Sweet Web
Abstract
Social Semantic Web
The Social Web of today is characterized by participatory content creation and also syndicated communication. Wikipedia is an example of participatory content creation, while the micro-blogging exchange using the Twitter service are examples of communication. A parallel and equally significant development of the web has been the steady effort on investing the data on the web with semantics and the resultant growth of the Semantic Web. Various initiatives to leverage the social web have been applied to collectively build the Social Semantic Web.
Web of Data
Large data sets are available on the Web today that make it the essential sources for Linked Data. While most of these need not be collaboratively created, there are sets such as DBpedia which is participatory in an indirect sense because it is extracted from Wikipedia. Wikipedia, although is participatory created is however a single web application that manages content creation and editing by a number of people. This is effectively similar to the way various social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are all centralized web applications that open themselves to help provision exchange of messages and content among their subscribers.
We propose to leverage syndicated communication to construct semantic content in a participatory manner.
Etymology
SWeeT
A SWeeT is an elementary unit of structured information that can be used by people to pronounce a semantic relationship of information on the web. Like "tweets" are used by people to express an idea or an interest on twitter(@), SWeeTs can be used to express a relationship. SWeeTs differ from Twitter tweets in two important ways: First, they are decentralized; the SWeeTs may be curated in arbitrary stores. Second, SWeeTs are structured so as to reflect a semantic relationship between web elements governed by an ontology. This combination of structure and decentralisation allows for a semantic web to be constructed in a much more participatory and incremental manner. Several examples demonstrate how SWeeTs allow for new ways of building collaborative information spaces: Alipi and web page renarration, heritage walks, Facebook like applications for online communities, ...
SWeeTs are Social Semantic "conversations" that help bring an individual to annotate the Web with a set of simple, customizable, tools. SWeeT Web serves as a social complement to the distributed and decentralized Web. SWeeT Web decouples the one that messages and the one that aggregates.
SWeeT is someone’s context sensitive statement about some Web resource, i.e., a resource which exists on the Web itself. Thus, SWeeT Web facilitates conversational enhancement of the Web through SWeeTs which are stored in repositories. The syntax of a SWeeT is
- @user Context Resource Attributes
where @user is the person making the statement, Context is the resource that defines the context (i.e. ontology), Resource is the subject (URI) of the statement, and Attributes describe the properties of the Resource according to the given Context.
Demo
Some links
A SWeeT store: [1]
SWeeTs in the store appear when someone uses a browser add-on (or a bookmarklet, or a browser app) to SWeeT a semantic-tag about a Web entity such as an image or a paragraph on some web-page.
Alipi Project
Alipi uses SWeeTs.
alipi.us helps you get started. When you go to a web-page using alipi.us, you get a bar on top that lets you do a few things: 1) Author an alternate narrative for a part of the page that interests you, 2) See if others have provided alternate narrations, 3) See if any other page on the site has been re-narrated.
When you choose an alternate narration, say a Kannada narration for the page http://schedule2013.rmll.info/programme/le-libre-dans-la-societe/communautes/article/sweet-web?lang=nl, you can also see the SWeeTs that helped in order to compile this alternate page by clicking on "Info".
When you author an alternate narrative, a SWeeT is generated and sent to the store.
a11y.in is a re-narration service that uses the SWeeTs stored in a few stores such as demo.swtr.us
Also see the directory of pages that are re-narrated.
Implementation
To add more about the architecture here someday soon.
A SWEET WEB for Sweeter us. http://swtr.us
Talks [2013]
RMLL 2013 talks
Slides [2012]
XPATH + tweet = social semantic web
An early and sketchy document on the SWEET messages on the Web.
Why tweet when you can bleat!
bah bah baa baa bleat
Bleat? SWeeT!
ps: bleats are motivated by our Follow the Sheep project. See janastu.org
