[drupal-devel] Google Summer of Code: Social context of content
Hello, please review this proposal and provide feedback for consideration as a Google summer of code project for Drupal. The social context of content is important in evaluating content. User questions this is trying to answer: Who is the person everybody reads? Who was there when the subject of the content happened? What are your friends reading? What is relevant for your next social meeting? What it is the socially relevancy of media such as pictures or video? The goal of this project is to allow for the descriptions of content in a social context and to automatically discover the social context of content. The first phase will be to create a standard set of social tags for describing individuals, their relationships, and their activities. These descriptions will be done using the taxonomic tagging module in Drupal and it's forthcoming customer relationship management module. The automated discovery of the social context of content will be the second phase. This will allow social context to be derived from information that is available but not coordinated. This will include user page views, authorship, number of reads, response rate weighting, interaction of buddy list contacts, social weight of readers, responders social weight , events, locative information, volunteer, and invitation information which are all currently available in Drupal modules. Why this is innovative? Content management has currently focused on supporting varieties of content, transcoding content, and integration of content with other systems but has done little to state why it is socially relevant to people. This project aims to enable producers, consumers, and managers of content to describe content in a socially relevant manner. It also aims to discover how users want to describe the social context of content and how they prefer to consume that information. Drupal's well defined schema allows for discovery of social context in structured data that is presented to users in an unstructured way. Deliverables Part I: Social context tagging An open standard for referencing individuals, their relationships, and their activities. This will be an open standard for Community Relationship Management based on the CiviCRM open standard, SugarCRM, foaf, xfn, rojo (proprietary), aura (codecon 2005), and SalesForce for non-profits. A database file with this standard taxonomy, and possible folksonomy extensions. An interface for the module which allows social context tags to be effectively displayed with content. An interface for allowing users to add social context tags or extend their own tags. Part II: Automatic discovery of social context. A module that drills across content management tables for social context information and creates a table with the total social context of content nodes. This will be done in off-line batch modes as a series of data warehousing style queries. This will be architected to include queries to other data marts. Interested Googlers who would benefit from this open source project Danah Boyd from Blogger and Ellen Spertus from Orkut would be able to benefit from research into social context prototypes. Academic references This project was inspired at the Computer Human Interaction conference 2005. One paper from Microsoft described the need for social context of content in Microsoft Outlook rather than meta-data such as file size, date, and urgency. One paper in the short papers section described how a photo of young people in a car on a trip could be socially relevant because it could have been the author's nephew who died on a similar car trip. This illustrates the power of social context of content. A paper from Microsoft analyzing Usenet post meta-data showed that power users were most interested in what the most respected people in a community were saying. References to papers and academic relevancy will be added to this proposal.
Hi Kieran, It rocks. Is this an individual's application or are you proposing we put it on the SoC pages and hope that someone applies for it? Do you know anyone who would be interested in applying? If this is a suggestion for a project that we should be doing please add it to the SoC page quickly as the application deadline is the 14th and I've noticed a marked slowing in the number of people mailing me with applications to review. If we want to get people to apply for this project then we not only have to move quickly but also put word out on the grapevine that we want applicants. -Robert Kieran Lal wrote:
Hello, please review this proposal and provide feedback for consideration as a Google summer of code project for Drupal.
The social context of content is important in evaluating content.
User questions this is trying to answer: Who is the person everybody reads? Who was there when the subject of the content happened? What are your friends reading? What is relevant for your next social meeting? What it is the socially relevancy of media such as pictures or video?
The goal of this project is to allow for the descriptions of content in a social context and to automatically discover the social context of content. The first phase will be to create a standard set of social tags for describing individuals, their relationships, and their activities. These descriptions will be done using the taxonomic tagging module in Drupal and it's forthcoming customer relationship management module. The automated discovery of the social context of content will be the second phase. This will allow social context to be derived from information that is available but not coordinated. This will include user page views, authorship, number of reads, response rate weighting, interaction of buddy list contacts, social weight of readers, responders social weight , events, locative information, volunteer, and invitation information which are all currently available in Drupal modules.
