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© Copyright 2009 Digital Enterprise Research Institute. All rights reserved. Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities Alexandre Passant Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway COIN@MALLOW - Invited Talk 09/11/2009, Torino, Italy

Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

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Page 1: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

© Copyright 2009 Digital Enterprise Research Institute. All rights reserved.

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Alexandre Passant

Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway

COIN@MALLOW - Invited Talk 09/11/2009, Torino, Italy

Page 2: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Introduction

  Postdoctoral researcher at DERI, NUIG   Since September 2008

  Research interests   Social Web and Semantic Web

  Especially the combination of both

  Ph.D. from Université Paris-Sorbonne   Semantic Web technologies for Enterprise 2.0

  Industrial collaboration with EDF R&D

  The following talk is mainly based on my Ph.D. thesis and its viva presentation

  More at http://apassant.net

2 of XYZ

Page 3: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Agenda

  Enterprise 2.0 and corporate online communities   Tools, applications and social implications

  Technical issues with Enterprise 2.0 ecosystems

  Using semantics to improve Enterprise 2.0   SemSLATES: A social semantic middleware architecture

  Socio-structural metadata

  Collaborative ontology population

  Semantic tagging

  Building new applications

  Questions and discussion

3 of XYZ

Page 4: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Enterprise 2.0

  Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers   [McAfee, 2006]

  Introduction of well-known services and practices such as blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, tagging in the professional sphere   Serious usages of Web 2.0 applications

  A new Information Ecology   [Davenport & Prusak, 1997]   Users and online communities are as important

(sometimes more) than the IT components of such ecosystems

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Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

The SLATES acronym

  Search   Mainly plain-text or tag-based

  Links   Internal and external

  Authoring   Simple user-interfaces (e.g. wiki syntax)

  Tags   User-driven annotation

  Extensions   Suggesting relevant content

  Signals   RSS feeds, microblogging, etc.

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Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Social aspects of Enterprise 2.0

  New paradigms with regards to knowledge sharing and communication patterns in organisations   E.g. Anyone can edit / remove content from a senior

researcher in a wiki or publicly disagree with him by commenting a blog post

  Social aspects are as important as the technical ones   Breaking the “Knowledge = Power” schema

  “Enterprise 2.0 is a philosophy”

  Success depends on a company’s background   A study by AIIM showed that 41% of companies do not have

a clear understanding of what Enterprise 2.0 is while this percentage goes down to 15% in KM-oriented ones

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Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Technical issues of Enterprise 2.0

  Based on our experience within an Enterprise 2.0 platform deployed at EDF R&D   Information fragmentation

  Knowledge modelling and re-use

  Tagging issues

  Some of these issues are not new per se   But Enterprise 2.0 strengthens them by providing more

and more data, voluntary published by end-users

  Enterprise 2.0 eases the process of collaboratively publishing information thanks to and within corporate online communities   But efficiently exploiting it is a complex issue

Page 8: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Information fragmentation

  Heterogeneity of people, community, services, needs and practices leads to various services and applications being deployed in organisations   Generally using different APIs, databases structure, etc.

  Information is fragmented over the company’s network   E.g. description of a project in a wiki, latest news in blog

posts, partners news in RSS feeds, etc.

  Getting the global picture of a given object (people, project, etc.) is difficult   Moreover, data integration is a costly task due to

heterogeneity issues

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Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Knowledge modelling and re-use

  Most of Enterprise 2.0 applications acts as independent and closed-world data silos and provide only plain-text information   Information is not interoperable

  Information is limited to human consumption

  Complex queries cannot be answered, even when the information exists !   List all French companies involved in sustainable energies

  How many institutes are part of project X

  List the latest 10 blog posts written by Bob dealing with a research institute working on Web-based technologies

Page 10: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Tagging issues

  Tag ambiguity   apple: fruit, computer brand, or record label ?

  Tag heterogeneity   Semanticweb, semweb, web_semantique, etc.

  Lack of organisation   No links between the tags SPARQL and RDF, while there is

obviously a link between the two domains

  Leads to various issues when searching for information   Noise: content not corresponding to the expected topic

  Silence: non-identified content as searched for using a different keyword

Page 11: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Tagging and expertise

  Expertise level in corporate online communities   Based on their individual experience and background,

people have different ways to approach a domain and tag related content (basic level [Takana & Taylor, 1991])

  Use-case at EDF R&D   194 items tagged with “TF” (= Thin Film, a particular kind

of solar cell) –  Only 1% of them tagged with “solar” !

