OntoBlog: Informal Knowledge Management by Semantic Blogging Aman Shakya 1, Vilas Wuwongse 2, Hideaki Takeda 1, Ikki Ohmukai 1 1 National Institute of Informatics, JAPAN 2 Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand

Publicly accessible web-based publication of periodic articles usually in reverse chronological order Easy publishing platform Dynamic media Contributions from the community Abundant collection of timely data Problems –Unstructured text –Filtering, organizing, navigating is difficult Blogs SKIMA 2008, Kathmandu, Nepal2

Semantic Web “The Semantic Web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.” The Semantic Web, Scientific American, May 2001, Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila The Semantic Web is about two things –Common formats for integration/combination of data drawn from diverse sources –Language for recording how the data relates to real world objects Web of Linked Data Current Challenge for the Semantic Web –How to publish and use enough structured data easily? SKIMA 2008, Kathmandu, Nepal3

Ontology in Semantic Web “An Ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization” - Gruber (1993) SKIMA 2008, Kathmandu, Nepal4 Source: Tim Berners-Lee (XML2000) Fig: The Semantic Web Stack Conceptualization “.. the objects, concepts, and other entities that are presumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among them”

Semantic Blogging Builds upon traditional blogging Provides semantic structure to blog items Enrich blog entries with metadata Combine desirable features of Blogging + Semantic Web Some Semantic Blogging systems 1.Semantic Blogging Demonstrator (Cayzer, HP labs) 2.Semantic Blogging using Haystack (Karger & Quan, MIT) 3.Semblog (Ohmukai & Takeda, NII) 4.semiBlog (Möller et al., DERI) (now renamed “Shift”) 5.SocioBiblog (Shakya et al., NII) 6.Structured Blogging ( ) SKIMA 2008, Kathmandu, Nepal5

Limitations of Current Works Authoring metadata is cumbersome Limited semantic capabilities –Linking semantically related blog entries –Navigating through semantically related blog entries –Searching and organizing relevant blog entries Problems of traditional blogging still remain! SKIMA 2008, Kathmandu, Nepal6

Semantic Blogging for Informal Knowledge Management Semantic Blog –Capture knowledge of individuals informally –Not rigid as conventional database driven systems Annotate information snippets in blogs with semantically structured information –Link, Organize and Retrieve them effectively Utilize Knowledge Base technologies –Ontology and instances –Exploit the semantic links in Ontology SKIMA 2008, Kathmandu, Nepal7

Linking Blogs and Ontology SKIMA 2008, Kathmandu, Nepal8 Blog entries Ontology Semantic Annotation

The OntoBlog Platform Semantic Annotation –Annotate blog entries with existing ontology instances Integrated Authoring –Authoring and annotation of blog entries Semi-automatic Annotation –Suggest related instances automatically Integrated Services –Semantic navigation, search and organization Feedback for Ontology Maintenance –Suggest new concepts and instances Online demo - SKIMA 2008, Kathmandu, Nepal9

Application Scenario SKIMA 2008, Kathmandu, Nepal10

Implementation SKIMA 2008, Kathmandu, Nepal11

Blog-Ontology Linking Simple language processing techniques –very fast and quite effective For each ontology instance, a “keywords” element contains a collection of related words Stemmed blog entries matched against stemmed “keywords” Related instances automatically suggested when adding/updating blog entries Discovered relations stored (if the user approves) SKIMA 2008, Kathmandu, Nepal12

SKIMA 2008, Kathmandu, Nepal13 Authoring Blog Entry Next…

Automatic Suggestions for semantic annotation SKIMA 2008, Kathmandu, Nepal14

Example Ontology (Computer science department domain) SKIMA 2008, Kathmandu, Nepal15 Populated and maintained using Protégé OWL micro reasoner for Inference

Blog-Ontology Linking SKIMA 2008, Kathmandu, Nepal16 Instances in Ontology Blog Entries

Semantic Navigation SKIMA 2008, Kathmandu, Nepal17

Semantic Search Simple implementation to demonstrate applicability of semantic search Augment traditional search results –Return blog entries linked to semantically related instances Useful when text search alone does not produce enough results Depth of semantic search can be controlled SKIMA 2008, Kathmandu, Nepal18

Semantic Aggregation SKIMA 2008, Kathmandu, Nepal19 Search results Related Entries click

Feedback for Ontology Maintenance Users may suggest a new instance and/or concept Useful for the administrator/knowledge engineer to maintain the ontology –by adding missing concepts and instances or refining them SKIMA 2008, Kathmandu, Nepal20

Conclusions Informal knowledge management can be done by semantic blogging OntoBlog –a Semantic Blogging prototype –Semi-automatic annotation of blog entries with existing instances of Ontology Linking Blog and Ontology technologies Semantic structure of ontology enables semantic capabilities like Navigation and Organization in blogs SKIMA 2008, Kathmandu, Nepal21

Future and Ongoing Work Decentralized collaborative approach for Ontology Semantic capabilities across multiple blogs Sophisticated language processing –WordNet, IE (with supervised/unsupervised learning) Incorporate mature semantic search Enhance inference capabilities Ranked information retrieval SKIMA 2008, Kathmandu, Nepal22

Thank you ! Questions / Suggestions SKIMA 2008, Kathmandu, Nepal23