Social Networks and the Semantic Web

1
Social Networks and the Semantic Web

• The Perfect Storm

Peter Mika // Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
2
Hurricane Katrina
3
hit New Orleans
4
and rendered most of the city uninhabitable
5
residents took refuge
6
all over the United States
7
looking for the missing
8
mostly on the Web.
9
Whats the problem?
Abc
10
What doesnt work

• But we still have search, right?
• Search on what?
• Search how?
• The non-solution crisis.gov
• Throw away the Web
• robustness, openness, innovation

New orleans west bank found nine year old niece
of Theresa
11
The Katrina PeopleFinder

• Part social, part technical effort
• The PeopleFinder Information Format
• Extracting and entering records
• katrinalist.net

Abc
XML repository
12
(No Transcript)
13
Where do we stand?

• Comprehensive database for search, visualization
  and developing additional services
• Information loss
• A single schema proves to be a bottleneck
• Limited by human effort
• Entering records
• Removing duplicate records
• Matching of safe and missing persons

14
In this Thesis

• Social network mining from the Web
• Statistical methods
• Evaluation
• Semantic-based representation of personal and
  social information
• Aggregation of information using machine
  intelligence
• Different scenario
• Semantic Web research community

1
2
3
15
replacing human effort
Abc
1
3
RDF/OWL repository
2
16
...how the story ends
17
In the end

• No usage of semantic technology in PF
• An emergency is not the time to educate
• ShelterFinder finding duplicate shelter records
• PeopleFinder shuts down
• Most found their loved ones
• Cease and Desist threats
• Data donated to a larger repository (Red Cross,
  Microsoft)