–  < 0.5% of “solar” items tagged “TF”

–  Clustering algorithms cannot be efficiently applied

  Another issue when searching for tagged content   Valuable information (written and tagged by domain

experts) gets lost as non-expert cannot access it

Page 12: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

SemSLATES

  The SemSLATES methodology   A social semantic middleware architecture for Enterprise 2.0

dedicated to solving the previous issues and bringing additional and innovative services to end-users

  Middleware   Add-ons to existing Enterprise 2.0 ecosystems, do not require

to rebuild the complete architecture

  Semantic   Based on Semantic Web technologies [Berners-Lee et al., 2001]

  Social   Online communities play a core role in producing and using

structured knowledge

Page 13: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

The Semantic Web

Page 14: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

SemSLATES overview

Browsing and querying interfaces

Enterprise 2.0 information system

Semantic mediation architecture

(Ontologies, semantic annotations)

Page 15: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Different layers of annotations

Wiki page 2Blog post

hyperlink

EDF

Company

France

CountryEnergy

is a is aproduces

located in

Blog post

has topic

Wiki page 2has link

Wiki A

is part of

AP

has author

createscontains

Wiki A

Onto

logie

s a

nd S

em

antic a

nnota

tions

Ente

rprise 2

.0 e

cosyste

m

Socio-structural meta-data

Semantic indexingOntology population

located in

Ontologies

EDF

has tag

Page 16: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Socio-structural metadata

Wiki page 2Blog post

hyperlink

EDF

Company

France

CountryEnergy

is a is aproduces

located in

Blog post

has topic

Wiki page 2has link

Wiki A

is part of

AP

has author

createscontains

Wiki A

Onto

logie

s a

nd S

em

antic a

nnota

tions

Ente

rprise 2

.0 e

cosyste

m

Socio-structural meta-data

Semantic indexingOntology population

located in

Ontologies

EDF

has tag

Page 17: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

FOAF

  FOAF – Friend-Of-A-Friend   [Brickley & Miller, 2000]

  http://foaf-project.org

  An ontology for describing people and the relationships that exist between them   From online communities to semantically-enriched online

communities

  Particularly suited for social networking purposes

  FOAF in Enterprise 2.0 settings   Model individuals, teams, relations between both, etc.

  As well as linking people to their interests and skills

  Identity unification across enterprise applications

Page 18: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

SIOC

  SIOC - Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities   [Breslin et al., 2005]

  http://sioc-project.org

  SIOC - Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities

  A model to represent activities of online communities and the related content   Who is writing what, who is answering to who

  Relationships between documents (blog posts, wikis pages) and their container

  One core ontology, several modules

  Published as a W3C Member Submission in 2007

Page 19: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

The SIOC Ontology

Page 20: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Producing FOAF and SIOC data

  Automatically generated from existing Enterprise 2.0 applications   Lots of applications / plug-ins already available

  Completely transparent for the end-user

  Use-case at EDF R&D: > 20000 instances of sioc:Item created

Page 21: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Collaborative ontology population

Wiki page 2Blog post

hyperlink

EDF

Company

France

CountryEnergy

is a is aproduces

located in

Blog post

has topic

Wiki page 2has link

Wiki A

is part of

AP

has author

createscontains

Wiki A

Onto

logie

s a

nd S

em

antic a

nnota

tions

Ente

rprise 2

.0 e

cosyste

m

Socio-structural meta-data

Semantic indexingOntology population

located in

Ontologies

EDF

has tag

Page 22: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Defining domain ontologies

  A need to represent particular objects that are being discussed in corporate online communities   Industrial domains, projects, agents, etc.

  Domain ontologies are required to represent these entities

  Depend on the use-casebut SemSLATES offers a set of best practices   Re-using existing models from the Web (FOAF, SKOS,

geonames …) to benefit from return on experience and build semantic mash-ups

  Use-case at EDF R&D   Developed several models, combining lightweight ontology

design and knowledge engineering [Masolo & al., 2005]

Page 23: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

athena:Constructeur

role:Type

rdf:typeathena:Producteur

rdf:type

athena:Role1

athena:Role2

skos:Concept

rdfs:subClassOf

role:Domain

rdfs:subClassOf

athena:EnergieNucleaire

athena:CentraleNucleaire

rdf:type

skos:broader

athena:EDFathena:PierreGadonneix foaf:member

foaf:Person

rdf:type

foafplus:Company

rdf:type

rdfs:subClassOf

foaf:Agent

rdfs:subClassOf

role:hasRole

role:hasRole

role:hasDomainrole:hasType

role:hasType

role:hasDomain

http://sws.geonames.org/

3017382/

http://sws.geonames.org/

2988507/

geonames:parentFeature

geonames:Feature

rdf:type

rdf:type

geonames:locatedIn

geonames:locatedIn

Role Ontology

SKOS

Geonames

FOAFplus

FOAF

Base de connaissances

Ontologies

athena:part1athena:Areva

rdf:type

partenariat:hasMember

partenariat:hasDomain

partenariat:Partenariat

rdf:type

Partenariat

Page 24: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Ontology population

  Once the ontologies are provided, the related knowledge base(s) must be created and maintained   Usual applications for ontology population are dedicated

to advanced users; not suitable in many contexts

  Our approach: Semantic Wikis   Using online communities and wiki philosophy to build

and maintain structured knowledge bases

  An open, collaborative and evolutive vision of ontology population   No technical nor knowledge engineering skills required

  Anyone can contribute

Page 25: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

From wikis to structured knowledge

Documents

France

EDF

Energyhyperlink

hyperlink

Ontologies and instances

EDFEnterprise

France

Country

Energy

is a

is a

produces

located in

Wiki Semantic wiki

Page 26: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

UfoWiki

  Various semantic wikis prototypes dedicate to ontology population available as open-source apps   However, none fulfilled all our requirements, especially in

terms of user-friendliness (i.e. not dedicated to SW-people)

