=Paper= {{Paper |id=Vol-449/paper-14 |storemode=property |title=Colibrary: Linking Communities of Readers on the Social Semantic Web |pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-449/Challenge5.pdf |volume=Vol-449 |dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/esws/GendarmiL09 }} ==Colibrary: Linking Communities of Readers on the Social Semantic Web== https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-449/Challenge5.pdf 
      Colibrary: Linking Communities of Readers on the
                    Social Semantic Web

                          Domenico Gendarmi, Filippo Lanubile
                  University of Bari, Dipartimento di Informatica, Bari, Italy
                               {gendarmi, lanubile}@di.uniba.it



       Abstract. Colibrary is a Web API, which combines classic bibliographic
       metadata and content from different communities of readers with the goal to
       share user-generated content across web applications rather than locking it
       within ‘walled gardens’. Aggregated information is represented and provided
       through Semantic Web technologies such as RDF linked data to allow machine
       computation and foster reuse among different applications.




1 Motivation

Social libraries encourage user feedback and participation, through advanced web
applications, but they are affected by inadequate APIs or, worst, the lack of APIs.
Collaboration and information sharing is restricted to each single application and data
cannot flow from one point on the Web to another. We thus paradoxically face a
situation where the same paperback can be tagged and reviewed in multiple social
libraries, but there is no way to know that people refers to the same resource in
Amazon, LibraryThing, or Anobii. We propose a Web API, called Colibrary, whose
main goal is to combine such data from different communities of book readers, as
they can be shared rather than locked within ‘walled gardens’.


2 The Colibrary Web Service

Colibrary is a RESTful Web service that, given as input the identifier of a specific
resource, returns RDF descriptions including bibliographic information as well as
social data coming from different communities of readers. The service is implemented
through PHP scripts which handle HTTP requests from clients, invoke original
content providers, filter the results and finally serialize the output as RDF Linked
Data using a Semantic Web toolkit for PHP developers, named RAP 1 . Currently,
Colibrary exploits three content providers for retrieving data about books: Amazon,
Anobii and LibraryThing; while data about scientific publications are retrieved from
CiteULike, BibSonomy and the ACM portal.



1 http://www.seasr.org/wp-content/plugins/meandre/rdfapi-php/doc/
3 Publishing and Linking Data from Communities of Readers

The Colibrary Web Service has been published on the Web as two distinct APIs: the
former is available only for books 2 and requires a valid ISBN as input, the latter is
available for scientific publications 3 and the required input parameter is an interhash
code 4 . A generic client can invoke the service through simple HTTP GET requests.
Colibrary provides different URIs for all the available information concerning the
book or the publication. For example, given as input a specific ISBN we have a URI
to obtain the full RDF description of that paperback, another URI to get just
bibliographic data, and a different URI to retrieve just social data. Social data denote
tags, reviews and users (as reviewers) related to the specific paperback. The system
also provides URIs to retrieve just tags, just reviews or just users. We can even ask
for the RDF description of a single user, of a single review or of a single tag.
All Colibrary RDF descriptions reuse existing vocabularies: Dublin Core is used for
describing bibliographic information, Holygoat Tag ontology 5 and MOAT 6 for tags,
RDF Review Vocabulary 7 for reviews and FOAF for describing reviews contributors.
Moreover, Colibrary RDF descriptions automatically generate outgoing links to other
data sources that exploit Semantic Web technologies. An outgoing owl:sameAs link
from book authors to corresponding topics on Freebase is generated through the
Freebase RDF service 8 . Then, two other rdfs:seeAlso links are generated, one for the
title of the book again to the corresponding topic on Freebase and another for the
ISBN to the corresponding description in RDF Book Mashup. Outgoing rdfs:seeAlso
links are also generated for tag descriptions. Using the tag name three different links
are created to corresponding descriptions on Freebase, Sindice and Falcons 9 . Finally,
we define meanings of tags using URIs from DBpedia.
Linking RDF data enables any third party to make reference to such information in
other RDF statements, opening the way for links between Colibrary and other data
sets. Incoming links can be also set between URIs provided by Colibrary and other
RDF descriptions about books created by other services such as the RDF Book
Mashup, Revyu and DBpedia. Thus, by publishing and linking these data in RDF we
aim to help the Web users with links between different data sets, supporting thus the
vision of a Web of Linked Data.
Finally, a Web-based interface 10 , that enables users to search for both bibliographic
and social data about books, has been developed as a client of the Colibrary service.
Users have been allowed to search for a book also by title and author and the RDF
output of Colibrary is rendered as a classic HTML page which includes three distinct
sections: bibliographic information, tag cloud and review list.

2 http://collab.di.uniba.it/Colibrary/books/
3 http://collab.di.uniba.it/Colibrary/publications/
4 http://www.bibsonomy.org/help/doc/inside.html
5 http://www.holygoat.co.uk/owl/redwood/0.1/tags/
6 http://moat-project.org/
7 http://danja.talis.com/xmlns/rev_2007-11-09/index.html
8 http://rdf.freebase.com/
9 http://iws.seu.edu.cn/services/falcons/api/index.jsp
10 http://collab.di.uniba.it/ColibraryClient/