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inherently lead to data replication all over the web:
every time a user joins a new social service she
probably has to sign up, invite friends, add/remove
friends, generally ask for email addresses too,
requiring people to send out address verification
emails, not even citing the tedious “lost
email/password” issues. Negative implications of
having users’ data tied to a proprietary platform –
worthwhile to name Facebook (Facebook, ©) here,
given the exponential growth in terms of interest and
users it has been experiencing (100.000 new users
per-day, mostly in the golden over-25-years-old
market share) – with its own markup language and
its own set of API, are evident: user’s experience is
based upon a specific framework and set of enabling
technologies, while data portability is – often
deliberately – not granted. On the other side,
developers are forced to master the n-th set of REST
API, to write applications that are not even close to
the “write once, run everywhere” paradigm which
underlies enterprise software engineering principles,
sparkling programmers’ and managers’ interests.
A solution to this problem has been proposed by
Google with the Open Social (Google ©) API set,
which is a specification for widgets and applications
deployable on social networks. Open Social defines
three broad areas of specification:
Widget/Application, Friends, Activity.
All of these still have a long way to evolve but,
yet being not standard at all, they bring powerful
concepts of openness and interoperability into the
social network marketplace. Personal data, however,
are not limited in any way in scope and practice to
the usual profile-related information: depending on
the service being used, personal information span
from pictures to videos, from wikis to blog posts,
from forums to discussion groups; the list would go
a long way. Heterogeneous information sources
continuously change in nature and content, moving
around highly dynamic centroids, topics, which
attract people sharing interests or just the desire of
publishing something: personal data, pictures,
artworks etc... To name a few, Facebook, Myspace
(MySpace.com, ©) and Flickr groups (Yahoo, ©),
YouTube channels (YouTube, LLC ©) and LinkedIn
(LinkedIn Corporation ©) or web sites aggregating
similar feeds from different sources. It is also the
case of newsgroups, or wikis. None of the above,
however, gives the user a thorough understanding
nor a total access to topic-related information.
Thus, building virtual communities of people
sharing the same areas of interest, and moving onto
topic-driven web surfing and information sharing is
a key aspect in (re)organizing world’s information.
This is what Radar Networks promises with the
forthcoming Twine (Radar Networks ©) which
promises to set as the first mainstream Semantic
Web application. Twine will construct a RDF graph
mapping relationships among people and topics as
well, giving the user full control over information
organization, providing a mean to share knowledge
with like-minded people. Twine follows successful
past experiences from both the industrial (see the
examples so far) and research worlds: consider past
Semantic Browsers emerged from the research
community, geared towards personal semantic
bookmarking, like Semantic Turkey (Griesi,
Pazienza, & Stellato, 2007), social semantic
annotation, as for Piggie Bank (Huynh, Mazzocchi,
& Karger, November, 2005), or Web Services
composition (Dzbor, Motta, & Domingue, 2004).
3 THEMATIC OASES
Industrial and research worlds are thus sharing the
same views and aims, colliding towards a new web
vision, where “knowledge” is no more a huge
amount of (semi)structured text but, turning into a
cloud of overlapping concepts, topics and domains.
At the same time, it emerges the need for a better
organization of the huge amount of information
erupting from the stream of available technologies.
To find the way through the plethora of
information sources, differentiating in content,
presentation and accessibility, a viable approach
would be to make these layers explicit, be able to
recognize them as several possible manifestations of
the same knowledge, and organize them
accordingly.
It makes sense, then, to make the jump from
single (and in-interoperable) specific services (blogs,
wikis, forums, discussion groups and so on…) to
huge collectors of information on a open and global
scale, which we dare to call Thematic Oases.
Thematic Oases (TOs, from now on) should provide
the main intellectual stream of interests around
which knowledge should be organized (and different
services be offered). By adopting Semantic Web
standards, TOs would be developed around
ontological repositories of conceptual knowledge,
which will be used as reference vocabularies for
accessing contents of federated (or simply annexed)
services and (socially) bookmarked web pages.
In this scenario, traditional services will be still
reusable and will coexist with their new semantic
counterparts, with the former being semantically
annotated with respect to the ontologies adopted in
given Thematic Oases, and the latter natively
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