Re: ESWC 2008 Linked Data Playground

Chris Bizer wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Paul, Richard, Knud, Tom, Sean, Denny and I have published some data
> describing papers and authors of the 5th European Semantic Web Conference
> (ESWC2008).
> 
> The data is interlinked with DBpedia, Revyu and the Semantic Web Community
> Wiki. So if you add a review about a paper to Revyu or if you add something
> to the wiki, your data will mix nicely with the data that is already
> published about the conference on the Web.
> 
> See http://data.semanticweb.org/conference/eswc/2008/html
> for a description of the dataset and its use cases.
> 
> The data is currently also being crawled by several Semantic Web search
> engines and we hope to be able to add a section about how to use the data
> within these search engines before the weekend.
> 
> If you have any ideas for further use cases or know about other Semantic 
> Web
> client applications that could be used to navigate, visualize or search the
> data please let me know so that we can add them to the webpage.

Fun stuff indeed :)

Here's my use case: I want to grab and archive for future use, 
information about people who are attending or authoring at the 
conference. And I want to be able to join that with other information I 
have local access to (eg. I have email addresses of XTech'08 attendees), 
as well as use services like Google Social Graph API which provide 
identity reasoning based on public XFN and FOAF.

It seems I can do this kind of thing quite nicely:

CONSTRUCT {
  ?author a foaf:Person .
  ?author foaf:name  ?authorName .
  <http://example.com/eswc2008-authors#group> foaf:member  ?author .
  <http://example.com/eswc2008-authors#group> a foaf:Group .
}
WHERE {
   ?author rdf:type foaf:Person .
   ?author rdfs:label ?authorName .
}


ie. 
http://data.semanticweb.org/snorql/?query=SELECT+DISTINCT+%3FauthorName+%3Fauthor+%0D%0AWHERE+{%0D%0A++%3Fauthor+rdf%3Atype+foaf%3APerson+.%0D%0A++%3Fauthor+rdfs%3Alabel+%3FauthorName+.%0D%0A}%0D%0AORDER+BY+%3FauthorName

...giving markup like this:

<rdf:Description 
rdf:about="http://data.semanticweb.org/person/guus-schreiber">
	<rdf:type rdf:resource="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person"/>
	<foaf:name>Guus Schreiber</foaf:name>
</rdf:Description>

<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://example.com/eswc2008-authors#group">
	<foaf:member 
rdf:resource="http://data.semanticweb.org/person/guus-schreiber"/>
	<rdf:type rdf:resource="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Group"/>
</rdf:Description>


...however I'd love to have some more identifying properties of Guus 
here, eg. mailbox hash, homepage, openid, weblog, or at least sameAs to 
other URIs for him where such descriptions can be obtained.

Do you have such info for any/all attendees? I'd presume at least you 
have email contact for the authors, or main author. Do the site's terms 
of service allow you to re-share this information? Even a hashed email 
can be fed to http://code.google.com/apis/socialgraph/ or other crawlers 
quite usefully.  However it would be really great to have a single URI 
from which we could download a list of authors (or authors/attendees) 
with inverse functional property descriptions, owl:sameAs as identifying 
characteristics.

Why might I want this? 'cos I'm experimenting with use of foaf:Group 
descriptions as filters against the Web (eg. flickr photos, twitter 
comments, wiki and blog post approval). So I go through life looking for 
nice lists of people I can categorize in an ad-hoc way to help with such 
things. Lists that come from evidence of real world activity (eg. people 
I've sent email to) rather than being merely asserted.

"Semantic Web people" is one such group (and yes, could be done as an 
OWL class; as well as with RIF, SPARQL or whatever). So building up a 
list of Semantic Web people from grassroots evidence seems quite a nice 
use case for this technology. If someone has had a paper accepted to 
ESWC, that is perfectly adequate evidence for me to say "ok, they can 
post to my blog without being spam-trapped.". As well as a nice way of 
auto-generating a blog aggregator. But to do this we need bindings from 
ESWC'08 people URIs to other identifiers (URIs & IFPs) that might be in 
use elsewhere in the Web. Is this something that you could make easier 
somehow?

Thanks again for everyone who worked on getting this data out there! 
Much appreciated (even if my 1st response is to ask for more ;)

Hope to see many of you at ESWC this week...

cheers,

Dan

ps. more on my thinking re foaf:Group is here: 
http://danbri.org/words/2008/01/22/260

--
http://danbri.org/

Received on Thursday, 29 May 2008 14:39:27 UTC