Social Media Analytics with a Pinch of Semantics

Using semantics to solve problems (not solving problems of semantics).

SM for businesses:

• Analytics.
• How to measure success?

SM silos impeding progress.
In-house social platforms increasing, so even more so.

SIOC to integrate online community information.
SIOC + FOAF + SKOS.

FB Graph.
People are likeaholics.  Their 'likes' become meaningless, so you need to take this into account when making recommendations.
Browse your data and understand user actions.

Behaviour analysis.

Bottom-up analysis.
Can handle unexpected or emerging behaviours.

• Community members classified into roles.
• Identify unknown roles.
• Cope with role changes over time.
• Clustering to identify emerging roles.

eg. focussed novice; mixed novice; distributed expert; ...
Spectrum across users you can or can't do without.

Extending an ontology built on SIOC.

Encoding rules in ontologies with SPIN.

Three categories of features:

• Social features (people you follow, people follow you, ...)
• Content features (what you're posting, keywords, ...)
• Topical/semantic features

Which behaviour categories you need to cater for more than others?  How roles impact activity in online community.

Consistently see that you need some sort of stable mixture of behaviours for activities in forums to increase.

==> Don't know what's causing which.

What is a healthy community?

Use behaviour analysis to guess what's going to happen to community. Eg.

• Churn rate.
• User count.
• Seeds/non-seeds prop (how many / if people reply to you).
• Clustering.

Unexpected: the fewer focused experts in the community, the more posts received a reply.
(But quality of answers?)

Community types (Little work in this space)

Muller, M. (CHI 2012) community types in IBM Connections:

• Communities of Practice
• Teams
• Technical support
• ..
• .. (see slides..)

Need an ontology and inference engine of community types.
Wants an automated process to tell you what type of community it is - it might be something it wasn't set up for.
Then you could determine what sort of patterns you would expect to find.
Noone has done this yet.

Measurements of value and satisfaction

Answers different across communities.  They ran it on IBM Connections - corporate community.

Most of this work is for managers of communities - see what's happening and help to predict what might be coming next.

Can classify users based on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs?
Mapping the hierarchy to social media communities.
~90% users happily staying at the lower levels of the 'needs hierarchy'.

Behaviour evolution patterns

What paths they follow over time.
eg. people who become moderators eventually.

Engagement analysis

What's the best way to write a tweet so that people care about it?
Which posts are likely to generate more attention?

Getting bored of people finding patterns in individual datasets.  What can be generalised to other communities?

So experimented with 7 datasets and looked at how results differed across:

• community types.
• randomness (vs. topicality) of datasets.
• related experiments.

And people use different features.

Semantic sentiment analysis in social media

Too much research going on, especially on twitter.

Extract semantic concepts from tweets; likely sentiment for a concept.
Tweetnator.
Semantics increases accuracy by 6.5% for negative sentiment; 4.8% for positive sentiment.

OUSocial.
Students don't use in-house networks because they already use facebook groups etc. Want to analyse what's happening on them.

Upcoming

Reel Lives (inc. Ed.)
Fragmented digital selves.
Want to automate compilations of media (photos, messages) posted online.

Changing energy consumption behaviour.
Providing information is not enough.

Social Eco feedback technology.

11th - 17th March

Had a sensible conversation with Ewan about when I should stop reading and start actually producing something.  The answer is sooner, rather than later.  I'm aiming for a literature review that is "neither a first nor final" draft by the end of April.  I started outlining topics that should be in it, and began faffing about with LaTeX (and Markdown and Pandoc).

Then started panicking and promptly quadrupled the amount of things on my to-read list.  Oops.  I blame Matthew Rowe.

I finished reading his first year review (2007) as well as his paper about Meervisage: Community-based Annotation for the Semantic Web.  I compiled a massive list of more things to read from his lit. review, and then looked up what he's been doing since then.  A lot.  Mostly relevant.  At the very least, interesting.  Damn.  Don't worry, I'll prioritise that list, and don't aim to finish it before I start writing.

Going to Serbia on Tuesday, for Resonate.io.  What should I bring back?

• Information about creative processes for digital artworks.
• Anything to do with open data or decentralized social networking movements.
• Potential case studies or people to work with.
• ... to be discovered?

