Using SKOS to describe communication structures

The last few weeks (or was it months?) I have hung out with the SIOC people on IRC and the mailing list and obviously I blog about it. SIOC is a ontology for Semanticaly Interlinced Online Communities. As such it is closely related to communication structures like a “statement” or “post” or whatever you call a message in your communication domain.

To define the terms used in a communication domain (and I mean domains like “bloggosphere”, “irc”, “mail”) SKOS was made. So the first step to enrich SIOC data is to define a few skos:Concepts:


 <skos:Concept rdf:about="http://b4mad.net/skos/communication#weblog">
  <skos:prefLabel>Weblog</skos:prefLabel>
  <skos:altLabel>Blog</skos:altLabel>
  <owl:sameAs rdf:resource="http://xmlns.com/wordnet/1.6/Blog" />
 </skos:Concept>
 <skos:Concept rdf:about="http://b4mad.net/skos/communication/weblog#post">
  <skos:prefLabel>Post</skos:prefLabel>
  <skos:altLabel>Weblog Entry</skos:altLabel>
  <skos:altLabel>Blog Entry</skos:altLabel>
  <skos:broader rdf:resource="http://b4mad.net/skos/communication#weblog" />
  <skos:narrower rdf:resource="http://b4mad.net/skos/communication/weblog#comment" />
 </skos:Concept>
 <skos:Concept rdf:about="http://b4mad.net/skos/communication/weblog#comment">
  <skos:prefLabel>Comment</skos:prefLabel>
  <skos:broader rdf:resource="http://b4mad.net/skos/communication/weblog#post" />
  <skos:narrower rdf:resource="http://b4mad.net/skos/communication/weblog#trackback" />
 </skos:Concept>
 <skos:Concept rdf:about="http://b4mad.net/skos/communication/weblog#trackback">
  <skos:prefLabel>Trackback</skos:prefLabel>
  <skos:broader rdf:resource="http://b4mad.net/skos/communication/weblog#comment" />
 </skos:Concept>

Using this thesaurus (or communication domain structure) we

may add additional semantics to SIOC data while maintaining SIOCs vision "to describe the information community sites have [] their structure and contents" [1] This thesaurus for a Weblog has a pretty flat structure, simply saying that a trackback is a subcategory of a comment which itself is a post as a subcategory of a weblog.

Having the concept of a sioc:Post and using a skos:Concept as a additional skos:subject with it could indicate the type of a message. This way the concept of a sioc:Post is omnipresent in all communication domains and per domain additional information is given how a message is named or labeled in that specific domain.

Example 1: A Usenet News Article would be of type sioc:Post and would have a skos:subject of http://b4mad.net/skos/communication/usenet#article. A reply on this message would be of type sioc:Post and would have a skos:subject of http://b4mad.net/skos/communication/usenet#article.

Example 1: A weblog entry would be of type sioc:Post and would have a skos:subject of http://b4mad.net/skos/communication/weblog#entry. A reply on this message would be of type sioc:Post and would have a skos:subject of http://b4mad.net/skos/communication/weblog#comment.

In both examples http://b4mad.net/skos/communication#comment is the skos:broader concept of http://b4mad.net/skos/communication/weblog#comment and http://b4mad.net/skos/communication/usenet#comment.

Using this pattern it is possible to interlink communication taking place in different communication domains such as Usenet News and Weblogs.

A full example of this pattern is available here. I also have made up a somehow incomplete thesaurus for the communication domains: weblog, usenet, mailinglist.

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Published:: 2006-07-22, 08° 11'

Category:: sioc

Tags:: B4mad blogging bluetooth coding comments desktop Events foaf general blogging GNU Debian/Linux IBM jabber/XMPP Java Kerberos macish MacOSX mobile Mono/C# mtb music openafs OS philosophy Photographie photos podcasting projects Python semantic web sioc technology Travel web 2.0 webservices wireless WordPress

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[GNU] 2006-08-02, 12° 27'

See also: a thread on SIOC-dev mailinglist

karl 2006-10-01, 12° 24'

Hi,

I’m not sure I completely agree with the structure. It’s cool to see SKOS used though. There is a meta category which are Post, in this category there are sub-categories entries (ones made by the weblog authors), comments (made by the authors or readers), trackbacks (made by readers). These are three type of posts on a weblog but a comment is not a subcategory of an entry IMHO.

