Facebook ( Open ) Graph and the Semantic Web

Facebook ( Open ) Graph
and the Semantic Web
Ideas around OpenGraph protocol and RDFa usage
with some possible future directions.

It’s all around the Social Object.

Matteo Brunati - dagoneye.it

Padua University - Italy - A lesson in the “Tecnologie Web2.0” course thanks to Massimo Marchiori

About me ( in italian )
on dagoneye.it

http://www.dagoneye.it
some english stuff on
http://www.dagoneye.it/blog/category/semantic-web/english/

This presentation is
about...
• Using Facebook OpenGraph to see how
RDFa is used
• Make a simple comparison with RDFa
standard usage
• introduction to Social Objects, the real “x-
factor” of the Web of Data
• Power to the people or to the Web2.0
platform? Let’s thinking about it

To a better understanding, don’t think pages,
think Social Objects in a Giant Global Graph

Linked Data
deﬁnition to a better
comprehension

http://linkeddata.jiscpress.org/tim-berners-lee%E2%80%99s-linked-data-principles/

events
people

things i like,
interests

Facebook connect people thanks to
shared interests and personal
informations

Facebook ﬁrst social graph
in 2006

Facebook Social
Graph with Social
Object in 2010

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2010/04/24/FacebooksOpenGraphProtocolFromAWebDevelopersPerspective.aspx

“We are building a web where the default is social.”

slide taken from http://www.slideshare.net/Saintsocial/facebook-open-graph-explained

From now on, any website can become part of the
Facebook ecosystem, outside of Facebook.com


The Web is more a social
creation, than
a technical one.

Sir Tim Berners Lee - 1999

Facebook wants to flood the web with these pieces of
functionality, adding a social skew to each and every site.



Every action taken through social plugins embedded
throughout the web will flow back to your profile, and
especially to the “Open graph”

Facebook Open Graph is an attempt to map all the complex interactions
existing between you, your friends and the content you all like = mapping
your interests and cross-interests.

It means that...
this kind
of
http://www.facebook.com/matteobrunati information is
IN the
cc:Likes Facebook
Platform

http://www.creativecommons.org

This graph around me is accessible from the new
GRAPH API, which links objects in the social graph via
CONNECTIONS...
URIs in effect

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api

a sort of RDF model?

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/api

so this triple with
the new Graph model
http://www.facebook.com/matteobrunati

https://graph.facebook.com/me/likes

http://www.creativecommons.org

Example of Open Like user experience

When “Mi piace” is clicked,
the object with the link
appears in my Facebook
proﬁle

When “Mi piace” is clicked,
the object with the link
appears in my Facebook
proﬁle

How Facebook knows the title and the site?

thanks to Metadata inserted in the page,
that transform the page in a Social Object...
wait... a Social Object?

http://gapingvoid.com/2007/12/31/social-objects-for-beginners/


https://graph.facebook.com/me/likes

Not the page, but the Social
Object inside that page

A movie titles “Fight Club”

This is the idea of
GGG,
the Giant
Global
Graph

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/tim-berners-lee-from-world-wide-web-to-giant-global-graph/7126

Metadata encoded with the new Open Graph Protocol:
a minimal RDFa implementation

http://opengraphprotocol.org/

Remember
the page on
the IMDB on
Fight Club?

IMDB Page source with OG,
the metadata

Let’s see metadata information using SIG.MA and SINDICE INSPECTOR
http://sindice.com/developers/inspector?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.imdb.com%2Ftitle%2Ftt0137523%2F#sigma

If the web page has no metadata
encoded using Open Graph Protocol,
Facebook show me only the title of that page

If the page has metadata
encoded using Open Graph Protocol and regular
Semantic Web vocabularies

http://www.metafora.it/leggi-internet/ﬁlirossi.html

http://sindice.com/developers/inspector/?url=http%3A%2F
%2Fwww.metafora.it%2Fleggi-internet%2Fﬁlirossi.html#triples

What are the differences on the usage of RDFa
between Facebook and W3C guidelines?

Facebook developers tried RDFa and thought that
is too complex, so they use it in a minimal form

1. URI -> property -> Literal value

Using the property attribute in RDFa, it means that
the object value in the RDF triple can be only a literal
value, a string of text.

2. One page -> One social object

The instructions for the webmasters for the usage of the
Open Graph Protocol are clear: one page, one social
object.
And with a lot of pages? Administration problems, caos...

Problems

URIs are universal identiﬁers,
labels and text are not

If Pages on different sites are around the same
Social Object

The property attribute makes the content value a literal,
not a WEB RESOURCE with an URI, so

how understand this kind of information?

Problems

The schema on opengraphprotocol is not
deferenceable. It’s only in HTML.

but the power of
decentralization of URIs
and the implicit web
capability of innovation
without consensus...
are with us .)

The Semantic Web community makes
the Scheme machine readable

http://github.com/facebook/open-graph-protocol/blob/master/schema.php

The Community makes some properties
of the Open Graph Protocol connected
with shared Semantic Web vocabularies
url property
<rdf:Property rdf:about="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/url">
<rdfs:label xml:lang="en-US">url</rdfs:label>
<rdfs:comment xml:lang="en-US">The canonical URL of your object that will be used as its
permanent ID in the graph, e.g., "http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/".</rdfs:comment>
<rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/homepage"/>
<rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/identifier"/>
<rdfs:isDefinedBy rdf:resource="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/"/>
</rdf:Property>

