that semantic search can
produce additional relevant results not produced by text search
alone hence increasing the recall of the system.</p>
        <p>Semantic aggregation. Semantic aggregation was tested
only to see if relevant instances are retrieved during the
process. The precision was roughly found to be about 77.83%.
But semantic aggregation provides much more than simply
retrieving relevant instances.</p>
        <p>
          User feedback. Many features of the system are
subjective in nature and difficult to evaluate by experiments.
Traditional information retrieval metrics like recall and
precision are not suitable enough for evaluation of a system like
this [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13 ref20">13, 20</xref>
          ]. So user feedback about the system was also
collected. The questionnaires had questions about the
effectiveness of semantic navigation, semantic search, inference,
semantic aggregation, metadata search and RSS
aggregation. The users had good response for most features.
However, it was not so easy for the users to judge relevance of
semantic search results because the results were not directly
related to the query.
        </p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-19">
      <title>8. RELATED WORK</title>
      <p>
        A number of works have been done in semantic blogging.
The Semantic Blogging Demonstrator11 uses a category tree
based on ‘broader than/narrower than’ relations [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4 ref5">5, 4</xref>
        ] to
cat11http://www.semanticblogging.org/semblog/blog/default/
egorize blog entries. OntoBlog uses an ontology with wider
variety of concepts and relations, rather than a simple
taxonomy, and enables powerful inferences. It also allows utilizing
rich knowledge base of instances maintained using existing
ontology management environments. It uses OWL which
is a more powerful ontology language than SKOS used by
the demonstrator. OWL allows us to define several types
of relations and offers powerful inferences which may be
needed in future. The demonstrator mainly emphasizes
semantic view, navigation and query. However, Tree
browsing provided for semantic navigation is already a feature
of many blogs [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3">3</xref>
        ]. Facet browsing is more like metadata
search. OntoBlog offers a different way of semantic
navigation by providing related links through each blog entry
which is more intuitive way of browsing. Search has been
enhanced to explore semantic relations. Furthermore,
OntoBlog organizes the search results by semantic aggregation.
Works like [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">12</xref>
        ], [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19">19</xref>
        ] and [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16 ref17 ref18">16, 18, 17</xref>
        ] are generic. We used
computer science department domain (also used by
Mangrove [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">15</xref>
        ]) just as a simple example. OntoBlog can be used
in any domain provided that a knowledge base is maintained.
The demonstrator provides a category chooser functionality
which works based on simple language processing. We also
used a similar technique for automatic annotation by
ontology instances.
      </p>
      <p>
        Karger and Quan [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">12</xref>
        ] extended Haystack12 to enable users
to view cross-blog reply graphs and track conversation in
multiple blogs. Semblog [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19">19</xref>
        ] annotates content using FOAF
metadata of users and exports using extended RSS. Our
other work [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref22">22</xref>
        ] facilitates sharing of bibliographic
information in a social network based on extended RSS. Mo¨ller et
al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">16</xref>
        ] identify structural and content-related metadata in
blogging. The SIOC ontology [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ] has been used for
structural metadata. FOAF, vCard, BibTex/SWRC, iCalendar,
etc. have been used for content metadata. In our case,
existing commenting mechanism generates some structural
metadata. Though SWRC has been used as an example, any
content metadata can be used. In addition, the metadata
produced by automatic semantic annotation can be
considered as categorization metadata. semiBlog [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16 ref17 ref18">16, 18, 17</xref>
        ]
emphasizes generating metadata by utilizing data on the user’s
desktop. But the user still has to search metadata assuming
that it exists in his/her desktop. More abundant metadata,
of better quality, may be available in existing knowledge
bases than one’s desktop.
      </p>
      <p>
        Uren et al. [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref23">23</xref>
        ] present a detailed survey of annotation
frameworks and semantic annotation tools and analyze them on
the basis of a number of requirements. A large body of
research on semi-automatic semantic annotation already exists
including significant works like S-CREAM [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10">10</xref>
        ] and
extraction ontologies [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
        ]. Our attempt is to demonstrate the
application of semantic annotation in blogs, not to build a
sophisticated annotation system satisfying all the requirements
mentioned in [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref23">23</xref>
        ]. OntoBlog satisfies some requirements like
automation, integrated environment, document-annotation
consistency and separate annotation storage. Magpie [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7 ref8">7, 8</xref>
        ]
automatically creates a semantic layer over web documents
and links instances identified in the document to relevant
ontological instance/class. It uses simple lexicon-based parsing
12http://haystack.lcs.mit.edu
and linguistic rules to identify instances. Magpie depends on
external service providers for providing semantic services.
KIM [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13 ref20">13, 20</xref>
        ] uses an ontology with a pre-populated
knowledge base of instances. IE techniques have been employed
for the recognition of named entities in documents. It also
introduces indexing and retrieval based on named entities.
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-20">
      <title>9. CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK</title>
      <p>In this paper we proposed OntoBlog, a prototype semantic
blogging system which semi-automatically annotates blog
entries with instances of an ontology. It links together the
well established technologies of blogging and ontology
management. The system is helpful in organizing the contents in
blogs through semantic capabilities and also receiving
feedback from the users for ontology maintenance to some
extent. The deep semantic structure of ontology provides a
rich way of classifying and organizing relevant entries and
can enable better navigation and search capabilities in blogs.
OntoBlog provides an integrated platform for publishing and
information utilization in blogs.</p>
      <p>
        We can explore mechanisms for the decentralized creation
of the ontology in future. Collaborative techniques like
folksonomy or semantic wiki could be utilized. The system
is currently a community blog for the concerned domain.
Features like semantic navigation and search are yet to be
employed across multiple blogs. The system can be made
more powerful by introducing different types of inference
and inference engines. Mature semantic search systems can
be incorporated. Information retrieval mechanisms can be
used to produce ranked search results. The system may be
extended to handle complex hierarchical metadata schema.
Language processing with stemming used for the
demonstration prototype is quite basic. It can be made more accurate
by handling lexical, semantical and syntactical variations [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ].
Lexical variations can be dealt with technologies like
WordNet. Sophisticated automatic annotation mechanisms using
IE techniques can be incorporated to make the automation
more robust. Supervised or unsupervised learning can
further augment such IE techniques. It would also be good to
support semantic blogging clients like semiBlog [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16 ref17 ref18">16, 18, 17</xref>
        ]
to utilize data from the user’s desktop.
10. ADDITIONAL AUTHORS
Additional authors: Ikki Ohmukai (National Institute of
Informatics, email: i2k@nii.ac.jp)
      </p>
    </sec>
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          <year>2006</year>
          .
        </mixed-citation>
      </ref>
    </ref-list>
  </back>
</article>