  UfoWiki   Ontology-based information modeling

  Simple form-based user-interfaces

  Modeling both domain and structure metadata

  Immediately using created knowledge

  Using public data to improve browsing interfaces

  Use-case at EDF R&D   About 25 users, > 350 instances collaboratively maintained

Page 27: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Maintaining ontology instances

Simple autocomplete

field

Complex instance field

Page 28: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Semantic tagging

Wiki page 2Blog post

hyperlink

EDF

Company

France

CountryEnergy

is a is aproduces

located in

Blog post

has topic

Wiki page 2has link

Wiki A

is part of

AP

has author

createscontains

Wiki A

Onto

logie

s a

nd S

em

antic a

nnota

tions

Ente

rprise 2

.0 e

cosyste

m

Socio-structural meta-data

Semantic indexingOntology population

located in

Ontologies

EDF

has tag

Page 29: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

MOAT

  MOAT – Meaning Of A Tag [Passant & Laublet, 2008]   http://moat-project.org

  Using ontologies to support free-tagging activities   Using Semantic Web resources (from internal knowledge bases

and from the Web) to represent the meaning of tags

  From free-tagging to ontology-based semantic indexing

  A model and a framework   A model to link each tag to its local and global meaning(s)

  A framework to collaboratively manage these meanings in online communities

  Use-case at EDF R&D   1176 tags linked to 715 resources, 39 URIs w > 4 related tags!

Page 30: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

MOAT: Example data

http://example.org/tagging1

http://apassant.net/alex/

http://example.org/tag/apple

http://example.org/post/1

tag:taggedResource

tag:associatedTag

tag:taggedBy

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple_Inc.

moat:tagMeaning

sioct:BlogPost

Nouvel iPhone disponible

dct:title

rdf:type

foaf:maker

tag:RestrictedTagging

rdf:type

Tag Ontology

MOAT + DBpedia

SIOC + DC

FOAF

Page 31: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

MOAT: Framework

User creates content and tag it Client queries the MOAT server

Server returns the setfor global meaning URIs

User chooses local meaning URI

User saves the content

<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple_Inc.>

<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple>

<http://example.org/id/myappleresource>

http://example.org/post/1

http://dbpedia/org/resource/Apple_Inc.

http://example.org/tagging1

Content entersthe Web of Data

moat:tagMeaning

http://apassant.net/alex

http://example.org/tag/apple

tags:associatedTag

tags:taggedBy

tags:taggedResource

Page 32: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Building new applications

  Use all the annotations created from different tools   Blogs, wikis, RSS feeds …

  Combine ontologies, socio-structural metadata and knowledge bases   For advanced querying

capabilities

  Hide the complexity of tools to the end-users   So that everyone can benefit

from it

Browsing and querying interfaces

Enterprise 2.0 information system

Semantic mediation architecture

(Ontologies, semantic annotations)

Page 33: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

UfoWiki macros

  Embedding SPARQL query results in wiki pages without the complexity of such queries   Mapping between macro syntax and SPARQL (inspired by

Semantic MediaWiki)

  E.g. [onto|members] to list all members of a company

  Taking context into account   E.g. Listing related blog posts from a wiki page (via MOAT)

  Support a subset of RDFS inference   E.g. Listing enterprise and research institutes when asking

for organisations in general

  Different ways of browsing the results   XHTML snippets, Geolocation, Faceted browsing

Page 34: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Semantic mashups

  Re-using RDF data from the LOD cloud internally   Low-cost Semantic mash-ups

  E.g. Geolocation of internal wiki data using Geonames

Page 35: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Semantic Search

  Solving the information fragmentation issue   Delivering all information about a particular object in a

single page

  Using different level of annotations

  Hiding RDF(S)/OWL and SPARQL to the users

Page 36: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

athena:Solaire :NonExpertfoaf:maker:post1moat:taggedWith

athena:TF ::Expertfoaf:maker:post2moat:taggedWith

skos:broader

foaf:Personsioc:Postskos:Concept

Non-expert level

Expert level

Ontologies

rdf:type rdf:type rdf:type

Solving the Expertise Gap

  Defining rules to extend information retrieval by suggesting nearest entities for a given search   Solving the issues of free-tagging related to heterogeneous

expertise levels in online communities

Page 37: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Conclusion

  Enterprise 2.0 enables interactions in corporate online communities and ease content-generation   But introduces new issues / emphasizes existing ones

  Semantic Web technologies can help   Various ontologies for distinct levels of representation

  Lightweight software add-ons for semantic annotations

  New applications can be build on the top of it   Consuming RDF(S)/OWL data to solve the initial issues

  And bring new services to online communities

  Some more challenges need to be solved …   Trust, context-awarness, privacy, etc.

Page 38: Using Semantics to Improve Corporate Online Communities

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

Thank you !

  Questions and discussion

  Contact   [email protected]

  http://apassant.net (blog, papers, etc.)