Live Social Semantics

Abstract

Abstract. Social interactions are one of the key factors to the success of conferences and similar community gatherings. This paper describes a novel application that integrates data from the semantic web, online social networks, and a real-world contact sensing platform. This application was successfully deployed at ESWC09, and actively used by 139 people. Personal profiles of the participants were automatically generated using several Web 2.0 systems and semantic academic data sources, and integrated in real-time with face-to-face contact networks derived from wearable sensors. Integration of all these heterogeneous data layers made it possible to offer various services to conference attendees to enhance their social experience such as visualisation of contact data, and a site to explore and connect with other participants. This paper describes the architecture of the application, the services we provided, and the results we achieved in this deployment.

Face-to-Face Contacts at a Conference: Dynamics of Communities and Roles

“…Additionally, social contacts during a conference are often essential, e.g., for networking, and are often revisited after a conference, as are the visited talks. All of these steps are supported by the system CONFERATOR 3 : It is in joint development by the School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh (conference management component, as a refinement of the Conference Navigator [1]) and the Knowledge and Data Engineering group at the university of Kassel (social and ubiquitous PEERRADAR component).…”

“…The system is based on the UBICON framework 4 : The PEERRADAR is applied for managing social and ubiquitous/real contacts, supported by embedding social networks such as Facebook, XING, and LinkedIn, while the TALKRADAR enables the personalization of the conference program. Furthermore, active RFID proximity-tags, cf., [3], provide for detecting the location and contacts between conference participants.…”

“…Isella et al [8] conducted further experiments on a variety of contact networks obtained via RFID technology. Alani and colleagues, e.g., [3], also added contact information from social online networks in the live social semantics experiments. In [9], the authors analyze social dynamics of conferences focussing on the social activity of conference participants in those experiments.…”

Web Science: Understanding the Emergence of Macro-Level Features on the World Wide Web

“…Gathering similar resources can also support real-time analysis of communities. The Live Social Semantics initiative has studied information about communities gathering at academic conferences, including data about activities and tagging on SNSs, co-authorship networks and real-world contacts gathered using wearable sensors, to enable analyses of patterns of engagement, such as the relative networking patterns of senior and junior attenders [8,29].…”

Social Dynamics in Conferences: Analyses of Data from the Live Social Semantics Application

“…The Live Social Semantics (LSS) [3,16] is an innovative application that tracks and supports social networking between conference attendees. The application integrates data and technologies from the Semantic Web, online social networks, and a F2F contact sensing platform.…”