The Social Semantic Web

Note change of time to 1:00pm

The Social Web, a platform where people are connecting through their shared objects of interest, is encountering some boundaries in the areas of information integration, portability, search, and demanding tasks like querying. The Semantic Web is an ideal platform for interlinking and performing operations on the diverse data available from Social Web "data silos", and has produced a variety of approaches to overcome some of the limitations with the Social Web. In this talk, Breslin will describe some applications of Semantic Web technologies to the Social Web. In particular, he will focus on the SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) framework which can be used to describe social website structures, enabling data exports and information sharing for social media contributions. SIOC is one of the metadata formats used in Drupal 7, and has been deployed in Yahoo! SearchMonkey/BOSS, OpenLink Data Spaces, BlogEngine.NET, Newsweek.com and various other sites/apps.

Dr. Breslin is a lecturer in the School of Engineering and Informatics at NUI Galway, Ireland. He is also co-leader of the Social Software Unit at DERI, NUI Galway, where he is researching the Social Semantic Web (he recently co-authored a book on this topic). Breslin is the founder of the SIOC project, which aims to interlink online communities with semantic technologies. He has received a number of web awards, including two IIA Net Visionary awards in 2005 and 2006 for the community website boards.ie Ltd., which he co-founded in 2000. Breslin is also an advisor to CrowdGather LLC, and owner/editor of Social Media Ltd..