Social music meets the Semantic WebQueen Mary University - Center for Digital Music

16th July 2008

http://flickr.com/photos/8049973@N03/2656140464/ by wolf.tone

Alexandre Passant - apassant.netLaLIC, Université Paris-Sorbonne

Agenda

• Web 2.0, Social Music and the Semantic Web

• Identity and social-networking with FOAF

• Modeling social data with SIOC• Semantic tagging with MOAT• Semantic Web based

recommendations

Web 2.0, Social Music, the Semantic Web

http://flickr.com/photos/wilbertbaan/244105100/ by wilbertbaan

Web 2.0

• Web 2.0 (O’Reilly 2005)• A read/write Web

• From consumers to producers

• Anyone can produce and share data

• Low-technical barriers

• Lots of various services and practices• Blogs, wikis, social networking, tagging ...

• Flickr, Twitter, Slideshare ...

Social Music• Term coined from last.fm• In this talk:

• Social networks from music-related services

• Interlinking music-related data

• Music-related weblogging and tagging

The Semantic Web• An extension of the current Web

(Berners-Lee et. al, 2001)• A machine-understandable Web

• Concepts and relationships rather than documents and hyperlinks• An abstraction layer of interlinked data

• Advanced features• Inference, trust ...

• http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/SW-FAQ

Technical aspects• URIs as identifiers

• Anything can be identified on the Web• http://apassant.net/alex

• RDF to model relationships and properties between concepts• Using triples to define statements• :TheClash rdf:type mo:MusicGroup

• Ontologies to define data semantics• RDFS and OWL

A machine-readable Web

Hyperlink

Web:Documents and

hyperlinks

A machine-readable Web

Hyperlink

Listens to Alexandre Passant Franz Ferdinand

Web:Documents and

hyperlinks

Interpretation

A machine-readable Web

Hyperlink

Listens to Alexandre Passant Franz Ferdinand

<http://dbtune.org/last-fm/terraces>

foaf:Person

<http://zitgist.com/music/artist/aa7a2827-

f74b-473c-bd79-03d065835cf7>

rdf:type

ex:listensTo

mo:MusicArtist

rdf:type

Web:Documents and

hyperlinks

Semantic Web:Data, models

and relationships

Interpretation

Web 2.0

Semantic Web

Limits of Web 2.0 services• Data models

• Each service uses its own model / API

• Need to build specific services

• Documents, hyperlinks rather than concepts and relationships

• Closed worlds• How to share data and connect people

between websites ?

• Social Network Fatigue (Fitzpatrick, 2007)

• The Semantic Web can help !

Web 2.0 + Semantic Web• A web built on social and machine-

understandable data• The Semantic Web to provide a stronger

data model for Web 2.0 services

• Web 2.0 and “wisdom of the crowds” to provide interlinked and structured data

• Languages (FOAF ...), tools (semantic wikis ...), services (revyu.com ...)

• Journal of Web Semantics• Special issue on Web 2.0

“I think we could...have both Semantic Web technology supporting online communities,

but at the same time also online communities can also support Semantic Web data by being the sources of people voluntarily

connecting things together.”

Tim Berners-Lee, ISWC2005 Podcast

Identity and social networking with FOAF

http://flickr.com/photos/poagao/2305789735/ by Poagao

Friend Of A Friend• FOAF : Friend Of A Friend (Brickley

and Miller, 2000)• http://foaf-project.org

• An ontology to describe people, attributes, interests ...

• Social networking with the foaf:knows property, extended with the RELATIONSHIP vocabulary• :me foaf:knows :yves

• :me rel:collaboratesWith :yves

A common model

A common model

FOAF data examples

Querying FOAF data

• FOAF data is RDF data, existing RDF tools and APIs can be used

• A single SPARQL query, wherever the data comes from

• SELECT ?nameWHERE { <$uri> foaf:knows [ foaf:name ?name ]}

Unifiying identity• One exporter = One URI

• lastfm:bob, myspace:bobby, facebook:bob77 ...

• A need to unify one’s identity across services by defining equivalent URIs• Explicit: owl:sameAs

• Implicit: foaf:email, foaf:openid

• Both use reasoning principles

• Interlinking distributed social networks

Interlinked networks

http://apassant.net/blog/2008/01/12/one-foaf-fits-all/

Merging networks• A complete decentralized social graph• Open, distributed, build on standards

(Kinsella, 2007)

Merging networks• A complete decentralized social graph• Open, distributed, build on standards• From various services

(Kinsella, 2007)

Modeling social data with SIOC

http://flickr.com/photos/ejpphoto/2314610838/ by EJP Photo

Modeling Web 2.0 content• SIOC: Semantically-Interlinked Online

Communities (Breslin et al., 2005)• http://sioc-project.org

• An ontology to describe activities of online communities and their Social Media Contributions (SMC)• Common semantics for SMC modeling

• Reusing existing ontologies (FOAF, DC ...)

