Egocentric Search Method for Authoring Support inSemantic Weblog
Ikki Ohmukai

Kosuke Numa

Hideaki Takeda

The Graduate University for
Advanced Studies
2-1-2 Hitotsubashi,
Chiyoda-ku
Tokyo, Japan

Yokohama National University79-1 Tokiwadai, Hodogaya-ku,
Yokohama-shi
Kanagawa, Japan

National Institute ofInformatics
2-1-2 Hitotsubashi,
Chiyoda-ku
Tokyo, Japani2k@grad.nii.ac.jp

d02hc038@ynu.ac.jp

ABSTRACTIn this paper we propose egocentric search methods basedon the concept of ”Information and Communicate Activities
Navigation (ICAN)” and an authoring support system for
Weblog (blog). ICAN regulates the human activities from aviewpoint of information and communication support. We
introduce the idea of ”Collect” and ”Relate” in the ICAN
table into the information retrieval and the search method
which uses contents and human relationship produced bydaily blogging. Our egocentric methods provide more subjective search result than the conventional engines. We apply the methods to improve the quality of the small contents
made with Weblog tools.

takeda@nii.ac.jp

mission for development of technologies, i.e., technologies
just for us. Shneiderman pointed out that we should shift
our vision from ”old computing” to ”new computing”. He
explained it in his recent book as follows[7]; ”The old computing was about what computers could do; the new computing is about what users can do. Successful technologies
are those that are in harmony with users’ needs. They must
support relationships and activities that enrich the users’
experiences.”
We should shift our focus from information and communication technologies (ICT) to information and communication activities (ICA). We should investigate what are humanactivities on information and communication and how we
can assist people in these activities.

Keywords
Social network, egocentric search, Weblog

1.2

1.

INTRODUCTION

1.1

From ICT to ICA

Human activities on information such as collecting information and communication such as contacting to people are
only a part of human activities but they become to play animportant role more and more in modern life.
They include various kinds of activities. Shneidermanshows a simple and therefore understandable model called
ART (Activities and Relationships Table) for them[7]. One
axis of the table is activity category, i.e., Collect (information), Relate (Communication), Create (Innovation), andDonate (Dissemination). The other is category of relationship, i.e., Self, Family and friends, Colleagues and neighbors,and Citizens and markets. We agree with relationship categories, while we think that activity categories should be
elaborated more because information handling and communication among people are mixed.
To explicate the difference, we propose two-layered model
as an extension of his model shown in Fig.1. The first layer
has three elements that concern information handling, i.e.,Collect (information)
Create (information)
andDonate (information).
It shows user-centered view of life cycle of information. Information is collected, then new information is created basedon the collected information, and finally created information
is donated to the society for future creation. It should be
noted that new information is seldom created from scratch

Computers and networks enrich and facilitate our life sothat they now become indispensable for our life. They sometimes enhance our traditional daily activities with their increasing computing and networking power like documenting
and communicating with other people, and sometime offer new ways for our activities with new technologies likeWWW.
On the other hand, most people become to live with worry
that unceasing improvement of computers and networks andinstallation of new software technologies would change theirlife and business.
It is not because of such technologies themselves but because of our vision to technologies. We are so eager to develop new technologies that we almost loose the original

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Information and Communication Activitiesbut created based on existing information.1
The second layer has also three elements that concerns
communication handling, i.e.,
Relate (people)
Collaborate (with people)
andPresent (people).

Figure 1: Information and Communication Activities
It is communication-centered view of the above process.
People establish relationship with other people, then collaborate with them to create new information, and finallypresent themselves as donor of new information. Having
both information and communication layers is not redundant. What we refer as ”information” in the context of computer technologies is stored data in computers, while humanis the source of ”information” in the broader sense, i.e., human can offer information dynamically. We should consider
communication in order to include the function ”human as
information source”. This parallel view of information andcommunication activities has thus six categories as activities. Ideally all categories should be supported by computers. Some categories like Collect is well investigated, butothers are not. In particular, the three categories in thecommunication layer should be investigated more.
We aim to investigate information and communication activities and support people in the all categories of the activities. We call such support ”information and communication
activity navigation (ICAN)”. It helps people to create new
information by guiding information space and human network.

2.

