With the recent announcement from Twitter to allow arbitrary metadata attached to each tweet (so-called annotations), the Twitter platform is getting even more interesting for tool developers. ReadWriteWeb writes:

With annotations, third-party Twitter developers can add any additional metadata to a Twitter post. [...] And a tweet can have more than one annotation attached to it. This extra data will initially start off small – Twitter developer Marcel Molina said it will “probably” be around 512 bytes. But over time, it will gradually grow larger as Twitter rolls out the feature and scales up in order to support it. The company hopes to have it end up “around 2K,” says Molina. How developers use that extra space is entirely up to them – there can be one giant piece of extra data attached to a tweet or a thousand tiny ones.

In a blog post Raffi Krikorian posted a useful map of the topography of a tweet. The picture could serve as cheat sheet for any developer dealing with Twitter… See also Raffi’s first ideas on what to do with annotations:

map-of-a-tweet

After we presented the AAN model at the CollaborateCom 2009 in Washington, our first implementation of the AAN backend was extended, so we’re now able to analyse Twitter and Wikipedia. Furthermore we’re working on the integration of Delicious, Slideshare and Scribd. Moreover, we’re developing a rating scheme for social media tools in order to find out how well they’d fit into the AAN backend. Regarding the similarity of artefacts, actors and groups we spent many hours of finding the right algorithm and storage mechanism for doing so and found out that it will take tons of storage space and time to do what we initially wanted to do. Luckily there is the PC2 at the University of Paderborn, which will hopefully support our activities with their massive computing power.

Artefact-Actor-Networks have been recognized by several people outside the University of Paderborn and may become part of several project’s work. Within the MATURE project there are approaches of connecting maturing processes with the respective artefacts and enlisted people; within the STELLAR project we discussed how AANs could be used to describe online social interaction within researcher communities and the a researcher from the LeMill project told me how useful Artefact-Actor-Networks will be in their context.

All this is very existing to me and especially the possibility of applying AANs within some real conference scenarios at university courses (such as the FSLN seminar) and conferences and workshops (e.g. ECTEL 2010 or MicroECoP 2010) will help me focusing on what is important for every research: application in real life. So stay tuned and listen for news from the AAN development team…

In Artefact-Actor-Networks we take a closer look at the multiple levels where communication and collaboration takes place in technology enhanced working and learning settings. We break down the information about those actions, objects and users into separate layers for artefacts and users that can be analyzed separately.

The different layers can be aggregated again, so that we can deal with a consolidated or pooled network.

Semantic Relations in Artefact-Actor-Networks

In the context of Artefact-Actor-Networks there exist semantic relations between actors and artefacts (AA relation), actors and actors (ACT² relation) and between artefacts and artefacts (ART² relation). Let’s take a look at the features of semantic relations in Artefact-Actor-Networks:

ACT² relations describe the nature of relationships between involved persons. They characterise simple connections, friendships or kinships. Furthermore, they can show the kind of media people are communicating with. The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project developed a RDF vocabulary, to express interests, connections and activities of persons. It covers constructs to describe properties of persons like firstname or surname but it is extensible to define own knows relations for each person too. Such a reference may point to virtual identities like Twitter- or a ICQ-IDs. The FOAF vocabulary is not sufficient to represent all ACT² relations in the Artefact-Actor-Network. For instance, there exists no relation to specify the kind of relation between a person to its organization. For these special semantic relationships we have to extend the vocabulary, which can easily be achieved.

ART² relations provide information on how artefacts are connected. The Dublin Core standard and the SIOC project provide currently useful expedient kinds of relations. For example artefacts can reference other artefacts with references or an artefact can be a derivative of an artefact in an earlier version with isVersionOf. Also the relations hasPart and isPartOf are useful if artefacts exist of multiple parts. Furthermore, we can reuse the relation replaces stating that an artefact replaces another one and requires saying that another artefact is required to make use of the current one (e.g. a picture within a blog entry). The SIOC project provides a set of useful relations for the context of web applications like e-mails, blogs or bulletin boards. Three important relations to reuse are replyOf, which marks an artefact as the reply of another, linksTo, expressing the linkage between two artefacts, and nextVersion, if an artefact has multiple versions and to represent the history of it.

The last type of relation we use in the concept of Artefact- Actor-Networks are AA relations. This type of relation also has many different semantic shapes. They connect actors with their respective artefacts. For each artefact there exist a set of actors which have semantic relations to it, because artefacts will always be created, modified and annotated by different actors. Therefore, AA relations give information about the kind of conection between artefacts and actors. Like for ART² relations we can use Dublin Core and SIOC to get a basic set of sematic relations. The main relations in this context are creator, publisher and rightHolder. The main relations from the SIOC Project are creator, modifier and owner. The LOM standard was created for relations between learning objects and involved entities (persons or organisations). We can use metadata from the LOM standard that describe the way of participation in a learning object. Possible shapes of values are: author, publisher, editor or initiator.