• W3C Member submission, June 2007• http://www.w3.org/Submission/2007/02

The SIOC Model

http:://rdfs.org/sioc/spec

SIOC data example

SIOC applications• More than 40 applications

• Mainly open-source

• http://rdfs.org/sioc/applications/

• Creating SIOC data• APIs (PHP, Perl ...)

• Exporters for major platforms (Drupal, Wordpress ...) and services (Mailing-lists, IRC ...)

• Consuming SIOC data• RDF tools, SIOC browsers, Agregators

SIOC explorer

http://activerdf.org/sioc

People and accounts

http://sioc-project.org/node/158

People, accounts and SMC

http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2008/01/04/dataportabilityorg-web-standards-sioc-and-foaf/

Querying SIOC data

• Retrieving last blog posts and pictures of a given user

• Use FOAF / SIOC relationships to provide a single query for your complete SMC from distributed services

• SELECT ?dataWHERE { <$uri> foaf:holdsAccount ?acc . ?data sioc:has_creator ?acc .}

SIOC Types• SMC are not text-only: pictures, videos,

music, events ...

• A need for more advanced semantics

• SIOC Types module

• http://rdfs.org/sioc/types

• Provides subclasses of Item and Container, aligned with existing ontologies

• AudioChannel and VideoChannel

• dcmi:Sound and dcmi:MovingImage

Modeling playlists

• Combining SIOC and DC to model an online playlist and related songs

• :myRadio a sioct:AudioChannel ;

sioc:contains :song1 ;

sioc:has_creator :me ;

dc:title “Alex’s last.fm playlist” .

:song1 a dcmi:Sound

dc:title “Monkey Man” ;

mo:performer dbpedia:The_Specials .

Linking Open Data

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28509009@N03/2668650475/ by marcreis

The LOD Initiative• Linking Open Data

• http://linkeddata.org

• Lots of information available on the Web• Closed world, proprietary data silos

• Provide it in RDF and interlink it !• From documents to machine-understandable data

• Use links to discover data by browsing the GGG

• Open licensing policy

• WWW2008 talk on Linked Data

The LOD cloud

http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/

Reference datasets• DBpedia (Auer et. al, 2007)

• Wikipedia infoboxes translated into RDF

• Any Wikipedia concept gets a URI:

• http://dbpedia.org/resource/The_Specials

• Geonames• RDF data about more than 6M

geographical entities (countries, cities ...)

• riese (Halb et al., 2008)• RDF description of the Eurostat dataset

Music-related open data• http://dbtune.org (Raimond, 2008)

• Music-related RDF platform

• LOD-exporters for major music databases and social services• MusicBrainz, Jamendo

• Last.fm, MySpace

• Interlinked with references datasets• Geonames, DBPedia, riese, FOAF

• Advanced querying and browsing features

Browsing interlinked data

http://blog.dbtune.org/post/2008/02/06/Playing-with-Linked-Data-Jamendo-Geonames-Mazzle-and-Songbird

Semantic tagging with MOAT

http://www.flickr.com/photos/loop_oh/2368779403/ by loop_oh

Tagging• A popular practice on Web 2.0

services to let user index content• Flickr, last.fm, YouTube ...

• Folksonomies• Open and user-driven indexing scheme

• Anyone can use his own terms, no need to learn a classification vocabulary

• Problems when retrieving data• Ambiguity, heterogeneity, lack of

relationship between tags

Tags (as words)

Tags (as words)

Tags (as words)

Tags (as words)

=

Tags (as words)

= =

URIs

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple

URIs

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

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple

URIs

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

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple_Records

URIs

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

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple_Records

URIs

!=

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

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple

http://dbpedia.org/resource/Apple_Records

Tagging with URIs ?

• Indexing data with Semantic Web concepts defined by URIs• Solves ambiguity / heterogeneity problems

thanks to understandable identifiers

• Interlinking content thanks to Linked Data

• Challenges • How to find URIs related to a given tag

and define new ones ?

• How to let people easily bridge this gap between tagging and semantic indexing ?

