SocioBiblog: Enabling Communication on Bibliography
with Semantic Blogging
Aman Shakya?

Hideaki Takeda?

Vilas Wuwongse‡

Ikki Ohmukai?

shakya aman@grad.nii.ac.jp

takeda@nii.ac.jp

vw@cs.ait.ac.th

i2k@nii.ac.jp?

National Institute of Informatics, 2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-8430, Japan‡

Asian Institute of Technology, Klong Luang, Pathumthani 12120, Thailand

Abstract
Sharing of information about publications is very importantin a research community. The paper describes a system which
demonstrates how semantic blogging can be used for the purpose. It incorporates SWRC ontology into blogging for entering metadata about publications; facilitates commenting onpublications and provides a decentralized aggregation mechanism to aggregate publications in the community. RSS aggregation has been extended to handle metadata in BuRST
feeds. The system uses FOAF links of authors and friends
to explore the social network of the research community andgather RSS/BuRST feeds.

ification for publishing bibliographic information. The aggregated feeds can be searched. When a blog entry about any
publication is opened, latest posts by the authors of the publication are also listed. In the example, while viewing X, otherposts by the co-authors P and Q are listed.

Keywords
Blog, semantic web, bibliographic metadata, information sharing, RSS aggregation, SWRC, BuRST, FOAF

1. Introduction
Communities of researchers are good examples of online communities spread worldwide. Researchers need to share bibliographic information and comment about publications. As
research activities are highly autonomous, we need a decentralized technology for this. Blogging is a popular mechanism
for easy publishing on the web. However, currently blogs
can only publish unstructured passages of text. The semantic web offers a decentralized platform to publish structured
information. Semantic blogging is a technology that builds
upon blogging and adds semantic structure to blog items [1].
SWRC (Semantic Web for Research Communities) [3] is an
ontology for modeling entities of research communities andtheir relationships. The semantic web also provides populartechnologies such as FOAF(Friend of a Friend) which help inbinding our research community together.

Fig. 1: Example scenario

2. Example Scenario

3. Implementation

Fig. 1 illustrates an example scenario. Researcher ‘A’ publishes information about his publication. Another researcher‘B’ has some comments. B’s entry (comment on X) acts as anannotation to A’s publication. At the same time, a trackback
ping is also sent to A’s blog. SocioBiblog aggregates posts
by friends of the blog-owner by subscribing BuRST feeds
from the blogs of people in the blogroll. BuRST(Bibliography
Management using RSS Technology) [2] is a lightweight spec-Fig. 2 shows the architecture of the system. The publishing system facilitates publishing blog entries and metadata
about publications based on the SWRC ontology. The metadata is embedded in BuRST feeds. It also publishes FOAF
profile of the blog-owner. The aggregation system aggregatespublications from multiple blogs. RSS/BuRST feeds to beaggregated may be retrieved from FOAF profiles. The aggregated feeds can be search by metadata. SocioBiblog caneasily be introduced in the current web to co-exist with existing systems. Standard metadata formats like SWRC, FOAF
and BuRST have been adopted to ensure compatibility andinteroperability.

ICWSM’2007 Boulder, Colorado, USAFig. 3: The blog interface

Fig. 2: System architecture of SocioBiblog

3.1 Publishing
The semantic blog provides metadata entry forms for different
SWRC publications. Fig. 3 shows a blog with both a normal
blog entry and a publication with some metadata. Blojsom1
has been used as the blogging platform. Metadata in RDF
format is stored in a MySQL database using the Jena2 framework.
Blogging has been made convenient by employing javascript
bookmarklet which captures the title, URL, and trackback
ping URL. The blog entry acts as a comment or annotation
to the entry pointed by the URL. An “annotates” property
has been introduced to model this forward link. A trackback
ping is also sent to the annotated blog entry if desired.
A web-based interface to maintain the FOAF profile of theblog-owner has also been provided in the blog itself. The
profile serves as a blogroll too. The information is maintainedin a simple readable text file which can be easily understoodand updated by the user.

3.2 Aggregation
The system aggregates BuRST/RSS feeds from multiple blogs.
The latest publications and posts by friends of the blog-owner
are aggregated in the blog itself as shown in Fig. 3. If feeds
are in BuRST format, publications can be distinguished fromother posts and SWRC metadata can be extracted. Whena publication is opened, RSS feeds of the authors are only
downloaded. Thus, when a user reads about a publication,
he/she is also presented a list of other publications by thesame authors.
The RSS aggregator makes subscriptions for RSS feeds
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http://blojsom.sourceforge.net
http://www.hpl.hp.com/semweb/jena.htm

from the friends list of the blog owner. A FOAF profile includes FOAF links and optionally RSS feed URLs. When asingle publication entry is opened, RSS feeds of the authors
are only aggregated. The Flock3 RSS aggregator has been
extended to handle BuRST feeds.
The Elmo scutter4 has been used as a FOAF crawler to findout FOAF links of publication authors. The FOAF crawler
traces rdfs:seeAlso elements to gather FOAF profiles into adatabase. The crawled FOAF database may be searched tofind out FOAF links of authors. The system provides aninterface to search the FOAF link of a person by entering
his/her name.
The aggregated BuRST feeds in a blog can be searched andsorted by SWRC fields like title, author, type, etc. Searchis done by filtering the aggregated RSS feeds on the basisof search criteria provided through a web-based form. The
aggregated search does a metadata based search over multiple
blogs in the community.

References[1] S. Cayzer. Semantic blogging and decentralized
knowledge management. Communications of the ACM,47(12):48–52, December 2004.
[2] P. Mika. Bibliography management using RSS
technology (BuRST).
http://www.cs.vu.nl/ pmika/research/burst/BuRST.html,
2005.
[3] Y. Sure, S. Bloehdorn, J. H. Peter Haase, and D. Oberle.
The SWRC Ontology semantic web for researchcommunities. In Proceedings of the 12th Portuguese
Conference on Artificial Intelligence - Progress in
Artificial Intelligence (EPIA 2005), pages 218–231.
Springer, December 2005.
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http://flock.sourceforge.net
http://www.openrdf.org/doc/elmo/users/index.html