Tonight we started the closed beta of ginkgo, a cool new tool for the management of scientific events that also makes use of AANs.

ginkgo is no classical conference management system. It rather combines conference management functions with those known from social networking sites. The goal of ginkgo is to raise awareness of researchers, make the organization of scientific events easier and more fun. We are currently working hard on getting the last pieces together and providing you with a fresh approach to the management of scientific events pretty soon. In the meantime you might want to join the beta list, follow ginkgo on Twitter or Facebook or follow Julian and me on Twitter for latest updates.

Abstract:

The increasing agility of business requires an accelerated adaptation of organizations to continuously changing conditions. Individual and organizational learning are prominent means to achieve this. Hereby learning is always accompanied by the development of knowledge artifacts. For the entire of learning and artifact development the term knowledge maturing has been introduced recently, which focuses on these three manifestations of knowledge: cognifacts, sociofacts, and artifacts. In this paper we will focus on sociofacts as the subject-bound knowledge manifestation of social actions. Sociofacts are rooted in respective cognifacts play an independent role due to their binding to collective actions and subjects. These are particularly difficult to grasp but play a decisive role for the performance of organizations and the collaboration in there.The presented paper approaches the notion of sociofacts, discusses them on a theoretical level and establishes a first formal notation for sociofacts. We use the case of a merger between two companies to describe the advantages of sociofact analysis for such process. Some sociofact related problems during a merger are described and possible solutions are presented. We identify technical approaches for seizing sociofacts from tool-mediated social interaction and discuss open question for future research.

Reference:
Riss, Uwe, Magenheim, Johannes, Reinhardt, Wolfgang, Nelkner, Tobias, and Hinkelmann, Knut. “Added Value of Sociofact Analysis for Business Agility” AAAI Spring Symposium Series 2011. Available at: http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/SSS/SSS11/paper/view/2444.

Bookmark it on Mendeley

Driven from the fact that many people in my community are collecting data from social media (you remember all of our Twitter analysis and the cool Delicious visualizations, don’t you?) and always struggling with the question: where to get clean data from, the idea of soharc was born.

What you can do in soharc is fairly simple: you create your online profile with the handles you possess and we’ll create a dedicated page for you. You can create “scientific” events or projects and join them, so everybody who’s interested can see what you are doing. In order to support scientific awareness and solve the problem of how to get clean data, we’ll be soon offering a SWRC export of your social media profile and those of an event’s or project’s participants. This will allow the aggregation of social media data for analyses with multiple tools, done by different people and organizations based on a well-defined and user-generated dataset.

Cool, right? Let me know what you think about the social handle archive in the comments. I’d like to thank Peter Kraker and Gonzalo Parra for the chats we had on soharc and their alpha tests of the service.

The provided data will be used for social media analyses around conferences other scientific events or projects. Doing this will not only help us, it will additionally enhance your network opportunities during the conference and give more visibility to your academic work. The provision of such data is voluntary and you can delete your personal information at any time. This information will be publicly available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. If you like to make use of this data yourself, please do not hesitate to contact us.

NB: SWRC export is not yet enabled as we are discussing a new version of the ontology together with researchers from STELLAR and FZI.

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

For doing so we will ask attendees of scientific conferences (e.g. EC-TEL 2010 and ED-MEDIA 2010) to submit some of their online handles during the registration process. The organizers of the conferences will then send those online handles to our team so we can feed the AANalyzer application with the data. All data submitted will be exclusively used for the purpose of analyzing the structure and dynamics of a scientific community. Furthermore we will give all conference attendees access to the AANalyzer tool.

For now we are asking conference attendees for the following online handles:

• Twitter account
• Delicious account
• Slideshare account
• LinkedIn account
• Facebook account
• URL of their weblog

We’ll combine this information with data about location and affiliation of the conference attendees.

Furthermore we will try to monitor the TEL community. So if you feel like belonging to that community and are willing to participate in our studies feel free to contact me via the comments or by mail.

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…

Here are the slides from the talk. If you have any questions or comments, just let me know.

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.