Semantic Blogging and Semantic Portals 

These projects formed HP Labs contribution to SWAD-E. The main deliverables are:

• a live semantic portal at swed.org.uk and an ongoing semantic blog at http://www.semanticblogging.org/.
• Semantic blogging software (and project reports) available from download page
• Semantic Blogging published in Communications of the ACM and as an HP Labs Tech Report
• An overall lessons learnt report, pointing to earlier documents specific to semantic portals and  semantic blogging
• Other items of potential interest include the SWAD-E main site, wiki and blog.

Semantic Blogging

The central idea is to apply ideas, techniques and tools from the semantic web and apply them to blogging. Our intuition is that semantic principles can be applied to enrich and extend the blogging metaphor. We use the bibliography management domain to focus our efforts and to provide grounding for our demonstrator. However, we envisage that our efforts will be (or should be) applicable to more than just the bibliography domain. In addition, if we can show how the semantic web can add value, within the context of a pre-existing, popular and powerful metaphor, then it will make a convincing showcase for the semantic web.

Semantic Portals

The idea here is that semantic web technologies can be used to support a community with disparate conceptualisations about the same content. For example, take the Arkive repository, which is a multimedia repository for data on endangered species. This repository is of interest to a number of groups. School teachers need to relate the content to the UK national curriculum. Further education students might be interested in multimedia content depicting relevant animal behaviours. Researchers, whose interests may be specific to only some species or phyla, have requirements spanning behavioural, habitat and environmental issues. All these groups form a loose community who are interested in accessing the same content through a variety of semantic 'lenses'.

AIS and semantic query

The 'mutate and refine' metaphor used by artificial immune systems (AIS) is a promising candidate for query expansion on the semantic web. The semantic portal provided a useful dataset for this project. More details on the AIS page.

Semantic Blogging Student Project

We were lucky enough to have the services of a student from Imperial College London during summer 2003, William Kong,whose sterling work was invaluable in completing the semantic blogging demonstrator.