Had a chat with Russell of Makur Media about video metadata and ontologies for describing film/TV production processes.  We're doing some of the same research and keeping in touch is likely to be mutually beneficial.  Note to self: Summerhall Cafe is nice and the food is cheap; go there for lunch one day.

Rowe, M. (2007)  Meervisage - A Community Based Annotation Tool. ‘Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0’ Conference at the University of York 5-6th September, 2007.

How SW can benefit from incorporation with existing 'Social Web'.

"...collaborative generation of metadata... using social networks as a user base..."

Uses fb groups created for sharing and organisation of research.  Suggests posting links to useful resources is comparable to annotating the resource.  Comments are more metadata.

Points out usual stuff of actually generating semantic data being a problem for SW.

System requirements:

• Annotations must be shared in a community.
• Annotations can be reviewed and edited (/audited) (by group)
• Collaborative
• Central repo.
• Annotations contain semantic metadata.
• Content of resource annotated, not URL.
• Communication layer that doesn't interrupt annotation (uses external services).

Review of existing systems:

• Annotea [9] [13]
• J. Kahan, M.R. Koivunen, E. Prud Hommeaux, R.R. Swick. Annotea: an open RDF infrastructure for shared Web annotations. Computer Networks. 2002.
• M Koivunen. Annotea and Semantic Web Supported Collaboration. Proc. Of 
• the ESWC2005 Conference, 2005.
• No communication layer (but has discussion threads, wat?). 
• Can only be edited  by author, but can be reviewed by others.
• Can be local, private or shared.  RDF.
• Piggy Bank [10]
• D Huynh, S Mazzocchi, D Karger. Piggy Bank: Experience the Semantic Web Inside Your Web Browser. Springer-Verlag GmbH. 2005. 
• RDF. 
• Auto and manual.  Bundled with scrapers; if they fail, manual.  Only of one type.
• Share group or global, or save to local 'semantic bank' <-- find="" is="" out="" this="" what="">
• Reviewed by all, edited by author.
• Community of users, but no SNS integration.
• KIM [14]
• A Kiryakov, B Popov, D Ognyanoff, D Manov, A Kirilov, M Goranov. Semantic Annotation, Indexing and Retrieval. Journal of Web Semantics, Springer. 2004.
• Automatic named entity recognition.  
• Links to knowledgebase with ontology.
• Creates new URIs for new entities or link swith entities it already knows about.
• Global sharing.
• Can be deleted but not edited.
• No social involvement.
• Magpie [11]
• J Domingue, M Dzbor and E Motta. Semantic Layering with Magpie. Handbook on Ontologies. 2004.
• Auto annotate webpage.
• Similar to KIM, but does not hyperlink to knowledgebase; instead each item gets context menu (right click) with services depending on entity.
• 'Multi-dimensional approach'. Uses ontology to trigger other services depending on concept.
• Plugin for IE.  
• Simply looks for entities that are in ontology (Dzbor 2004).

[1] Using existing information to derive semantics from folksonomies (delicious):
X Wu, L Zhang, Y Yu. Exploring social annotations for the Semantic Web. Proceedings of the 15th international conference on the World Wide Web, 2006.

[15] Social bookmarking tools and how semantic info aids resource discovery.  Probabalistic model of how resources are annotated:

A Plangprasopchok, K Lerman. Exploiting Social Annotation for Automatic Resource Discovery. Eprint arXiv, 2007.

[16] Distributed nature of folksonomies.  Improve search mechanisms.  Tags not great:

S Choy, A. Lui. Web Information Retrieval in Collaborative Tagging Systems. Proceedings of International Conference on Web Intelligence, 2006.

        (vs.)

[17] Rigid taxonomies not great:

C Shirky. Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags. Clay Shirky’s Writings About the Internet, 2005.

[18] Methodology for easier browsing of large scale social annotations:

Z Xu, Y Fu, J Mao, D Su. Towards the semantic web: Collaborative tag suggestions. Collaborative Web Tagging Workshop at WWW2006, 2006.

All use one annotation per resource, not annotation of content within, so only one lot of metadata about a page.

Meervisage

"To aid the process of collaborative annotation of web documents"

Allows sharing of annotations between subset of SNS users (eg. fb group).

Management of users and groups offloaded to third party.

Stored in central annotation store.