WEBLOG AND SEMANTIC WEB

2.1

Weblog and Small Contents

Recently Weblog (blog) or blogging has come into the
spotlight in the World Wide Web[3]. There is no strict definition about Weblog but it is recognized as a web site which
consists of miscellaneous notes updated daily[1]. In suchsites the authors do not make efforts to knit up these contents and just align them in chronological order. We callthese frequently-posted contents as small contents in thispaper. Small contents include various subjects including
journal, expertise and critique. One of most popular top1

We do not claim that information creation is just combination of existing information. Rather creativity arises with
understanding and interpretation of existing information.

ics is the introductions and comments of the web sites that
include from news sites to the other small contents.
Some Weblog sites attract the attention with their own
editorial policy. The authors of Weblog sites reedit the existing web contents by quoting them. Moreover there are
new types of Weblogs that criticize the other Weblogs sothat these Weblogs are regarded to organize the ”Weblog
community”. There are more than 100,000 Weblogs in the
United States Weblogs make people to change from information receiver into information sender and distributor.
Most of Weblog site uses the contents management system(CMS) called Weblog tool. Weblog tools enable the author
to describe and edit the small contents via a web browser
and transform the contents form text format to HTML files.
These tools are implemented based on MVC (Model / View
/ Controller) model which is the fundamental concept of web
applications. The author defines a view template once thendo not have to decorate the contents with various HTML
tags. This model decreases the cost of publication remarkably comparing with traditional style which requires local
text editor and FTP. This feature contributes abundant production of the small contents. Fig.2 shows typical site with
Weblog tool.

Figure 2: Typical Weblog Site
A huge number of the small contents and citations among
Weblog communities are increasing day by day. Some efforts
such as topic discovery, trend analysis and content ranking
are applied to these large amount of information.
Weblog facilitates to publish the small contents, however,the cost of contents arrangement and classification remains
extremely high. Most of Weblog tools are specialized to enhance the convenience of publishing by transforming fromtext to normal HTML files. There are already billions ofHTML files on the Internet so that people are facing troubles both to discover her/his objective articles and to use
information effectively. Therefore it is skeptically considered that Weblog will just accelerate this trend.

2.2 Semantic Web
There are great hopes that the Semantic Web technologies will resolve our current condition of information overload. According to the manifest[2], the Semantic Web is anenvironment, which consists of the contents with machinereadable (semantic) tags and the software agents, to realize

autonomous information distribution and syndication. Resource Description Framework (RDF)[13] and other ontology definition languages[14] are recommended by W3C aselemental technologies of the Semantic Web and these are
now in practical use.
However it is difficult to produce contents with semantic
tags because of their complicated syntax and vocabulary.
Ordinary people hardly find a merit of semantic annotation
because it is a time-consuming task. It is also impossible
to annotate the semantic tags to existing enormous information on the Internet. There are some researches about
automatic annotation with AI techniques and natural language processing[4] however their effects are still unclear.
In this research we aim to integrate both technologies,
Weblog and Semantic Web, to achieve the platform whichenables to share, reuse and reedit our small contents. We
provide a new function to the contents management systems like Weblog tools and allow a semantic annotation toexisting contents semiautomatically. Hereby it is possible
to apply the effects of the Semantic Web to all of the contents on the Internet. As a result, links in Weblogs aretransformed into semantic annotations so that the Weblog
contents and the web contents refered by Weblogs can beworked as Semantic Web.
In this paper we propose the egocentric search methods
with relational annotation and description support system
for Weblogging as a first stop of our project.

3.

4. IMPLEMENTATION
4.1 System Architecture
We implemented authoring support system for Weblogs
with our proposed method as shown in Fig.3. The system
consists of three modules as follows.
• Weblog tool
We use ready-made Weblog tool as an infrastructureof our system. In a number of Weblog tools released
recently we introduce Movable Type system[8] which
is one of the most popular tools. Movable Type cancommunicate CGI (Common Gateway Interface) programs via MetaWeblog API[11] based on XML-RPC
protocol[10].
• Editor
We developed an Editor interface as Web application.
It can connect the Weblog tools and the Cache Databaseand execute the egocentric search methods. We will
explain it in detail in following section.

CONCEPT OF EGOCENTRIC SEARCH

As mentioned above Weblog tools contribute to increase
the amount of small contents. However these tools do not
help improve the quality of contents. There is fear that floodof ”junk” contents sweeps the Internet as a result.
We explore new ways of authoring support for blogging.
Most of the contents on Weblogs are closely related to theother contents from different sites. Therefore it is importantfor Weblog authors to know similar or related contents tocurrently describing contents.
We illustrate the procedures of authoring support according to the ICAN table discussed before2 . We assume theuser usually refers and comments on several contents on theInternet in her/his Weblog site. These activities associate
the user’s contents with the other contents. We define these
activities as ”Collect” of information. We also consider theselinkages not only as relationships between each contents but
relations between the authors who have these contents. This
fact corresponds to ”Relate” in the ICAN table.
Thus the contents and human network are built aroundthe user with these Collect and Relate activities.
In case of describing a new content, that is the ”Create”
activity, the authoring support system will retrieve the contents and human network close to the new content. The
closeness among the small contents is calculated not as thescore of semantic similarity but as the distance from theuser on her/his network. We call these search methods as”Egocentric search”3 . The user will add a new link onto2

the authoring content and polish the content out with thesearch results. Iteration of these processes may improve thequality of each content in Weblogs.