<rdf:Property rdf:about="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/type">
<rdfs:label xml:lang="en-US">type</rdfs:label>
<rdfs:comment xml:lang="en-US">The type of your object, e.g., "movie". Depending on the
type you specify, other properties may also be required.</rdfs:comment>
<rdfs:seeAlso rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type"/>
<rdfs:isDefinedBy rdf:resource="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/"/>
</rdf:Property>

type
property

Make a Web of Data from the new Facebook
Graph API that return JSON data with HTTP
URIs which are dereferencable

http://sam.tw.rpi.edu/ws/face_lod.html

Mapping inconsistencies with semweb vocabularies

http://sam.tw.rpi.edu/ws/face_lod.html

If we make assertions on things, we make
a relationship between things.
We need to speak about such relations.
We need ontologies.

slide taken from http://www.slideshare.net/Cloud/the-social-semantic-web

RDF power to make assertions
on everything using a graph

slide taken from http://www.slideshare.net/Cloud/the-social-semantic-web

Linking Open Graph term with
the Linked Data cloud, thanks
to ontologies

Linked Data cloud - http://linkeddata.org/

In the extreme view , the world can be seen as
only connections, nothing else.
We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning,
but it deﬁnes words only on terms of other words.

Original
World Wide
Web Proposal at
CERN in
1989-1990

It’s the Web, my dear .)

Others examples
of sites that use RDFa
in a complete way

Newsweek.com adopted full
RDFa metadata at the end of May 2010
( without Doctype declaration )

http://sindice.com/developers/inspector?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com

Newsweek page source with
RDFa

http://sindice.com/developers/inspector?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com#triples

Another example:
Ecommerce and
OpenGraph protocol,
thanks to the power
of RDF model

E-commerce ontology: GoodRelations

slides taken from http://www.slideshare.net/mhepp/web-page-optimization-for-facebook

GoodRelations + OpenGraph Protocol

slide taken from http://www.slideshare.net/mhepp/web-page-optimization-for-facebook

Data “on” the Web
vs
Data “in” the Web

The power of link:
how it can be used
http://webofdata.wordpress.com/2010/03/01/data-and-the-web-choices/

Making Linked Data

http://linkeddata.jiscpress.org/tim-berners-lee%E2%80%99s-linked-data-principles/

Don’t think Websites, think Data

Coloured lines are ontologies and balls are applications:
mapping the world without reinvent the wheel .)

Another example: advantages using Linked Data in a
tweet based on SMOB - http://smob.me/

My status is connected
on the URI of the Social
Object automatically,
thanks to Linked Data
automatism

thanks to Linked
Data, automatically topics
of the tweet are connected
with the colletive intelligence
of the Web, in a machine
readable form

Useful stuff
1. http://www.slideshare.net/dpalmisano/from-the-semantic-web-to-the-web-of-data-ten-years-of-linking-up
2. http://www.slideshare.net/Cloud/the-social-semantic-web
3. http://www.slideshare.net/mhepp/web-page-optimization-for-facebook
4. http://www.semanticweb.com/news/rdfa_momentum_continues_part_of_html5_160146.asp
5. http://linkeddata.deri.ie/services/tutorials/rdfa
6. http://jeffsayre.com/2010/02/24/a-ﬂock-of-twitters-decentralized-semantic-microblogging/
7. http://groups.google.com/group/open-graph-protocol
8. http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/
9. http://socialbits.net/blog/the-social-semantic-web/
10. http://www.slideshare.net/Saintsocial/facebook-open-graph-explained

Tools
a. http://sindice.com/developers/inspector/
b. http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/BestPractices/HTML/rdfa-bookmarklet/
c. http://rdfa.info/wiki/Tools

In Italian:
1. http://www.webprofession.it/group/semanticwebelinkeddata
2. http://www.titticimmino.com/2010/04/28/open-graph-facebook-e-lad-il-web-semantico-in-movimento/
3. http://www.dagoneye.it/blog/2010/04/26/facebook-open-graph-e-rdfa-il-grafo-come-modello-per-leggere-la-
metapiattaforma-del-web/
4. http://www.slideshare.net/dagoneye/i-ﬁli-rossi-di-apogeonline-in-versione-semantica-grazie-a-rdfa-prima-
parte

Thanks! Creative
Commons
License RDFa
powered
<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/">
<img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc/3.0/88x31.png" />
</a>
 

Facebook ( Open ) Graph and the Semantic Web
by

Matteo Brunati
is licensed under a
<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribuzione-Non commerciale 3
Unported License</a>.

dagoneye.it - matt [at] blog.dagoneye.it

Future directions for the next presentation:
some clues

Facebook
Social
Graph

Who controls that data?

What are the points of contact, me or the Platform?

What implies if i have my facebook social graph connected
in a personal way with the Linked Data cloud?

or in other words

people on the Web has
an URI under their own control
to take control of their digital
identity?


Making us the central point of contact, not
the Platform

making us a central point of contact with the Market,
mmm...VRM Vision enabled by Semantic Web “power to the
people”

http://www.brucemacvarish.com/2008/07/
customer-service-20-and-vrm---a-revisit.html

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projectvrm/
Main_Page

VRM can be the perfect scenario to
understand the power of changing our
attitude to the Market thanks to the Web at
full of its potential ( Semantic Web )

Taking control of our relationship in the Market

http://thebankwatch.com/2007/01/05/microformats-as-
information-brokers-revisited/

An Agent that can
manage my relationship
with Vendors...

More Power to the People in the Global Market

The Web is more a social
creation, than
Society
a technical one.
changes thanks to
innovations, thanks to
tecnology by people
that see this
change
Sir Tim Berners Lee - 1999

People centered Market is possible now with
the grow of decentralization of our personal social
objects graphs, if we are under control

VRM + Semantic Web
tools ideas: next
presentation with some
ideas around the future
of Advertising
Networks .)

Facebook ( Open ) Graph and the Semantic Web

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