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KMi Seminars
A Socio-Technical Approach for Topic Community Member Selection
This event took place on Monday 14 May 2007 at 14:00

 
Dr. Aldo de Moor CommunitySense, Tilburg, the Netherlands

There is a multitude of very complex and interconnected political, socio-economic and environmental issues facing our globalizing society. To address these, topic communities are essential of experts and stakeholders collaborating closely for a longer period of time. These topic communities often need to be created ad hoc and urgently, however, while demanding a unique mix of experience and expertise of their members. Thus, the formation of such communities is far from trivial. Existing scientific and political structures do not suffice to provide the right experts and stakeholders in time. I outline a socio-technical approach for topic community member selection, analyzing large corpora of blog posts to identify combinations of topics and bloggers relevant to the goals of the topic community. The technical basis for the approach is the tOKo tool for text analysis. The social aspect consists of a sequence of steps of human interpretation of the blog analysis results that tOKo produces. This socio-technical approach forms a ''pragmatic funnel'', producing a set of candidate topic community members likely to be relevant. I illustrate the approach with a realistic case.


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Semantic Web and Knowledge Services is...


Semantic Web and Knowledge Services
"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" (Berners-Lee et al., 2001).

Our research in the Semantic Web area looks at the potentials of fusing together advances in a range of disciplines, and applying them in a systemic way to simplify the development of intelligent, knowledge-based web services and to facilitate human access and use of knowledge available on the web. For instance, we are exploring ways in which tnatural language interfaces can be used to facilitate access to data distributed over different repositories. We are also developing infrastructures to support rapid development and deployment of semantic web services, which can be used to create web applications on-the-fly. We are also investigating ways in which semantic technology can support learning on the web, through a combination of knowledge representation support, pedagogical theories and intelligent content aggregation mechanisms. Finally, we are also investigating the Semantic Web itself as a domain of analysis and performing large scale empirical studies to uncover data about the concrete epistemologies which can be found on the Semantic Web. This exciting new area of research gives us concrete insights on the different conceptualizations that are present on the Semantic Web by giving us the possibility to discover which are the most common viewpoints, which viewpoints are mutually inconsistent, to what extent different models agree or disagree, etc...

Our aim is to be at the forefront of both theoretical and practical developments on the Semantic Web not only by developing theories and models, but also by building concrete applications, for a variety of domains and user communities, including KMi and the Open University itself.