Why this is innovative? Content management has currently focused on supporting varieties of content, transcoding content, and integration of content with other systems but has done little to state why it is socially relevant to people. This project aims to enable producers, consumers, and managers of content to describe content in a socially relevant manner. It also aims to discover how users want to describe the social context of content and how they prefer to consume that information. Drupal's well defined schema allows for discovery of social context in structured data that is presented to users in an unstructured way.
Deliverables Part I: Social context tagging An open standard for referencing individuals, their relationships, and their activities. This will be an open standard for Community Relationship Management based on the CiviCRM open standard, SugarCRM, foaf, xfn, rojo (proprietary), aura (codecon 2005), and SalesForce for non-profits. A database file with this standard taxonomy, and possible folksonomy extensions. An interface for the module which allows social context tags to be effectively displayed with content. An interface for allowing users to add social context tags or extend their own tags. Part II: Automatic discovery of social context. A module that drills across content management tables for social context information and creates a table with the total social context of content nodes. This will be done in off-line batch modes as a series of data warehousing style queries. This will be architected to include queries to other data marts.
Interested Googlers who would benefit from this open source project Danah Boyd from Blogger and Ellen Spertus from Orkut would be able to benefit from research into social context prototypes.
Academic references This project was inspired at the Computer Human Interaction conference 2005. One paper from Microsoft described the need for social context of content in Microsoft Outlook rather than meta-data such as file size, date, and urgency. One paper in the short papers section described how a photo of young people in a car on a trip could be socially relevant because it could have been the author's nephew who died on a similar car trip. This illustrates the power of social context of content. A paper from Microsoft analyzing Usenet post meta-data showed that power users were most interested in what the most respected people in a community were saying. References to papers and academic relevancy will be added to this proposal.
The social context of content is important in evaluating content.
I totally agree It is an interesting and very useful proposal. I add a few random add-ons and questions complementing your writeup. They concern more the content neighbourhood, as defined by people interested in a subject. Some of them might be really tough from text-mining point of view, but nevertheless I think they are important to keep things in perspective
User questions this is trying to answer: Who is the person everybody reads? Who was there when the subject of the content happened? What are your friends reading? What is relevant for your next social meeting? What it is the socially relevancy of media such as pictures or video? Who else is interested in this subject? What's new on this subject? veiwpoint?
The goal of this project is to allow for the descriptions of content in a social context and to automatically discover the social context of content. The first phase will be to create a standard set of social tags for describing individuals, their relationships, and their activities. These descriptions will be done using the taxonomic tagging module in Drupal and it's forthcoming customer relationship management module. The automated discovery of the social context of content will be the second phase. This will allow social context to be derived from information that is available but not coordinated. This will include user page views, authorship, number of reads, response rate weighting, interaction of buddy list contacts, social weight of readers, responders social weight , events, locative information, volunteer, and invitation information which are all currently available in Drupal modules.
Why this is innovative? Content management has currently focused on supporting varieties of content, transcoding content, and integration of content with other systems but has done little to state why it is socially relevant to people. This project aims to enable producers, consumers, and managers of content to describe content in a socially relevant manner. It also aims to discover how users want to describe the social context of content and how they prefer to consume that information. Drupal's well defined schema allows for discovery of social context in structured data that is presented to users in an unstructured way.
Deliverables Part I: Social context tagging An open standard for referencing individuals, their relationships, and their activities. This will be an open standard for Community Relationship Management based on the CiviCRM open standard, SugarCRM, foaf, xfn, rojo (proprietary), aura (codecon 2005), and SalesForce for non-profits. A database file with this standard taxonomy, and possible folksonomy extensions. An interface for the module which allows social context tags to be effectively displayed with content. An interface for allowing users to add social context tags or extend their own tags. Part II: Automatic discovery of social context. A module that drills across content management tables for social context information and creates a table with the total social context of content nodes. This will be done in off-line batch modes as a series of data warehousing style queries. This will be architected to include queries to other data marts. Decentralised content discovery? Content propagation? Discovery of a context neighbourhood?
Interested Googlers who would benefit from this open source project Danah Boyd from Blogger and Ellen Spertus from Orkut would be able to benefit from research into social context prototypes.
