Social use case ideas

Regarding the Social use cases cluster, below are some ideas.
Currently they are just a brainstorming re adding a social aspect. If
some of them look useful to you, they can be detailed as use cases.
(Note: at the moment these scenarios do not focus on the linked data
aspect)

1) Social annotation

Let people annotate publications (both online and offline) and share their
annotations. this sharing can be book-centered (when looking at a book
you can access others' annotations - c.f. how Kindle tells you people have
highlighted this sentence) or people-centered (share with your social
network what you annotated).

  -- will need annotation filtering / ranking (by reputation, etc.)
  -- need a way to specify a particular location or snippet in a
publication (a span of words, a sentence, a paragraph, ...)

An interesting use of social annotation can be constructing a
collection of annotations to a particular publication in a
decentralized manner. That is, when participants each publish their
annotations individually yet the machine readable information about
these annotations allow to create collections of annotations such as
http://fawny.org/pr/ .

2) Social recommendations

Recommend books based on social data (annotations, usage data)
  - use user activity (how many people annotated a book, looked at a
book, read it, ...) for determining its relevance to the user and in
recommending books to look at.

How does Google Books rank book search results?

3) Location/ownership info

An open publication catalog + information about where these
publications can be found.

To add a social aspect, let users of this service indicate what
publications they have and if / on what conditions they would lend
these books. As a result participants would not only be able to find
books in nearby collections (presumably covered by the Use Case Find
materials in the closest physical collection) but could also enable
peer-to-peer book-swapping (though would require a critical mass of
users from any given location before it becomes useful for people from
that location).

Related: Open Library (linked data via the Use Case Open Library Data)
could provide information about publications.

4) Add social features to ILSs

Simple and not-so-interesting social features are buttons for sharing
an item on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Not that interesting to us as they
are already present on many sites (and probably on some ILSs) and
there is probably little use for linked data there.

But perhaps there are some more interesting social features that are
worth discussing.

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The thoughts above are for starting a discussion re social use cases.
Looking forward to your comments.

Best regards,
Uldis

Received on Wednesday, 5 January 2011 00:03:03 UTC