July 29, 2009 at 6:09 am · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged PhD, Semantic web, social semantic web, social web, StYLiD, thesis, Web 2.0, web 3.0
Feel quite free after finishing the final defense for my PhD 🙂 (July 27, 2009 @ NII, Tokyo)
It went quite smoothly. Thanks to the evaluation committee for constructive comments. And it was nice to have a good number of interested audience. Thank you all for coming!
Here are the slides for my presentation, in case useful to anyone. The thesis is all about information sharing anyway 😉
October 23, 2008 at 8:19 am · Filed under Semantic web, social semantic web, social software, social web, Web 2.0 ·Tagged Semantic web, social web, w3c, Web 2.0
Good to see the Social Web incubator group charter. Great start! Harry Halpin had talked about it when he visited Tokyo and had a meeting with some W3C members here along with prof. Hideaki Takeda and I from NII. I feel that a group like this can play a very important role in identifying and addressing practical challenges that are still hindering the adoption of open semantic standards in the social web. While movements like Data portability, SIOC and FOAF have been very successful in the Semantic Web world, many issues like privacy, authentication, ownership, security, trust etc should still be addressed if such standards are to be publicly accepted. Otherwise, people feel safe and comfortable within walled data gardens while social web companies prefer to hold their customers and their data.
The mission of the Social Web Incubator Group, part of the Incubator Activity, is to explore the development of open standards for social data portability built on existing W3C standards and standards developed by the community, and to promote these solutions within the W3C.
October 13, 2008 at 4:33 am · Filed under Information sharing, Semantic web, social semantic web, social web, Uncategorized, Web 2.0 ·Tagged Semantic web, social web, Web 2.0
Yesterday I presented my paper titled “Information Sharing on the Social Semantic Web” in the Second NEA-JC Workshop on Current and Future Technologies. NEA-JC stands for Nepal Engineers’ Association – Japan Chapter. I made a general introduction to the social web and the Semantic Web, with the general audience from all backgrounds in mind. The paper has been written for non-technical audience. I am glad to see the interest shown by all in this area.
In general people understand what is the social web as there are many example sites many of them are actually using today. However, people find it hard to imagine what the Semantic Web is really like. There are rarely any sites that ordinary people are really using that could be used to cite examples of Semantic Web technologies. People are not satisfied by just understanding the vision and principles of the Semantic Web. People want to see the Semantic Web but its still hard to show to non-technical people.
I hope in the near future we will also have enough Semantic Web sites, just like the social or Web 2.0 sites today, so that people really see, understand and benefit from the Semantic Web. I feel that day will come soon with the social Semantic web, rather than pure Semantic Web technologies only. The social Semantic Web can be as common as the social web today if the social web community and the Semantic Web community work in cooperation.
Below are the links for the PDF and presentation slides.
September 1, 2008 at 10:21 am · Filed under social semantic web, social web, structured web, Web 2.0 ·Tagged enticing, incentive, social web, user contribution
MediaShift Idea Lab . Ensuring Content in User Driven Conversations
A user-driven system does not have value unless users contribute contents. It is good news that 80-20 rule is observed in this case (it is enough to have 20% of the users as active contributors and rest 80% can be passive readers). However, it is very difficult to entice this 20% users. It is not enough to have an easy-to-use interface to ensure that users will contribute – users simply don’t care. The blog post mentions some important tactics to deal with this.
It is even more difficult to entice users into contributing structured data. The associated cost is higher than that for unstructured contents. So the benefit also has to be much greater. We need more tactics for enticing users to contribute structured data.
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