Re: Social use case ideas

On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 2:01 AM, Uldis Bojars <captsolo@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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).
>

This is certainly planned in Project Ben-Yehuda, which is one of the two
major examples of
http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/wiki/Use_Case_Digital_Text_Repository

(that is not to say social annotation is not relevant in other UCs as well,
of course.)
<http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/lld/wiki/Use_Case_Digital_Text_Repository>


>  -- need a way to specify a particular location or snippet in a
> publication (a span of words, a sentence, a paragraph, ...)
>

TEI's[1] advanced textual markup capabilites come to mind in this respect.
 There is, generally, an obvious but little-explored intersection (or
intersection *opportunity*) between TEI and LOD.


> 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?
>
>  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.
>

Just a FYI, some discovery tools, e.g. Ex Libris's _Primo_ (as distinct from
Ex Libris's ILS, Aleph), offer some social tools today.

"Interesting" social features would probably be more along the lines of
privately-curated content on public repositories, e.g., in the Digital Text
Repository, one might be allowed to, _as an external, unprivileged user_,
create a "path" or "virtual tour" comprised of any number of items
(repository objects, e.g. digital texts), with some curated content
before/around/after each, e.g. "Let me take you through some examples of
misogyny in 19th century Hebrew literature: <item1> -- note the
this-and-that in line 8; now, let's look at a different example -- <item2>
-- etc. etc.

Then, *other* users (perhaps after some editorial review to thwart
vandalism/offensive material etc.) could "take the tour" created by the
first user, effectively experiencing a "social" perspective of repository
browsing, a socially-curated exhibition.

This, again, is an idea planned for Project Ben-Yehuda, but I can also
report it is being actively considered for the content portals being planned
at the National Library of Israel right now.

Cheers,

   Asaf

[1] http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml
<http://www.tei-c.org/index.xml>
-- 
Asaf Bartov <asaf.bartov@gmail.com>