=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=Using SKOS to Integrate Social Networking Sites with Scholarly Information Portals
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-830/sdow2011_paper_4.pdf
|volume=Vol-830
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/semweb/BleierZTM11
}}
==Using SKOS to Integrate Social Networking Sites with Scholarly Information Portals==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-830/sdow2011_paper_4.pdf
Using SKOS to Integrate Social Networking Sites with
Scholarly Information Portals
Arnim Bleier, Benjamin Zapilko, Mark Thamm and Peter Mutschke
GESIS-Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
{arnim.bleier, benjamin.zapilko, mark.thamm,
peter.mutschke}@gesis.org
Abstract: Web 2.0 platforms have become a ubiquitous way of information ex-
change, but are seldom integrated with the Web of Data. To overcome this situ-
ation we propose the usage of SKOS thesauri acting as back-of-the-book index
providing domain-specific axes transcending applications. We illustrate this
concept with a use-case in the social sciences domain but applications in other
domains are possible.
Keywords: User-Generated Content, Digital Libraries, Semantic Web, SKOS,
Social Sciences
1 Introduction
The Social Web represents the vision of user-friendly online platforms fostering
the generation of content in a collaborative manner. In the case of emerging scholarly
online platforms it is the hope that innovative patterns of knowledge creation and
dissemination enhance collective intelligence by overcoming the role-asymmetry
between producer and consumer known from the Web 1.0. Members of such commu-
nities can form virtual networks around topics of their academic interest propelling
the exchange of ideas along the social graph. However promising this might be, the
concept breaks with the borders of the application and leaves a gap left to fill for ena-
bling linked and open Web 3.0 information systems.
In the remainder we suggest domain specific LOD traversal axes crosscutting ap-
plication boundaries. We begin with the problem statement. Next we sketch out the
process of linking heterogeneous academic data sets via SKOS thesauri and later ex-
tend this idea to unstructured user-generated content found on Social Networking
Sites (SNS). We conclude with having a look into challenges still faced as well the
current status of a prototype.
2 Problem Statement
Leaving the distinction between content provider and user with the advent of the so
called Web 2.0 was the empowerment leading to a flood of content with only light-
weight explicit semantics such as mentions of other users or tagging. But as Schmidt
rightfully argues [1] this new “produser” role suffers another distinction, this time
towards the ontology manager and in the case of scholarly Web 3.0 platforms prohib-
iting a rich semantic encoding of new ideas in the first place.
The W3C Incubator report on a “Standards-based, Open and Privacy-aware Social
Web”[2] provided valuable visions and bottom up projects (e.g. GNU social or Dias-
pora) have targeted cross-application interoperability, but few of these initiatives fo-
cused on the empowerment of users when it comes to the semantic dimension of their
content to provide a linkage to rest of the Web of Data. A related situation is faced on
the side of heterogeneous LOD services; this time however highly specialized appli-
cation specific vocabularies prevent a coherent picture to emerge and make it difficult
to traverse (scientific) data along domain concepts.
We argue that both cases are related in requiring a domain-specific representation
that is precise enough to capture existing concepts, but also leaves flexibility to ex-
press new ideas.
3 Integrating Heterogeneous Data on the Web of Data
In this section we will have a closer look at the process of building up LOD ser-
vices at GESIS combining fine-grained vocabularies for individual data sets and more
coarse-grained representations for the thematic traversal of the social sciences do-
main. As the leading German social sciences infrastructure facility GESIS publishes
large amounts of scientific information in form of library references, survey studies
and corresponding statistical data sets on several sites (i.e. Sowiport1, SOFIS2 or
ZACAT3) addressing different use cases and user categories. The development of
such targeted applications scenarios yielded services enjoying high usage. However,
leaving many information sources unconnected proved disadvantageous for growing
beyond the originally foreseen use cases. Addressing these shortcomings with a com-
plete rebuild of applications was not a choice, but a integrative approach was needed.
The Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) proved as a useful choice, al-
lowing classic knowledge representations to be encoded, in terms of a high-level the-
saurus, for the Web of Data. With the RDF representation of the Thesaurus for the
Social Sciences [3] (TheSoz) a formal multilingual representation of the social sci-
ences domain has been developed. This TheSoz4 acts as a back-of-the-book index for
the social sciences and glues together data items belonging to various application
domains; now we are looking into ways extending this concept to third-party applica-
tions such as academic Social Networking Sides.
1
http://www.gesis.org/sowiport/
2
http://www.gesis.org/en/services/research/sofis-social-science-research-information-system/
3
http://zacat.gesis.org/webview/
4
http://lod.gesis.org
4 Connecting Social Networking Sites
As we have addressed GESIS is providing different kinds of data sets and the The-
saurus for the Social Sciences provides the glue making it possible to traverse them
along domain-specific axes. A similar situation is faced in case of integrating Social
Networking Sites. If one agrees that applications centered on user-generated content
should be aligned with the Web of Data a two-way mechanism would be needed to
support ingoing as well as outgoing links to and from further LOD resources. While
the subject of supporting application/rdf+xml request types on a partnering SNS is an
open issue, progress on supporting outgoing links and requests to further LOD re-
sources has been made. Users of our prototype can either manually select TheSoz
concepts tags they think are suitable to their contribution(s) or use an automatic sug-
gestion service recommending appropriate thesaurus concepts. The usage of an auto-
matic suggestion service proves in particular useful since it requires only little user
knowledge of the vocabulary itself and makes adoption of the service more likely.
While these “TheSoz tags” can act just as traditional tags with a human readable label
integrating seamless into the expected user experience, they are in fact a smart re-
source. Since the thesaurus is multilingual, literal forms of labels provide translations
and semantic relations with other thesaurus concepts provide refinement and inclusion
[4] in the tag-space. Moreover the semantic machine- and human-readable meaning of
these tags does not end at artificial application boundaries but provides connections to
other applications for the traversal of information along axes of user interests.
5 Current Status and Challenges
The discussed concept has still a long way to go. A particular challenge to get ini-
tial user involvement is the optimization of the multi-label classifier used in the
TheSoz concept recommendation and consequently we are considering ways to inte-
grate multi-modal data (e.g. mentions or the structure of discussion threads) into the
feature space of the classifier. Most importantly to us, however, will be the user feed-
back to our prototype on the iversity5 platform launching this fall.
References
1. Schmidt, J. and Pellegrini, T.: Das Social Semantic Web aus kommunikationssoziolo-
gischer Perspektive. In: Social Semantic Web, pp. 453—468. Springer (2009)
2. Harry, H., Tuffield, M.: A Standards-based, Open and Privacy-aware Social Web: W3C
Incubator Group Report. W3C (2010)
3. Zapilko, B., Sure-Vetter, Y.: Converting the TheSoz to SKOS. GESIS Report (2009)
4. Miles, A. and Bechhofer, S.: SKOS simple knowledge organization system reference.
W3C (2008)
5
http://www.iversity.org