Social Networking to Support Researchers at Minority Serving Institutions

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Social Networking to Support Researchers at
Minority Serving Institutions

• Marlon Pierce
• Community Grids Lab
• Indiana University

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Acknowledgements

• Geoffrey Fox (PI)
• Joshua Rosen (Developer)
• Siddharth Maini (Developer)
• Part of MSI-CIEC, an NSF OCI CITEAM Funded
  Project
• http//www.msi-ciec.org/eduwiki/index.php/Main_Pag
  e
• Thanks to Dr. Alex Ramirez of MSI-CIEC for
  feedback and guidance.

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Challenges for MSI Researchers

• We need in general a portal/gateway to online
  community services geared specifically for (MSI)
  faculty and researchers.
• Support their communications identifying
  solicitations, forming or joining teams, writing
  proposals, etc.
• Enable them to identify interesting projects and
  people.
• Our general philosophy is that the broad range of
  Web 2.0 services provides the necessary
  capabilities
• MySpaces, Facebook, Flickr, Imagelooop, Google
  Docs, etc.
• And you can build on collaboration software
• Sakai, Moodle, MediaWiki, Drupal,
• We concluded that these sorts of collaborations
  should really be a sophisticated mashup.

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Shared Bookmarking for Social Networks

• Our kernel project is to support tagging and
  online shared bookmarking.
• Pioneered by del.icio.us in 2003 (!)
• Bookmarking services allow you to
• Share links (URLs) with networks of friends
• Organize your links by mnemonic tags
• Find other interesting URLs by popularity (most
  bookmarked)
• Find interesting URLs by keywords
• When used collectively, tags form folksonomies.
• Pave the cow paths
• Typically about tagged URLs.
• But also about people who tag.
• Semantic Web Lesson everything is a URI.

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RSS Feeds Can Be Click-Tagged. Additional feeds
easy to make with OpenKapows Robomaker.
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Tag Cloud and Favorite Tags
Favorite Tags
Tag Cloud of Everything
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Clicking a tag brings up all the URLs in the main
area.
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Recent Tags
Gives a list of most recent additions.
Recent Tags
Not very well placed
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Drag and Drop Feature
You can Drag and Drop any menu items between left
and right navigational menu
Scriptaculous, Flex, etc
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Drag / Drop
Dragged Recent Tags
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Tag System

• URLs are bookmarked by users
• Users describe these bookmarks with descriptive
  tags
• These tag/bookmark relationships form a graph
  that can be navigated
• Tag Yahoo with search
• If you look up search, Google has the same tag.
• Google is also tagged with video
• Walk the graph through the Internet, or through
  databases (as we will see)

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Login
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User Profiles
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Personal Tags
Personal User Tags
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Bookmark (drag or right-click)
Personalized Bookmarklet when you Login
appears Either Drag it into the Bookmark menu in
Firefox or Right-click and Book this Link
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Click the Bookmarklet button
Example tags algore nobel peace prize
Assign tags and Submit Query
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When you return to the portal, you will see the
tags added to your list.
My Tags
Recent tags
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Results are highlighted in bold and the
corresponding user who owns the tag is also
displayed
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Searching the tag research gives a list of
other users with this tag. Click the user name
to navigate to the profile.
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Click the tag to get the real URL and navigate
out.
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Harvesting NSF Tags

• Harvesting NSF information to seed the system
  with relevant proposal information.

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Populating Tags with NSF Grant Information

• The NSF Awards web site is a good source for data
  to import and convert into tags
• We believe tagging will add value.
• Tagging gives you alternative paths through
  database.
• Walk a graph
• Tagging bridges multiple resources (databases,
  URLs, etc).
• Ex TeraGrid user database has overlap with
  nsf.gov on OCI users.

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NSF.org Award Search
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Sample Search Results
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NSF.org sends back an XML encoding of your search
request.
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NSF Grants Tag System

• NSF has the ability to get information on all of
  the grants a particular person worked on (in XML)
• We downloaded, parsed, and bookmarked this info
  using a little scavenger robot.
• Each grant is represented by a bookmark and
  tagged (using namespaces) with relevant
  information
• Grant tags point to URLs of the NSF award page.
• The investigators are imported as users
• Each has a bookmark for each project they worked
  on
• They are also represented in the tags of these
  projects.

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Tags and URLs Form Graphs
Tag
Bookmark (URL)
User (URI)
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NSF Tag System Example
Large Award
Joe Smith
John Doe
A. Einstein
sbe directorate
Small Award
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NSF Tag Navigation

• You can start at a user or a grant
• You find which grants has this user worked on
  or which users worked on this grant
• In this way, you can find users by crawling from
  user to grant and vice versa
• Also, you can use the tags to narrow your search
  (e.g. only large awards, only a certain
  directorate)
• We are working on a system to use tags to
  successively refine searches.

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Looking Forward Tagging Profiles, Folksonomies,
and Matchmaking

• Social bookmarking sites are generally geared
  toward managing URLs.
• But you can also use it to find like-minded
  people with shared tagging profiles.
• Ex LibraryThing.com
• More direct social networking LinkedIn,
  Facebook,
• Tag clustering can also be investigated as a CS
  problem
• Clustering, machine learning

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More Information

• mpierce_at_cs.indiana.edu
• Current portal will debut at SC07
• General bookmarking and NSF grant information
  tagging.
• RSS Feeds and click tagging

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Future Work Matchmaking and Graphs

• Now that we have a substantial amount of tags, we
  can investigate graph operations.
• These are classic CS problems in clustering and
  machine learning.
• We hope in this way to build recommendation
  systems
• Find other users with similar research interests
  (tagging profiles).
• Potentially interesting to tie this to scholarly
  journal search engines.

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Third Party Software

• Connotea used as a backing bookmark manager.
• Scriptaculous
• - A javascript framework incorporating
  animation effects and ajax functionality.
• - Used in interface for animations and
  page loading
• Pear
• - PHP framework to facilitate uses of xml,
  databases, and various other functions
• - Used to interface with database
• Flex
• - Being used for advanced animated effects
  and navigation interface
• PHPClasses.org
• - a website that allows users to share
  classes and functions they created
• - A queue class was adapted for use in
  the NSF loader
• - A rssGenerator class is being used to
  create various rss feeds
• OpenKapow RoboMaker
• - Allows the creation of navigation robots
  to create REST and RSS services
• - Used in news rss feed and some other
  planned services

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Internal Messaging / E-mail system

• To send messages
• Receive messages
• Contact Groups
• Or some better way to communicate with groups or
  each other

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Matchmaking
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Membership
Ontology tree for a common Tag Cloud
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Profile Actions
Classifieds
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Profile
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More Information

• Portal snapshot is available from
  http//gf14.ucs.indiana.edu/
• See demos at Supercomputing 2007
• Contact me mpierce_at_cs.indiana.edu

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CITEAM Features
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Features
FIND
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A Web 2.0 Diversion

• REST services back to the future
• Simple message formats
• JSON, RSS, Atom
• Rich Client Interfaces JavaScript is back on the
  menu.
• AJAX
• Gadgets, widgets, badges, etc.
• Client-side integration
• Microformats, tagging