Switter: A Semantic Microblogging proposal

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Alvaro Graves Department of Cognitive Sciences Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY 12180, USA gravea3@rpi.edu

Abstract

One aspect of the Semantic Web that has not been fully explored is the idea of good interfaces for interacting with small portions of semantic information, in particular with a few set of triples. Even though more and more data has been published in RDF, usually this came from already existing databases. On the other hand, microblogging sites such as Twitter have gained big popularity in the media and have become an important player in the so-called social networks. In this paper we propose the reuse of several components of Twitter syntax to help developers and designers to develop user-friendly interfaces based on syntax that people can easily recognize and from what it is possible to express semantics.

1 Motivation

Semantic Web tools allows users to interact with data in multiple ways: It is possible to store data in triples stores, such as 4store, Virtuoso, AllegroGraph and others. It is also possible to query this data using SPARQL and develop programs that manipulate this data taking advantage of a plethora of frameworks and libraries for different program- ming languages and platforms. It is also possible to design ontologies using editors such as Protege and Swoop, among others. However, to our knowledge there is no user friendly way to manage triples one by one. More generally, it is not clear that exists a way to manipulate triples for (relatively) non technical expert users.

Is in this scenario that microblogging sites appears as an interesting opportunity to express semantics in a human scale. There is a number of reasons for which this is possible:

1. The microblogging concept of short me...

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... creation of agents that will “listen” to these message and act according to the semantics in them. Also, it can help users to express semantics taking advantage of already existing platforms for publishing messages. Also, allowing users to publish just a few triples allow people to fix and maintain information about datasets without the necessity of owning a hosting

For future work, is clear the need of user-friendly interfaces to simplify the process of writing Switter. While the proposed syntax is focused in readability, we think is still hard to remember predicate names for the unexperienced user. Interfaces suggesting predicates to use and showing the different namespaces (and their meanings) available can greatly improve the adoption of Switter. Finally, I formal specification is needed to allow developers to create their own applications that supports Switter.

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