Annotations contain author, SNS, folksonomies and date.  Made from content within.

Meerkat is "responsible for generating semantic metadata by annotating external web resources."  Meervisage for management via social network.

Meerkat allows a user to edit another user's annotations if they are members of the same group on facebook.

Popularity rating of resources rises with fb discussion.

Meerkat informs browser users if they come across a resource that has been heavily discussed on fb, and by which group etc.

Meervisage also provides RSS feed.

Evaluate by comparing precision and recall metrics of annotations by one user in an allotted time, and those by a group.

-> Don't know how this helps to assess quality of annotations; maybe I'm dumb?  Find out.

Limited to private, says it's like that's a good think :s

Oh, because public access would be "laborious and resource intensive".

Annotations rated on usefulness and weighted.

[20] Attempt to describe folksonomies as part of formal ontology.  Meervisage doesn't; limited to users' viewpoint:

S Angeletou, M Sabou, L Specia, E Motta. Bridging the Gap Between Folksonomies and the Semantic Web: An Experience Report. Workshop: Bridging the Gap between Semantic Web and Web 2.0, European Semantic Web Conference, 2007.

[9] + [13] are most similar.  Have groups, but groups aren't already established networks.

Future work

Annotating multimedia.

Matching assigned tags with ontology terms mined from Web.

[19] Desktop app for annotating text with ontology:

A Chakravarthy, F Ciravegna, V Lanfranchi. AKTiveMedia: Cross-media Document Annotation and Enrichment. Poster Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Semantic Web Conference, 2006.

4th - 10th March

I played with the Tell Me Scotland SPARQL endpoint to put Scottish public notices on an OpenStreetMap: http://rhiaro.co.uk/publicnotices/map.php.  It works intermittently, as the TMS endpoint is a 'proof of concept'.  Okay, that's not PhD related, but it's still interesting.

I went to the 5th OKFN Edinburgh meetup at Napier.  Look, evidence, I'm in the picture!

Dave Robertson asked me hard questions about how I'll turn my vague research interests and intentions to make something useful into a PhD with genuine contributions to knowledge and I floundered a bit, but he agreed to be my second supervisor nonetheless.  I hadn't properly thought about it in those terms, and I'm still figuring it out with like, words.  (As opposed to a gut feeling).  I'd always planned to plough ahead enthusiastically and hope for the best.  That's how I approach everything, actually.

I started reading Community-Based Annotation for the Semantic Web by Matthew Rowe (2007); I think it was a first-year PhD review, and I was primarily reference-harvesting.  More on that next week.

I attended a Social Informatics Cluster meeting, and heard about the Smart Society project; very much in its figuring out stages, but worth following as it appears to have many diverse goals, and various crowd-computation related outcomes might be relevant to what I'm doing.

I went to an ESALA lunchtime talk entitled 'Data Objects', by Ian Gwilt of Sheffield Hallam.  I have to admit, I was expecting something more technical and internet-of-things-y.  Actually data objects are primarily tangible visualisaitons; 3D printed, carved out of wood or sculpted from bronze.  The research was about how people reacted to and understood data differently when it was presented in different forms.  Interesting, and they got some very pretty artefacts out of it, but not directly relevant so I don't have room in my head to store it unfortunately.

I attended the new Social Computing interest group kick-off meeting, coordinated by Dave Murray-Rust.  Everyone introduced themselves, and we arranged a time slot for future meetings.  It looks like I'll be presenting there at some point in the probably not-so-distant future (it was decided that everyone should).  There were a very diverse bunch of people there, and 'social computing' hasn't been defined officially for the group yet.  Quite a few people are attending to essentially see what all the fuss is about.  I'm hopeful that there will be a hardcore technical leaning, because that's where most of the gaps in my knowledge are.  Well, I'm more gaps than knowledge about everything, but that's where I feel particularly vulnerable.

J. Hendler, T. Berners-Lee, From the Semantic Web to social machines: A research challenge for AI on the World Wide Web, Artificial Intelligence (2009), doi:10.1016/j.artint.2009.11.010

Powerful human interactions enabled by futuristic high-speed infrastructure.

Empower Web of people via coupling of AI, social computing and new technologies.  "humanity in the loop".

Social machine: "...processes in which people do the creative work and the machine does the administration." (Weaving the Web, p172).

