Semantic Web of Linked Data deployment using Social Media Platforms

Last weekend marked the 10 year anniversary of the introduction of Hashtags to Twitter. They soon propagated to other social media enclaves such as Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

Unnoticed by many, this coincided with the adoption of Linked Data principles and production of 5-Star Linked Open Data across the same social media data spaces.

Hashtags are aesthetically-friendly HTTP URIs scoped to a specific service for topic identification. Basically, they are words (in fact, terms, since they resolve to documents that describe whatever they identify, i.e., their referents).

How HTTP URIs (Hyperlinks) Facilitate Unambiguous Identification

Why is any of this important?

Control over identity and content remains a challenge for every Social Media user. Luckily, the underlying design of the Web provides functionality that addresses this challenge, once it’s understood.

5-Star Linked Data Deployment leveraging Hashtags

Place a few RDF sentences, following the template below, within braces (“{}”) and you have a collection of statements that represent your profile across any social media space, courtesy of Nanotation.

</{LocalUserIDorHandle}#this>
   a  schema:Person ;
   schema:name  "{Your Name}" ;
   schema:mainEntityOfPage  </{LocalUserIDorHandle}> ;
   schema:sameAs  </{LocalUserIDorHandle}> .

Live Example using This Medium Post

{
  <>
     a  schema:WebPage ;
     schema:about  </kidehen#this> ;
     skos:related  <#Nanotation>,  <#SemanticWeb>, 
                   <#LinkedData>,  <#WebID>, 
                   <#Identity>,  <#HashTag10> .
  </kidehen#this>
     a  schema:Person ;
     schema:name  “Kingsley Uyi Idehen” ;
     schema:mainEntityOfPage  </kidehen> ;
     schema:sameAs  </kidehen> .
}

Here’s a visualization of the sentences above, courtesy of our Structured Data Sniffer.

Medium Example

Visualizing the effects of copying and pasting the same sentences to a Facebook post.

And the very same approach in a LinkedIn post, with identical results.

Here’s the same thing via a post on Quora.

In addition, I can then add a few additional sentences, using predicates that leverage Relationship Types (relations) that handle equivalence:

{
  </#kidehen> 
     owl:sameAs  <https://www.linkedin.com/kidehen#this> , 
                 <https://www.facebook.com/kidehen#this> , 
                 <https://www.twitter.com/kidehen#this>, 
                 <https://www.quora.com/profile/Kingsley-Uyi-Idehen#this> . 
}

These are visualized as in the depiction below.

Use of owl:sameAs Relationship Type Semantics to inform a human or machine about my various WebIDs

Conclusion

I can load the 5-Star Linked Data created in this page into my own Virtuoso instance (a multi-model RDBMS that supports both SQL and SPARQL query languages) for additional processing. In addition, I have full control over who ultimately has access to my data, courtesy of fine-grained attribute-base access controls.

Finally, despite questionable marketing, inevitable politics, and immense amounts of confusion, the notion of a Semantic Web of Linked Data has both survived and grown exponentially — all of which has happened in stealth mode without a grandiose “Semantic Web of Linked Data has arrived!” day.

Related

• Linked Data Principles
• Linked Data & Hashtags Explained in a Single Slide — Tim Berners-Lee Presentation excerpt (circa 2005)
• 5-Star Linked Open Data
• LinkedIn Post Example
• What is a Hashtag, really?
• What is Nanotation?
• Simple 5-Star Linked Data Tutorial
• Generating a Semantic Web of Linked Data from a Tweet
• A Semantic Web and Artificial Intelligence
• Sentences & Notations
• Using Relationship Type Semantics to Reconcile Disparate Identities
• Controlled Access to Linked Open Data using Attribute-based Access Controls
• About Virtuoso