Jul 15 2009
Semantic Social Software = Linked People + Linked Content + Linked Data
As you may know, my research area is “Semantic Social Software”, trying to combine social software ideas with Semantic Web technologies – for me a very promising approach that could bring the Semantic Web into practical applications and help to improve social software at the same time (see also my publications, e.g. Semantic Social Software: Semantically Enabled Social Software or Socially Enabled Semantic Web? (506)). During the discussion of our new group strategy, I tried to clarify the topic a bit more, which resulted in the following illustration, which I’ll try to describe in the following:
Currently, there are several trends on the Internet, which I’ll in the following call “Linked People”, “Linked Content”, and “Linked Data”:
- Linked Content is the most simple to explain; it describes basically the current state of the Web where content can be linked using hyperlinks. It is important to note that this content is meant primarily for human consumption, i.e. human-readable text, images, or other media files.
- Linked Data in contrast describes linking of data that is designed for machine consumption. At the base of Linked Data lies RDF as data exchange format. The people working on Linked Data are organised on the Linked Data website.
- Linked People now is the connection of individuals through the Internet using social networking platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn or Xing. “Linked People” is one of the most exciting developments of the last years and one of the pillars of the ongoing revolution that changes our society.
Many applications follow one of these strands: most traditional Websites are “Linked Content”, most social networking platforms “Linked People”, and there are quite some interesting applications emerging based on “Linked Data”. There are even some applications that combine two of these lines (e.g. Facebook combines Linked People with Linked Content).
What is mostly missing though is a connection of all three strands in one application. Such an application would allow people to connect with each other and share content, but would also expose its data in structured form to the Linked Data cloud (Linked Data Server) to be used by other applications and consume data from the Linked Data cloud (Linked Data Client) to enrich the user experience of the application itself. Our project KiWi with its flexible platform for Semantic Social Software does the first steps into this direction. Henry Story’s FOAF+SSL is also an interesting approach in this area, if combined with social software applications. I believe that in the future we might see many more such applications – at least this is the direction that we will most likely be heading … 
One response so far
This is an interesting triangle and excellent basis for discussing a web of data. I offer some comments and questions.
- in database modelling (for the Web) we distinguish between document-centric and data-centric (content). This seems to be similar to the separation of “human-centric” and “machine-readable”. See e.g. http://www.rpbourret.com/xml/XMLAndDatabases.htm
- with respect to a very general model of information systems, i.e. that of human-task-technology (“Mensch-Aufgabe-Technik”, follow. Prof. Heinrich) I miss a “box” for tasks/processes, in order to represent the objective of what humans try to achieve (or to model processes/time). Where could this be included?
- finally, IMHO the most interesting bits in sw-architecture are in the interfaces (i.e., the arrows in the figure above). Often we focus on the boxes and the layers and we forget about the interfaces. But it is the interfaces (e.g. protocols such as http or even more general IP), that enable interoperation. So what would be the labels of the arrows between the boxes?
SR