Struggling with social mechanisms to control predatory behaviour and threats to privacy.

-> Tech must be developed that allows user communities to construct / share / adapt social machines, so successful models evolve through trial, use and refinement.

Claims a new generation of Web Technologies needed to overcome barriers to this; cross-disciplinary approach needed.

• creating tools
• creating principles and guidelines
• extending Web infrastructure re: information sharing and address privacy and user expectations of data use.

"...a revolutionarily more powerful platform for the individual, enabled by realizing that the individual is also a member of a community" (/ies)

"architecture of the future Web must be designed to allow the virtually unlimited interaction of the Web of people" (vs. documents now)

Giant Global Graph - dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/node/215

SW deployment:

• [3] T. Berners-Lee, J. Hendler, O. Lassila, The semantic web, Scientific American (May 2001) 28–37.
• [10] J. Hendler, Web 3.0 emerging, IEEE Computer 42 (1) (January 2009).
• [11] I. Jacobs, N. Walsh (Eds.), Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One, 2004, W3C Recommendation 15 December 2004, http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-webarch-20041215/.

"disruptive potential" of SWt, "important paradigm shift"

"little work in understanding the impact of their new capability"

"the smaller we can make the individual steps of this transformation, the easier it will be to find humans who can be incentivized to perform those steps."

"need to develop mechanisms to enable [connections between people]"

Lack structure for formally computing qualities like:

• trustworthiness
• reliability
• expectations about use of information
• privacy
• copyright
• (etc)

"requires data structures... to treat social expectations and legal rules as first-class objects" ("declarative rule-based infrastructure that is appropriate for the Web").

"open and distributed nature of the Web requires that rule sets be linked together."Cross-context use, sometimes unanticipated.Inconsistency sure to arise.  No logics that control contradiction have been shown to scale well.

New approaches to problem of specifying contexts (need).

SMs must be able to apply different policies based on context.

Work in ontologies must extend to allow user communities to identify bias and share different interpretations.

Current security models / mechanisms insufficient.

[1] - formal models for privacy: L. Backstrom, C. Dwork, J. Kleinberg, Wherefore art thou r3579x?: Anonymized social networks, hidden patterns, and structural steganography, in: Proceedings of the 16th International World Wide Web Conference, Banff, 2007, pp. 181–190.

Provenance important in determining trustworthiness.

[20] information accountability, legal and public policy: D. Weitzner, H. Abelson, T. Berners-Lee, J. Feigenbaum, J. Hendler, G. Sussman, Information accountability, Communications of the ACM (June 2008).

policy-rule-based languages.Reasoners that can interpret policy and determine which uses of data are policy-compliant.-> How to tackle scaling?

RespectMyPrivacy dig.csail.mit.edu/2009/SocialWebPrivacy

[4] Lit review: T. Berners-Lee, W. Hall, J. Hendler, K. O’Hara, N. Shadbolt, D. Weitzner, A framework for web science, Foundations and Trends in Web Science 1 (1) (2006).

Lawrence, K.F., schraefel, m.c.: Bringing communities to the semantic web and the semantic
web to communities. In: Proceedings of WWW2006. (2006)



Research into SW communities:

• Communities of practice
• Social networks, eg. FOAF

Compare with other definitions of communities outside of SW.
Concept: Internet Based Community Network, has properties of COP and SN.
Case study: Amateur Fiction Online.

Early community definitions, Howard Rheingold: "..webs of personal relationships in cyberspace."

1996 CSCW Conference defined prototypical attributes of communities (Whittacker):

• Shared goal / interest / need
• Repeated active participation, emotional ties and shared activities.
• Shared resources and access policies
• Information, support and services reciprocated between members ( overlap with ^ ?)
• Shared context (culture, language)
• Can be applied to virtual and offline communities.

-> More attributes = clearer example of community.

Preece:

• Social interaction
• Shared purpose
• Common set of expected behaviours
• Computer system that facilitates and mediates communication

^^ Things in common.  Whittacker's is more inclusive/broad.

So for a SW SN:

• Accessible via browser
• Explicit links between users
• System supports creation of these links
• Links are visible and browseable

COP or SN may describe a community, not necessarily.  IBCN will do, and could be a COP or SN too.

