Re: call to arms

The effort of developing a semantic facebook for life scientist (called 
VIVO) is on the way and funded by NIH: 
http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/2009/091105/full/nj7269-123a.html.

The preliminary versions have been running at the following sites:

VIVO Cornell      http://vivo.cornell.edu/
VIVO University of Florida     http://vivoweb.org/
VIVO Indiana University     http://vivo.iu.edu/
Southwest Biodiversity Knowledge Environment in China    
http://ske.las.ac.cn/
Plant Evolutionary Biology Knowledge Environment in China    
http://botany.las.ac.cn/
Biomedical and Health Knowledge Environment     http://health.las.ac.cn/

More further development and improvement will be continuously released, 
please check: http://www.vivoweb.org/

best
ying


Sampo Syreeni wrote:
> On 2010-03-30, Story Henry wrote:
>
>> For the moment, writing your foaf profile is nearly just a write only 
>> exercise. Some robots read it, but the result of doing so is not 
>> immediately obvious, if at all. Once one can see what the benefit is 
>> - and here I mean close to immediate feedback - such as getting 
>> access to a campus, being able to chat with friends, [...]
>
> So in essence what we need is a distributed version of Facebook: all 
> of the user specific metadata stored as RDF documents on the Web 
> and/or accessible via some well-defined protocol which can also do 
> targeted pushes and/or pulls of triples. (I wonder whether Google's 
> Wave stuff could help here; certainly some version of it could.) A UI 
> layer on top of that to make it usable and beautiful. Trust, which in 
> this case would probably be email authentication directly to your 
> hosting node, with optional PGP crypto. Perhaps also aggregation of 
> inter-host dataflows for efficiency.
>
> The main problem I see with this sort of thing is that you'd have to 
> pay for your subscription to one of the hosts (or host your own). 
> Financing from ads wouldn't be easy in this sort of environment, 
> because you could always roll your own open source implementation 
> which excluded any ad from other people's feeds. OTOH, any particular 
> host implementation could do whatever it wanted at the UI layer.
>
>> The outcome is pretty easy to describe: you are no longer locked into 
>> one provider.
>
> Yes, and that is part of the funding problem. I mean, I've repeatedly 
> asked Google to enable plain exports of data from their services. Even 
> they don't go there -- lock-in is evidently part of their business 
> model too.
>
>> If you want to help people grok linked data just having them play 
>> with data that is based on Linked Data won't help. After all: how 
>> would they distinguish that from normal data?
>
> One big way to make that distinction would be to build in location 
> independence from the start. That is, deep support for multiple 
> identifiers for the same data, means of propagating trust from one 
> identifier to the next, and eventually resolution services which 
> enable you to rename data to its newest URI. If this sort of thing 
> took off, even the giants like Google and Facebook would be inclined 
> to either implement their own resolution services or to subscribe to 
> an existing one.
>
>> Yes, the best way to do that is to start getting people to play with 
>> social networks. They are bound to be interested. As they improve the 
>> descriptions about themselves, they will then turn to dbpedia, 
>> musicbrains, and all the other linked data sites out there.
>
> Yes. In their most rudimentary forms, I think of such services as yet 
> another app/box on your (distributed) Facebook page. In the next phase 
> as integration of the basic data elements into the overall UI (i.e. 
> when I state I like kittens, every box that has to do with likes 
> actually links to some ontology and disambiguates the meaning using 
> standard UI components and data sources). And come nirvana, PnP/DnD ad 
> hoc functionality to build the boxes in the first place. ;)


-- 
Ying Ding, Assistant Professor of Information Science
School of Library & Information Science, Indiana University
1320 East 10th Street, Herman B Wells Library, LI025
Bloomington, IN 47405, USA

Tel: (812) 855 5388, Fax: (812) 855 6166 
Semantic Web Lab: http://swl.slis.indiana.edu/
Homepage: http://info.slis.indiana.edu/~dingying/

Received on Wednesday, 31 March 2010 00:38:51 UTC