Title: Sharing information across community portals with FOAFRealm

Authors: Slawomir Grzonkowski, Adam Gzella, Sebastian Ryszard Kruk, John G. Breslin, Tomasz Woroniecki, Jaroslaw Dobrzanski

Addresses: Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, IDA Business Park, Lower Dangan, Galway, Ireland. ' Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, IDA Business Park, Lower Dangan, Galway, Ireland. ' Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, IDA Business Park, Lower Dangan, Galway, Ireland. ' Department of Electronic Engineering; Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, IDA Business Park, Lower Dangan, Galway, Ireland. ' Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, IDA Business Park, Lower Dangan, Galway, Ireland. ' Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, IDA Business Park, Lower Dangan, Galway, Ireland; Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics, Gdansk University of Technology, Poland

Abstract: Community portals such as blogs, wikis and photo-sharing sites have become the new channels for information dissemination on the web. They contain a huge amount of valuable information that is often voluntarily delivered by experts. The most useful results of searching the web very often come from some sort of a community site. We present a method of sharing information across multiple community portals through a Social Semantic Collaborative Filtering (SSCF) system. It utilises FOAFRealm, a user profile management system which extends the popular |Friend of a Friend| (FOAF) metadata and enables users to share the bookmarks and community documents that they create. Moreover, the proposed solution allows both a seamless connection of different portals and the easy identification of contributors. We describe the required infrastructure, including the components that enable content sharing and browsing. Finally, we demonstrate a verification of our idea.

Keywords: online communities; information sharing; FOAFRealm; social semantic collaborative filtering; SSCF; community portals; web based communities; virtual communities; blogs; weblogs; wikis; photo-sharing sites; metadata; semantics; content browsing; content sharing.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2009.025212

International Journal of Web Based Communities, 2009 Vol.5 No.3, pp.351 - 370

Published online: 16 May 2009 *

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