Donate and Present are achieved as the original functionsof Weblog that are one of most excellent functions among
other information publishing tools.
3
The word ”egocentric” is borrowed from Social Network
Analysis[12]. In Social Network Analysis, sociocentric andegocentric network analysis provide two distinctive views for
network where the former concerns the nature of the whole• Cache Database (DB)
Cache DB stores all contents which is linked in theuser’s Weblog.

Figure 3: Snapshot of Proposed System

network and the latter is focused in network of individuals.
Search engines like google shares the same view with theformer, and our approach with the latter.

4.2

Extension of RSS

Most of Weblog tools generate a RSS (RDF Site Summary4 )[5][6] file automatically. RSS is an XML-based metadata format for describing an abstract of Web pages. Basicelements of RSS are shown as follows:• <channel><channel> element contains information of entire Web
site such as name of Web site and author.
• <item><item> element describes metadata of a content in a
Web site. In a single Weblog site there are multiple
contents (entries) so that their titles and update times
are described in the item elements correspond to them.
The RSS, which is the unified regular description format
for Web sites, is now propagating from Weblogs to enterprise sites so that people can incorporate various contents
into her/his Weblog using the RSS called ”Content Syndication”. However the RSS is for describing content relationin single site, not for inter-site relationship. Therefore we
extend the concept of the RSS to describe metadata likeinter-site relation. We call this metadata ”RDF Content
Summary (RCS)” that is annotated to every entry in Weblog. The RCS uses following modules in addition to theelements of the RSS.
• <semblog:outlink><semblog:outlink> module represents an ordinary hyperlink. ”semblog” indicates the XML namespace weoriginally defined. Instance URI of the element is extracted from <a href> tag in a HTML document.
• <semblog:inlink><semblog:inlink> module shows the URI which is provided as a reverse link (also called ”TrackBack”[9]) by
several Weblog tools. For example, the author of Weblog B publishes an entry 1 and pings to the entry
X in Weblog A, then the system of Weblog A recognizes this message and appends the URI of entry 1 tothe entry X. This type of reverse link is regarded as a
metadata or an annotation of entry X.

Figure 4: Example of RDF Content Summarywith these link information. This network indicates not only
relations of contents but also human relationships because
all entries on Weblog are owned by an author. Each path of
the human networks is weighted relatively to the frequencyof citation.
Once the user cites some site as a topic in the new content (entry), the Editor program performs three types of
egocentric search and shows the result.
• Relative Chain Search

As just described, the RCS maintains both link information of related contents and metadata of entry itself. Furthermore the Movable Type system can generate equivalent
RCSs for each entry simply with template. Fig.4 shows anexample of RCS file.

4.3

Search Methods

In this section we explain the search methods in the circumstance described previously.
The users daily write and post the small contents to their
Weblog sites with the Editor program. The Editor scans the
text strings of these contents each times they are posted.
If content contains a hyperlink, the Editor acquires wholecontent and RCS of the link and store it in the Cache DB.
Then the Editor extracts hyperlinks from stored contents
and constructs a entry network around the user’s contents
4
RSS is also a acronym of ”Rich Site Summary” or ”ReallySimple Syndication”.

Relative chain search returns the contents which is directly linked with the entry cited by the authoring content. This model is based on a simple model but consequently it seems most trustful. (Fig.5(a))• Relative Co-citation Search
Relative co-citation search discovers the entries thatlink same contents as the authoring entry links to.
Co-citation entries are retrieved from the Cache DB
and the search result contains the weight of authors.
(Fig.5(b))• Relative Keyword Search
Relative keyword search picks up the entries by keyword matching from the Cache DB. Different from theconventional search engines, our method targets only
related sites around the user’s Weblog. (Fig.5(c))

The user read search results by these methods and canappend the link of some helpful contents to describing contents. This process may enrich the user’s content and change
the search result of the system.

method based on a pure P2P model, which does not dependon the cache DB. Future model may create a foothold of the
Semantic Web for ”the rest of us”. We will take an experimental proof of our system with large Weblog communities
in the near future.

6. REFERENCES

Figure 5: Egocentric Search Methods

5.

CONCLUSIONSIn this paper we propose egocentric search methods basedon the concept of ”Information and Communicate Activities
Navigation (ICAN)” and an authoring support system for
Weblog (blog). ICAN regulates the human activities from aviewpoint of information and communication support. We
introduce the idea of ”Collect” and ”Relate” in the ICAN
table into the information retrieval and the search method
which uses contents and human relationship produced bydaily blogging. Our egocentric methods provide more subjective search result than the conventional engines. We apply the methods to improve the quality of the small contents
made with Weblog tools.
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