Simon Price, University of Bristol

Webs of People, Webs of Data

Web 2.0 Live, Taunton, Nov 2006

Web 2.0

Web Applications (Web 1.5?)

Hybrid Web-Desktop (Web 1.6?)

Canonical Web 2.0

• Amazon– Customer Reviews– Amazon Recommends

• Google– PageRank™– Making money out of links– Google Mail, Maps, APIs, Desktop Search, ...

Web 2.0 Technology (nothing new)

• Minimum– CGI (e.g. Perl, PHP, Python, C/C++)– Database (e.g. MySQL, Postgres, Oracle)

• More recent additions– Java– XML– Web Services– AJAX– Ruby on Rails

Social Networks

A key ingredient in the Web 2.0 melting pot

Google PageRank™

• Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page (Stanford, 1995)

• Intuition behind PageRank:– Web is a network (graph) connected by links– A link is a "vote" for the destination page– Strength of vote is a fraction of the PageRank

of the page casting the vote

PageRank of a page is the

probability of a random

surfer arriving at that page

after many clicks.

(By Markov Theory)

Newsgroup Mining

Work by Jonathan Roberts

Web Mining

www.theyrule.net

Link Discovery

www.theyrule.net

The Web of Data

Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is a graph-based knowledge representation of data, spanning the Web, traditional databases, the desktop and mobile devices.

Friend of a Friend (FOAF)

"The FOAF project is about creating a Web of machine-readable homepages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do."

http://www.foaf-project.org/

FOAF and Co-depiction

PARIP

• PARIP = Practice As Research In Performance– 5 year national project– Led by University of Bristol's Department of Drama:

Theatre, Film, Television– Professor Baz Kershaw and Dr Angela Piccini

• PARIP Explorer– Innovative contacts and research database– Developed by ILRT– Semantic Web technology

PARIP - Data Fusion

• contact details

• research interests

• images

• interviews

• concepts

• questionnaire responses

• institutions

• projects

• …

PARIP - User Perspective

• Dual interface:– Text View cross-database search-engine– Map View visual link discovery and browsing

PARIP - Technical Perspective

• Semantic Web: RDF/XML and FOAF

• Prolog running as a Web Service (WSDL+SOAP)

• SPARQL query interface for programmatic access

• XHTML AJAX client

• Visualisation via Flash

Research Directions

Automated Data Fusion

Exabyte Scale Informatics

• 1 Exabyte = 1018 bytes i.e. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

• 1 Exabyte is approximately everything ever:• written,• composed,• filmed,• painted• or in any other way 'recorded' by humans.

• Manual classification and retrieval is inadequate; machine learning and data mining are essential.

Google on "Simon Price Bristol"

Contact details