Section: Application Domains

Assisting Web-based Epistemic Communities

In parallel with linked open data on the Web, social Web applications also spread virally (e.g. Facebook growing toward 1.5 billion users) first giving the Web back its status of a social read-write media and then putting it back on track to its full potential of a virtual place where to act, react and interact. In addition, many organizations are now considering deploying social Web applications internally to foster community building, expert cartography, business intelligence, technological watch and knowledge sharing in general.

By reasoning on the Linked Data and the semantics of the schemas used to represent social structures and Web resources, we provide applications supporting communities of practice and interest and fostering their interactions in many different contexts (e-learning, business intelligence, technical watch, etc.).

We use typed graphs to capture and mix: social networks with the kinds of relationships and the descriptions of the persons; compositions of Web services with types of inputs and outputs; links between documents with their genre and topics; hierarchies of classes, thesauri, ontologies and folksonomies; recorded traces and suggested navigation courses; submitted queries and detected frequent patterns; timelines and workflows; etc.

Our results assist epistemic communities in their daily activities such as biologists exchanging results, business intelligence and technological watch networks informing companies, engineers interacting on a project, conference attendees, students following the same course, tourists visiting a region, mobile experts on the field, etc. Examples of collaboration and applied projects: EduMICS, OCKTOPUS, Vigiglobe, Educlever, Gayatech.