MOAT• Meaning Of A Tag (Passant & al, 2008)

• http://moat-project.org

• A model to represent the meaning of tags• “apple” can refer to various things, but when

I tag this blog post with it, I mean the record company, not the fruit

• A collaborative and open-source framework• A tag server to define and share meanings

• Architecture of participation principles

The MOAT modelmoat:Tag

tags:RestrictedTagging

tags:associatedTag

Resource

tags:taggedResource

Resource URI

moat:tagMeaning

Local meaningGlobal meanings

moat:Meaning

moat:Meaning

moat:hasMeaning

moat:meaningURI

foaf:Agent

foaf:Agent

foaf:makertags:taggedBy

The 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://sws.geonames.org/2988507/>

<http://sws.geonames.org/4402452/>

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

http://example.org/post/1

http://sws.geonames.org/2988507/

http://example.org/tagging/1

Content entersthe Semantic Web

moat:tagMeaning

http://example.org/alex

http://tags.moat-project.org/tag/paris

tags:associatedTag

tags:taggedBy

tags:taggedResource

Semantic Web based recommendations

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yumlog2/20896759/ by yuki*

Recommendations• Common practices

• Bitrate, musical similarity, rythm ...

• Suggest music, content and events thanks to the Semantic Web• Social-networking

• LOD relationships

• SMC and tagged content

• Related work: FOAF-ing the Music (Celma, 2006)

Social Networking

• You may like what your friends are listening to ...

:alex :yvesfoaf:knows

foaf:topic_interest

dbpedia:Ramones

Social Networking

• ... and also the friends of your friends ...

:alex :yvesfoaf:knows :tomfoaf:knows

foaf:topic_interest foaf:topic_interest

dbpedia:Ramones dbpedia:Rancid

Social Networking

• ... from any service

:alex :yvesfoaf:knows :tomfoaf:knows

foaf:topic_interest foaf:topic_interest

dbpedia:Ramones dbpedia:Rancid

Using LOD

• You like a band, what about using DBpedia to see if you may like ...

:alex dbpedia:Beastie_Boysfoaf:topic_interest

Using LOD

• Bands that share concerts with them ?

:alex dbpedia:Beastie_Boysfoaf:topic_interest

p:associatedActs

dbpedia:Bad_Brains

Using LOD

• Their solo members ?

:alex dbpedia:Beastie_Boysfoaf:topic_interest

p:currentMembers

dbpedia:Adam_Yauch

p:associatedActs

dbpedia:Bad_Brains

Using LOD

• Bands from the same music genre ?

:alex dbpedia:Beastie_Boysfoaf:topic_interest

p:currentMembers

dbpedia:Adam_Yauch

dbpedia:Black_Flag_(band)

dbpedia:Hardcore_Punk

p:genre p:genrep:associatedActs

dbpedia:Bad_Brains

Using LOD

• Or even ... somehow related artists ?

:alex dbpedia:Beastie_Boysfoaf:topic_interest

p:currentMembers

dbpedia:Adam_Yauch dbpedia:B._B._King

dbpedia:Category:American_vegatarians

skos:subject skos:subject

dbpedia:Black_Flag_(band)

dbpedia:Hardcore_Punk

p:genre p:genrep:associatedActs

dbpedia:Bad_Brains

SMC and tagged content

• Tag blog posts using SIOC and MOAT ...

:alex

:blogPost1

sioc:creator_of

sioc:topic

dbpedia:The_Clash

sioct:BlogPost

rdf:type

SMC and tagged content

• ... while people tag pictures ...

:alex

:blogPost1

sioc:creator_of

:bob

:picture1

sioc:creator_of

sioc:topic

dbpedia:The_Clash dbpedia:Joe_Strummer

sioc:topic

sioct:BlogPost

rdf:type

exif:IFD rdf:type

SMC and tagged content

• ... find related content ...

:alex

:blogPost1

sioc:creator_of

:bob

:picture1

sioc:creator_of

sioc:topic

dbpedia:The_Clash dbpedia:Joe_Strummer

sioc:topic

p:pastMembers

sioct:BlogPost

rdf:type

exif:IFD rdf:type

SMC and tagged content

• ... once again, everything is distributed

:alex

:blogPost1

sioc:creator_of

:bob

:picture1

sioc:creator_of

sioc:topic

dbpedia:The_Clash dbpedia:Joe_Strummer

sioc:topic

p:pastMembers

sioct:BlogPost

rdf:type

exif:IFD rdf:type

Using the whole data

• Bands that a friend of your friend blogged about, in which the drummer played in the Ska band of the 80’s and that will play in your town next week for less thank £10

• The data is there, on various datasets, we (just) need to write the query ...

Thanks you ! Any questions ?slides @ apassant.net

http://flickr.com/photos/8049973@N03/2656140464/ by wolf.tone