=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=Publishing Semantic Personal Notes as Linked Data
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-674/Paper161.pdf
|volume=Vol-674
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ekaw/DraganPGH10
}}
==Publishing Semantic Personal Notes as Linked Data==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-674/Paper161.pdf
Publishing Semantic Personal Notes as Linked Data
Laura Drăgan Alexandre Passant Tudor Groza
DERI, National University of DERI, National University of DERI, National University of
Ireland, Galway Ireland, Galway Ireland, Galway
laura.dragan@deri.org alexandre.passant@deri.org tudor.groza@deri.org
Siegfried Handschuh
DERI, National University of
Ireland, Galway
siegfried.handschuh@deri.org
ABSTRACT it requires two prerequisite steps, provided by existing ap-
There is an obvious shift of focus towards the Web, as peo- plications: (i) the note-taking process and annotation of the
ple spend more of their time and store more of their data note (adding the context), and (ii) the identification of Web
online. However, the desktop still handles a large amount of URIs which represent the same real-world thing as the desk-
the personal data. The Semantic Desktop brings semantics top resources that belong to the context of a note.
to the desktop, better interlinking and organization of the
data, thus allowing better management. However, in spite Our contributions include: (i) mappings between the rela-
of common representation formats, personal and online data tively small number of desktop vocabularies and the most
is still difficult to interlink, notably because of the different popular Web vocabularies. The mappings are used in the
vocabularies used to describe it as well as the lack of com- transformation of the desktop data, represented with the
mon identifiers between desktop applications and Web-based desktop ontologies, to data represented with the Web vo-
services. We describe here a solution for easily publishing cabularies, ready to be published online; (ii) a process for
and sharing of personal notes as Linked Data. We provide the publication of desktop information on the Web using the
a two-phased publishing and interlinking process. It can be Linked Data principles, while at the same time protect the
used to publish any kind of information from the desktop to sensitive private data from being shared unwillingly; (iii) a
the Web, enabling integration of small chunks of personal system implementation that allows sharing of semantic per-
knowledge into the Web of Data and focusing on a user- sonal notes as semantic blog posts, interlinked with existing
driven approach of knowledge management. information within the Linked Data cloud.
1. INTRODUCTION 2. USE CASE - SEMANTIC BLOGGING
The Linked Data initiative and the Semantic Desktop are Two important characteristics of blog posts are: (i) their
two relevant subdomains of the Semantic Web vision. The topics are of interest to the author and thus are very likely
first focuses on globally interlinking resources on the Web, to have references to things present on the desktop; (ii) they
while the second enables information integration and inter- belong to a context consisting of the references made in their
linking on the desktop. Although the two share the represen- content. Writing a blog post in a desktop application can
tation models (RDF(S)/OWL), there is still a gap between offer several benefits, if the application is a semantic one,
data from the Web and the desktop, due to different sets of on a Semantic Desktop, where desktop resources are inter-
vocabularies that are used, and generally distinct identifiers. connected [1]. Semantic note-taking tools like SemNotes1
automatically generate relations between the notes and the
We describe here an approach for integrating data from desktop things mentioned in their content. Such annotations
these two environments, specifically for publishing personal give context to the note and should be preserved when the
notes from the desktop (using Semantic Desktop technolo- note is published as a blog post on the Web, since it enables
gies) to the Web (using the Linked Data principles). The serendipitous browsing and information discovery, as they
main requirement is to publish data online without losing contain relevant additional links to other entities.
the personal context established on the desktop. Our ap-
proach consists of two main steps: (i) preparing the desktop Currently, personal notes, even the ones semantically en-
data for sharing, and (ii) publishing it online. In addition, riched using Semantic Desktop applications, must be pub-
lished as blog posts by being manually copied into a blog-
ging tool. In this way, any additional semantic information
available on the desktop becomes lost or, if copied, leads to
broken references as they point to the local resources which
are not accessible outside of the desktop. The note-taking
to publishing process is sometimes shortcut by using the
drafting functionality that some systems like WordPress or
Blogger offer, so that users can directly take the notes in
1
http://smile.deri.ie/projects/semn
the blogging tool, usually online, thus replacing the desk- context of the Semantic Web browser Haystack [4]. The ex-
top note-taking application. Using online tools deprives the isting systems for semantic blogging fall into two categories:
user from having the personal context automatically added (i) desktop applications that involve publishing the actual
to the blog post, since desktop information cannot be easily local resource information together with the blog post, or
integrated in Web-based interfaces. (ii) online applications that do not have access to desktop
data relevant to the user. The first category, represented by
3. SYSTEM OVERVIEW tools like SemiBlog [5] or SemBlog [6], gives the user bet-
We propose an approach that enables the publishing and ter access to the relevant data from the desktop. However,
sharing of personal notes by extending the functionality pro- both tools require that the resources that contain private in-
vided by SemNotes. The process has two steps: (i) trans- formation are published together with the blog post, which
formation and (ii) publication. In the first step, the note is might lead to privacy issues. They are used for exchange of
transformed locally for publication, and private local data is personal information in the blog posts, which differs from
replaced with public server references. In the second step, our approach of using already published web data as to pro-
the transformed note is published online on a dedicated tect the privacy of the personal information. The process
“SemNotes server”, where the resources referenced and the described implies manually adding the metadata, while our
tags assigned, are shared between the notes of all users. As approach relies on automatic export. Online services like
we mentioned above, there are also two prerequisite steps: BlogAccord [2] for music information or Zemanta2 blogging
(i) the note-taking process and annotation of the note, which assistant, belong to the second category. They enhance the
is the usual note-taking approach, and (ii) the identification blogging experience by providing access to various online re-
of Web aliases for the desktop resources related to a note, sources to create the context of a blog post, but not to the
where URIs are mined from the Web for locally defined re- personal context of the user.
sources, such as people, events or projects. The annotation
is done semi-automatically and is an existing feature in Sem- 5. CONCLUSION
Notes. The second prerequisite step consists in finding Web We presented an approach for publishing personal notes as
resource for each of the desktop entity linked to the note that Linked Data on the Web. The aim of our work was to pro-
is about to be published. This step is executed by a desk- vide a way for publishing and sharing complete information
top service that relies on the Semantic Web index Sindice to by preserving the personal context of the notes without com-
retrieve results. promising privacy. Our solution makes a step towards bridg-
ing the gap between local semantic data and Linked Data.
The publishing system is divided between its local part and We defined a publishing process that comprises two steps:
its remote part. The local part handles local private data, (i) preparation – the note is transformed into a SIOC-based
while the remote one handles online public data. The sep- Web representation; and (ii) publication / sharing – the note
aration between them extends over three layers: ontology, is published online following the Linked Data principles.
data and application.
6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
On the ontology level, the NEPOMUK desktop ontologies The work was supported by the Lı́on-2 project funded by Sci-
are used locally while popular Web vocabularies like SIOC ence Foundation Ireland under Grant No. SFI/08/CE/I1380.
are used on the server-side. These ontologies are used to
describe the data exchanged between the applications. Per-
sonal desktop data is stored in the local repository, which 7. REFERENCES
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4. RELATED WORK
Semantic blogging was introduced by Cayzer and Shabajee
2
in [3]. Karger and Quan describe semantic blogging in the http://www.zemanta.com