Real-Time SemanticWeb with Twitter Annotations

Thursday, June 24, 2010

10:15 AM - 10:45 AM

Level:	Technical - Intermediate
Location:	Yosemite B

The ability of millions of average Web users to publish short, timestamped and even geotagged microblog posts, at a moment's notice, presents new opportunities for real-time and location-based services. Much as these services are changing the nature of search on the Web, so the Semantic Web will be both challenged and enhanced by real-time content. Furthermore, the ability to annotate microblog posts using highly expressive vocabularies, as in Twitter's upcoming Twannotations functionality, will provide an endless stream of up-to-date, structured information about the world. In this presentation, we discuss a semantic data aggregator which brings together structured microblog annotations with Semantic Web vocabularies and best practices in order to augment the Semantic Web with real-time, user-driven data, enabling a new breed of query services. Emerging formats, modeling issues, publication and data ownership of microblog content, data storage and basic techniques for real-time, real-place semantic search are presented.

Joshua Shinavier is a Ph.D. student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Tetherless World Constellation, where his research explores the intersection of the real-time social web with the Semantic Web. Joshua's interests include graph databases, knowledge-based systems, Linked Data, social data streams and human-agent interaction. Joshua has worked as a software developer in several start-ups prior to beginning his thesis work.

Jans Aasman started his career as an experimental and cognitive psychologist, earning his PhD in cognitive science with a detailed model of car driver behavior using Lisp and Soar. He has spent most of his professional life in telecommunications research, specializing in intelligent user interfaces and applied artificial intelligence projects. From 1995 to 2004, he was also a part-time professor in the Industrial Design department of the Technical University of Delft. Jans is currently the CEO of Franz Inc., the leading supplier of commercial, persistent, and scalable RDF database products that provide the storage layer for powerful reasoning and ontology modeling capabilities for Semantic Web applications. Dr. Aasman has gained notoriety as a conference speaker at such events as Semantic Technologies Conference, International Semantic Web Conference, Java One, Linked Data Planet, INSA, GeoWeb, ICSC, RuleML and DEBS.