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• A Tool for Collaborative Research
• James Miller
• UC Berkeley School of Information
• May 2009

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What is Slants?

• Standardsland Tagging Service
• A research tool
• Focused on a specific domainPublic policy and
  ICT standards
• But any domain is possible
• Requests Delicious RSS feeds from many users
• Harvests bookmarks and tags
• Organizes them for retrieval

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About Delicious

• A social bookmarking website
• Easy tagging as you browse
• Share bookmarks with others

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About Delicious
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About Delicious
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How Slants Uses Delicious
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How Slants Uses Delicious
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The Problem That Slants Addresses

• Technical standards have public policy
  consequences1
• Identity
• User/content discrimination
• Content censorship and control
• User consent, etc
• Often unaddressed in standards
• Best to find out early in the standards process

1 Morris,J, A. Davidson."Public Policy
Considerations for Internet Design Decisions,"
Center for Democracy and Technology, 2003.
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More Easily Said Than Done

• There are now more than 400 ICT standards
  consortia active globally
• Thousands of standards
• Consumer and watchdog groups are unlikely to be
  represented
• Therefore, specifications may not take due
  account of their needs

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Semantic Gap
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Semantic Gap IPv6 (RFC-2464)
Under IPv4, the predecessor to IPv6, Internet
addressing allowed a reasonable amount of privacy
and anonymity, because a numeric address was
typically not tied to any particular machine or
user.  With IPv6, however, the standard provided
that in many cases a users address would be
derived from the unique MAC (Medium Access
Control) address embedded in the users Ethernet
network card.2
2Davidson, Alan, John Morris, Rob Courtney.
Strangers in a Strange Land Public Interest
Advocacy and Internet Standards. Washington,
D.C. Center for Democracy and Technology, 2002.
ltwww.cdt.org/publications/piais.pdfgt
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Focus on Identity

• Information privacy
• Information security
• Authentication
• Access
• Online tracking
• Datamining
• Profiling
• Third-party use
• Anonymous speech
• Etc.

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The Slants Approach

• Recruit or select Delicious users interested in
  ICT/public policy issues
• Harvest their Delicious bookmarks, based on their
  tagging
• Harvest other bookmarks from the wider Delicious
  network
• Aggregate and organize the bookmarks on the
  Slants website

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Tag Harvesting

• Slants requests bookmarks from Delicious
• For specific users
• For specific resources
• With specific sets of tags
• Delicious returns an RSS feed of bookmarks

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Tag Harvesting

• An automated process
• Search terms are based on thesaurus
  relationships
• BT/NT identity authentication OpenID
• SA RFID_tags vicinity_cards
• UF surveillance eavesdropping
• RT key_generation key_distribution
• Expansive smart card OR chip card

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Expansive Searches
GSM
CDMA
smartphone
iPhone
cellphone
phone
android
smart
cell_phone
or
mobile
Find bookmarks tagged

surveillance
or
eavesdropping
location_tracking
track
tracking
intercept
eavesdrop
monitor
covert
monitoring
Interception
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Normalized Results
GSM
CDMA
smartphone
iPhone
cellphone
phone
android
smart
cell_phone

mobile
Organize tags under

surveillance
eavesdropping
location_tracking
track
tracking
intercept
eavesdrop
monitor
covert
monitoring
Interception
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Processing Bookmarks

• Database stores individual bookmarks
• Bookmark tags are checked against the thesaurus
• Matching tags are normalized against the
  controlled vocabulary e.g., eavesdropping
  becomes surveillance
• Nonmatching tags are discarded

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Accessing Bookmarks

• Tags are organized to create an index according
  to rules in the thesaurus
• Index is refreshed whenever new bookmarks are
  harvested
• The index allows users to sort bookmarks by topic

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Why Use Slants?

• Leverages the researching skills of many users in
  a single area of interest
• Automatically searches the entire Delicious
  network (over 5 million users)
• Normalizes disparate tagging into a consistent
  system
• Organizes bookmarks by topic

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Low Cognitive Cost

• No extra work involved, just tagging as usual
• Gathers domain-relevant resources in one place
• Provides easy browsing and finding

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Additional Features

• Identifies Delicious users that have the same
  interest
• Scores resources by times bookmarked
• Enables users to create custom searches

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Future Work

• Term recommender system
• Thesaurus building tool

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Summary

• A collaborative research tool
• Leverages social bookmarking that users would do
  anyway
• Performs expansive searches
• Normalizes search results for easy retrieval
• Built for the public policy domain but can be
  applied to any domain

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