NUI Galway – UL Alliance First Annual ENGINEERING AND - ARAN ...

Mobile Web + Social Web + Semantic Web = Citizen Sensing
David Crowley 1, 2 , John G. Breslin 1, 2 & Alexandre Passant 2
1 School of Engineering and Informatics, NUI Galway
firstname.lastname@nuigalway.ie
2 Digital Enterprise Research Institute, NUI Galway
firstname.lastname@deri.org
Abstract
Citizen Sensing comprises the three entities of the
Social, Mobile and Semantic Web and through
implementing technologies from these three fields tries
to extract meaning from Microposts. By harnessing, the
power of services like Twitter, Semantic Web standards
like SIOC, and frameworks like SMOB and then
combining these with sensor/multi-sensor data from
mobile devices, this work can aid in the creation of
citizen-sensor-networks often where large sensor
networks are not currently feasible. With these
technologies, we can develop a new platform that can
correlate posts that are linked through these networks
by situation or event.
1. Introduction
The growth in popularity and usage of microblog
publishing services has led to a surge in data created by
users; these low-effort formats have removed some of
the barriers for users to post to the Web. As
microblogging lends itself to almost instantaneous
updates, creation of data related to events around the
world is posted before it can be reported on by
traditional media and even by blog or blog-like services.
2. Mobile Devices
Mobile devices commonly contain many sensor
formats that support information like location through
GPS or cell location to create/add context to
Microposts, which companies like Foursquare use to
create a geo-social gaming/marketing platform. In
relation to microblogging, at present GPS adds location
to the data of the post made, but in the field of Context
Awareness, researchers currently examine ways to
augment devices with awareness of their situation and
environment to add contextual understanding. As
Gellersen et al. [2] asserts “Position is a static
environment and does not capture dynamic aspects of a
situation”, and this idea can be applied to most single
sensor data but with multi-sensor context awareness the
diverse sensor readings are combined and then with
processing situational context can be derived.
4. Social Web
Twitter, a micro-blogging platform founded in 2006,
which by October 2010 had roughly 175 million users
and in June 2010 Twitter stated that on average 65
million posts per day were created. Twitter Annotations
are additional structured metadata attached to Tweets.
The annotation or metadata while structured is open to
the user or developer to decide what additional
information is attached to the Micropost.
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5. Semantic Web
SIOC enables the integration of online community
information. SIOC provides Semantic Web ontology for
representing rich data from the Social Web in RDF.
SIOC can semantically interlink forums, blogs and other
related online material. Microposts can be considered a
subset of Microblogs; and with frameworks like SMOB,
then the SIOC ontology can be used to describe these
posts. It is intended to extend SIOC to support sensor
data, the sioc:Post class can be extended to include
sensor or context data. By adding a has_context or
context field to the Post class will link the sensor data to
the user's post.
6. SMOB
SMOB is an open-source semantic microblogging
framework built on recognised web standards
technologies; it provides an open, distributed and
semantic microblogging experience. SMOB aims to
add semantic metadata to posts and use the power of
Linked Data to ease information overload on the poster
and on the subscriber/reader. SMOB is built using web
standards like RDF and ontologies like SIOC and
FOAF\footnote. When SIOC is extended to support
sensor metadata to microposts then SMOB will
automatically support it but the readings will not be
usable by the poster or reader, the framework will need
to be edited/rewritten to enable the data to be added to
posts. SMOB is currently in re-development and the
ability to add sensor data to posts will be implemented
through the previously mentioned extension of the SIOC
ontology.
7. Proposed Solution/Conclusion
Citizen Sensing is an emergent field combining
different aspects of the Social Web, Semantic Web and
sensor networks, where mobile devices controlled by
human members of the network from the sensor
networks. The aim of this work is to make data relevant
to events/situations accessible and to aid the information
extraction process through attaching sensor/contextual
data to tweets and blog/microblog posts.
8. References
[1] A. Sheth, “Citizen Sensing, Sensing, Social Signals, and
Enriching human Experience”, Internet Computing, IEEE,
13(4), 2009, pp. 87-92.
[2] H.W. Gellersen, A. Schmidt, M. Beigl, “Multi-Sensor
Context-Awareness in Mobile Devices and Smart Artifacts”,
Mobile Networks and Applications, 7(5), 2002 pp. 341-351