SIOC: Mein Blog semantisch aufbereitet at Florian Altherr, Mainz 2006-12-15, 15° 50'

[...] Habe soeben das Wordpress-Plugin des SIOC-Projekts (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities - eine weitere BemÃ¼hung auf dem Weg zum bedeutsamen Semantic Web) ‘installiert’, d.h. mein Blog wird jetzt mithilfe des Plugins semantisch aufbereitet. Die aufbereiteten Informationen finden sich hier. Dank fÃ¼r die Entwicklung geht an Ulnis Bojars von DERI Galway. SIOC ist ein auf RDF basierender offener Standard und beschÃ¤ftigt sich damit verschiedene Online-Diskussionsformen wie Foren, Mailinglisten, Blogs, etc. fÃ¼r Maschinen verwertbar zu machen und InsellÃ¶sungen zusammenzubringen, sowie vorhandene Information (Struktur und Inhalt) automatisiert nutzbar zu machen, indem es die dazu nÃ¶tige Terminologie in einer Ontologie explizit definiert. Diese kann mit anderen Ontologien und Vokabularien wie FOAF, SKOS oder Dublin Core kombiniert werden. SIOC provides methods for interconnecting discussion methods such as blogs, forums and mailing lists to each other. It consists of the SIOC ontology, an open-standard machine readable format for expressing the information contained both explicitly and implicitly in internet discussion methods, of SIOC metadata producers for a number of popular blogging platforms and content management systems, and of storage and browsing / searching systems for leveraging this SIOC data. [...]

Craig Hubley 2006-12-23, 21° 34'

It’s a good start, but I strongly suggest putting wiki at the centre as wiki-based services like Wikipedia are already the most heavily used sources in the world, and that will continue. Most comments on blogs or newsgroups or mailing lists are quite forgettable, and often wrong. They are worthless media for any kind of knowledge management, but wiki (being itself based on software repositories) is more or less ideal. So the concept of an “article” should be the wiki concept of an article, and an “edit” to that article should be the most carefully studied and defined type of “post”, and the idea of “discussion pages” (mediawiki) or web-threaded comment threads alongside (tikiwiki) needs to be better integrated into your map.

Blogs are likewise interesting only because they are RSS feeds so you should put RSS feeds (which are also available automatically from mediawiki to track page-”related changes” or overall “recent changes”, or even particular user contributions to a given wiki) at the centre, not the “weblog” as such. A “trackback” is just an unfortunate term for a stable URI such as major public wikis (like WIkipedia) already enforce, so I suggest you generalize this notion as well into something that fits the terms a serious study would recognize. For instance a stable URI is meritous in many other applications than blogs, and seems to have been the key to Wikipedia’s success. There were always better wikis for any given subject, but it was Wikipedia’s simple standard URI “en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…NAME…” that put it at the core of people’s reference habits.

Mail is also increasingly integrated with other web-based services (witness gmail, yahoogroups) so you may have to draw some explicit line between private, shared, and public discourse. Newsgroups are usually wholly public, mail usually assumed private, but there are exceptions, so deal with this dimension somehow in a way that isn’t tied to the media itself. I think you need also to distinguish between forwarding, “quoting” or otherwise just reposting something, vs. “citing” it as a credible “source” (as one might do for a newspaper article or firsthand report). You might want to look at the issue/position/argument form, which is easy to find references on.

Finally you don’t deal with chat (IRC, “IM”, jabber, etc.) at all nor the concept of logs for teleconferences or other phone logs. I think this is a mistake as these media are getting important. In the long run they will often be attached to specific (internal or external) wiki articles, being debates about them, so I suggest you deal with them as a subclass of conversations about pages if you want to remain content-focused in your ontology.

Compliments for taking it on. It’s a good start, good enough to criticize. but I wouldn’t be writing any software based on it just yet.

Sohbet 2007-02-07, 17° 44'

One thing you may want to try is a unix based whois client, mainlyâ€¦the whois command

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Using SKOS to describe communication structures

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