Academic references This project was inspired at the Computer Human Interaction conference 2005. One paper from Microsoft described the need for social context of content in Microsoft Outlook rather than meta-data such as file size, date, and urgency. One paper in the short papers section described how a photo of young people in a car on a trip could be socially relevant because it could have been the author's nephew who died on a similar car trip. This illustrates the power of social context of content. A paper from Microsoft analyzing Usenet post meta-data showed that power users were most interested in what the most respected people in a community were saying. References to papers and academic relevancy will be added to this proposal.
Vlado, thanks for you feedback. Before I add your comments let me ask a couple clarifying questions to make sure I understand your additions.
What's new on this subject? veiwpoint? -I understand why this is useful, but is this really related to social context. Social context of content does not require categorizing the subject of viewpoint of content.
node A -Fosdem node B -Fosdem node A and node B might not have similar subjects. Do you mean what's new on this social context? i.e if node C -Fosdem then you could see the latest content for a social context of Fosdem?
Decentralised content discovery? Correct. This is the major thrust, can we apply a common set of labels across data sources with common dimensions(descriptions) so that we can discover social context.
Example: Users table Contact table Contact manager table Buddylist table XFN hypthetable CiviCRM-table Profile-table They could all have an e-mail field and be mapped to a common label e- mail, with a common description. Therefore any new data source say Aura, that complies with the e-mail label, and description could be discovered through a cross query of that data source. However, that capability would fall clearly outside what was possible for a summer's worth of development.
Content propagation? I suspect that content propagation is outside the scope of social context but please explain further if you think it is relevant. Discovery of a context neighbourhood? I assume you are talking about some form of statistical technique for weighting or clustering common social context terms. Great idea, but I think that just getting the social content to be manually added and extracted from solid relationships will be a summers worth of work.
Several of these are great Phase III, Phase IV type projects. I'd be happy to add them if you wanted to help flush out the deliverables, that would probably have to go to other students. Cheers, Kieran
Vlado, thanks for you feedback. Before I add your comments let me ask a couple clarifying questions to make sure I understand your additions. I'm not sure if I am not overdoing it. Maybe I'm widening the scope. If it is the case ignore me.
I have the understanding that the social context, i.e who knows whom, who trusts whom on what topic is useful, if it helps us improve the delivery or filtering of content for particular people, with particular interests.
What's new on this subject? veiwpoint? I understand why this is useful, but is this really related to social context. Social context of content does not require categorizing the subject of viewpoint of content. It is very far fetched, the way I see it. For example: a controversial issue, let's say election, Bush vs Kerry viewpoint would be election coverage from Bush, kerry or neutral supporters. I'm not sure how this could be done though. It is hard to achieve. But good to keep in mind for future.
Decentralised content discovery? Correct. This is the major thrust, can we apply a common set of labels across data sources with common dimensions(descriptions) so that we can discover social context.
Example: Users table Contact table Contact manager table Buddylist table XFN hypthetable CiviCRM-table Profile-table I would add referral or recommendation, which can nicely fit with the above. For example A recommends B to C. Again the identification of A could be done by any of the methods you mention.
Content propagation? I suspect that content propagation is outside the scope of social context but please explain further if you think it is relevant. It is related to referral I mentioned before. Consider a chain of RSS aggregators. With a referral filter on a subject.
A->rss-feed->filter1->B->rss-feed->filter2... This can be useful for discovering content
Discovery of a context neighbourhood? I assume you are talking about some form of statistical technique for weighting or clustering common social context terms. Great idea, but I think that just getting the social content to be manually added and extracted from solid relationships will be a summers worth of work. true, this is far fetched
Several of these are great Phase III, Phase IV type projects. I agree that probably it is better to keep the things close to the ground, to ensure the foundations. Again it's good to have a view of the "big picture".
I'd be happy to add them if you wanted to help flush out the deliverables, that would probably have to go to other students. Please explain, I can definitely help with some of that. I'm working on some related ideas of my own, but it is early days.
participants (3)
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Kieran Lal -
Robert Douglass -
vlado