The Web Observatory Extension: Facilitating Web Science

Collaboration through Semantic Markup"

Dominic DiFranzo, John S. Erickson, Marie Joan Kristine T. Gloria, Joanne S. Luciano, Deborah McGuinness, James Hendler

The Tetherless World Constellation & Institute for Data Exploration and Applications

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY

Introduction

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•  Web Science involves using and producing large amounts of heterogeneous data about and from the web"

"•  As we (Web Science researchers) strive to collaborate and work

together, we must find ways to share, link and reuse each other’s data and tools."

"•  To do this, we are striving to build “Web Observatories” – a

common infrastructure for enhancing this sharing, and to extend it to also include tools, research project results(papers & experiments), etc."

Tiropanis, T., Hall, W., Shadbolt, N., DeRoure, D., Contractor, N. and Hendler, J., The Web Science Observatory, IEEE Intelligent Systems, March/April, 2013.

Web Observatory Concept

WO Portal

Engaging communities with analytics Publication of catalogues (schema.org)

Access with/without credentials Searching and Indexing

Distributed Queries Plugged in Datastores and App Servers

Harvesting Dataset enrichment/curation

Dataset management Provenance

Optimisation

WO Datastores

Hosting of analytic apps Hosting of visualisation apps Monitoring dependency on

datasets Monitoring dependency on tools

Explicit links between tools & datasets used

WO Apps WO Portal

WO Apps WO Datastores

WO Portal

WO Apps WO Datastores

Links to resources in other Web Observatories

Thanassis Tiropanis – University of Southampton

RPI Observatory Themes

Science Data Observatory Health & Life Sciences Observatory

Open Government Observatory Social Spaces Observatory

Example: Indian Election Twitter Dataset

Example: Deep Carbon Obs. Datasets

Example: Cancer Treatment Datasets

Example: Int’l Open Govt Metadata

Data use (Social Spaces)

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Data use (Open Govt Data)

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Problem: putting these together across laboratories (and fields)

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Schema.org

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•  An initiative launched by the leading search engine providers to create and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on Web pages.

•  These vocabularies enable the metadata to be more machine readable, allowing for better search, discover and display this information

Example RDFA Lite

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<div http://schema.org/ > <h1 >Avatar</h1> <span>Director: <span ">James Cameron</span> </span> <span >Science fiction</span> <a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html"

>Trailer</a> </div>

Schema.org in action

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Schema.org in action

6 http://datasets.schema-labs.appspot.com/

Goals

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•  Describe Web Observatories •  Interconnect Web Observatories •  Facilitate discovery of tools, datasets,

and projects for researchers

Overview

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Web Observatory

Project

Dataset Tool

Without Schema.org:

Search

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Web Observatory

Project

Dataset Tool

Web Observatory

Project

Dataset Tool

Web Observatory

Project

Dataset Tool

Search

With Schema.org:

Schema.org vocabulary extension

Web Observatory Class"

Schema.org vocabulary extension

Web Observatory Project"

Schema.org vocabulary extension

Web Observatory Dataset"

Schema.org vocabulary extension

Web Observatory Tool"

Schema.org vocabulary demo

Schema.org vocabulary demo

Social Spaces WO

WO Project: Cosmic

WO Project:

First Responder

Schema.org vocabulary demo

Health/Life Science WO

WO Project: Mobile Health

WO Project: Health Data

Challenge

WO Dataset: Health Data Challenge

Conclusions

Science Data Observatory

Social Spaces Observatory

•  Integrating data on the Web, in general, is growing •  Schema.org is a data embedding model

showing great success •  Schema.org/Dataset became official April

2013 •  Search Engine tools are increasingly making

used of embedded markup •  Web Observatory extension aimed at use in

(Web) scientific community •  Also being used by AGU and DCO scientific

Future Work

Science Data Observatory

Social Spaces Observatory

•  Further extend the vocabulary to fit more web observatories •  Subcommunities can extend terminologies

•  Build better tools to use and embed schema.org vocabulary into web observatories •  Integrate into “telescope” toolbox

•  Build tools to make use of schema.org WO metadata (search engines, crawlers, etc) •  Google Domain Search underway