Problem of Amateur Fic. is fluctuation of archive.  Personal sites go down etc.  How to find a story you remember a bit of?

IBCN is also combination of WBSN and virtual community.
Lack of incentive to use FOAF (eg. on LiveJournal etc) (Plus ignorance).
Doesn't offer anything they don't already have.
They don't use much metadata, just tons of human-readable stuff.

SW would allow:

• "better integration of distributed systems"
• "improved searching and filtering"
• "more personalised services"
•   experienced users
• expand options
•   new ways to interact
•  new users
•   ease introduction re: unwritten rules, expectations, terminologies

FOP extension to FOAF for anonymous identities.
('Fan Online Persona' - why not just 'Online Persona'?)
Consistency likely in community-based system because of advantages of reputation etc.  Identity cost.
Shared set of behaviour values, or risk losing rep.
Reputation gained by taking part.  (definitive part of community).
Additionally by creating works.

foaf:document and foaf:groups allow users to give details about their own creations and review work of others.

OntoMedia to describe content complements FOP.
Options in FOP gathered from study of metadata of works in mailing lists, websites and groups.
Recommender system -> notification system.

Allow SNS of writers to be studied at friend level and collaboration level.

Application to allow users to create FOP under development...

Michael O. Jewell, K. Faith Lawrence, Adam Prugel-Bennett, and m. c. schraefel (200?) Annotation of Multimedia Using OntoMedia

Check out a bit of discussion about this paper on Ontologies with a View.

OntoMedia for representing "diverse range of media".

Others for media:

• CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (museums)
• ABC Ontology (multimedia in libraries and digital archives)
• Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (attribute and relationshops for task performed when consulting bibliographic records)
• FictionFinder - FRBR to Online Computer Library Centre
• WorldCat db - Metadata about characters and fictional places
• Describe contents of films & comics etc for tracking things down to share you forgot?

None quite did what was needed.
So created to map to current models but specifically describe media content.
Hierarchical approach.

1. Overview
Entity / Event system
Entity: object, concept
Event: interaction between one or more entities
0 or more Entities are modified OR new Entity created
Entities not destroyed, but may have not-exists attribute


Decompose to sub-ontologies.

ontomedia.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ontologies

Mediate? Graphical interface.  interaction.ecs.soton.ac.uk/ir/projects/ontomedia/ontomedia

Sub-ontologies

• Core
• Expression (primarily elements and subclasses; Entity, Event)
• Media (binding between media and Expression objects)
• Space (extension of Signage Location Ontology, buildings, and regions of structures)
• Extensions (more detailed subclasses to Core)
• Being (people)
• Trait (attributes of Entities)
• Events (extends Core->Event)
• Action
• Gain
• Loss
• Travel
• & properties thereof
• Fiction
• Character (on Being)
• spoiler info. and accuracy
• Media
• More detailed than the one in Core; includes audio, image, photo, text and video subclasses
• Misc - classes used by any or all of other classes, eg. colour, geometry

Specified in OWL
Developed in Protege and SWOOP.

2. Case Study
Scene from Total Recall annotated.  Represent script and characters, and characters from related book, and links between two forms.

Screenplay annotation - SiX - Screenplays in XML.
Wraps around existing content.
Transition (cuts, fades, blackouts), location, dialogue and direction (action taking place in the script)

SiX allows for DC, for creators, date, descr, title.
Custom XSL to conform marked up scripts to Oscar requirements for readability.

Script Item extends Media Item to link script representation to OntoMedia.
Use has-expression to tie to OntoMedia:Expression.

Describing places and access etc, like lift, like IF.
- For describing character continuity, eg 'can character really see x' etc.

Must describe events that don't occur.  Characters want to occur, etc.  Multiple timelines, dreams.

Declare events.
Create timeline and add occurances.
- events can be reused, and coincide.

3. Testing / querying
Imported into Sesame triplestore.
RDQL queries (subset of SPARQL, simpler, only ever has 1 graph pattern, doesn't use RDF data typing)

4. Conclusion
No examples of pictures - how to annotate comics?

Combining OM with other apps.
Stuff integrated into Mediate.

26th November - 2nd December

I read a paper about Semantic Web tools for online communities.  Large parts of this project are comparable to my own, I think, and I will probably keep going back to it for inspiration.

I did a lot of non-PhD related things, too.