Social Networking to Support Researchers at Minority Serving Institutions Marlon Pierce Community Grids Lab Indiana University
Social Networking to Support Researchers at
Minority Serving Institutions
Marlon Pierce
Community Grids Lab
Indiana University
Acknowledgements
Geoffrey Fox (PI)Joshua Rosen (Developer)Siddharth Maini (Developer)Part of MSI-CIEC, an NSF OCI CITEAM
Funded Project http://www.msi-ciec.org/eduwiki/index.php/Main_P
ageThanks to Dr. Alex Ramirez of MSI-CIEC for
feedback and guidance.
Challenges for MSI Researchers
We need in general a portal/gateway to online community services geared specifically for (MSI) faculty and researchers. Support their communications: identifying solicitations,
forming or joining teams, writing proposals, etc. Enable them to identify interesting projects and people.
Our general philosophy is that the broad range of Web 2.0 services provides the necessary capabilities MySpaces, Facebook, Flickr, Imagelooop, Google Docs, etc.
And you can build on collaboration software Sakai, Moodle, MediaWiki, Drupal, …
We concluded that these sorts of collaborations should really be a sophisticated mashup.
Shared Bookmarking for Social Networks
Our kernel project is to support tagging and online shared bookmarking. Pioneered by del.icio.us in 2003 (!)
Bookmarking services allow you to Share links (URLs) with networks of friends Organize your links by mnemonic tags Find other interesting URLs by popularity (most bookmarked) Find interesting URLs by keywords
When used collectively, tags form folksonomies. “Pave the cow paths” Typically about tagged URLs. But also about people who tag. Semantic Web Lesson: everything is a URI.
Drag and Drop Feature
You can Drag and Drop any menu items between left and right navigational
menu
Scriptaculous, Flex, etc
Tag SystemURLs are bookmarked by usersUsers describe these bookmarks with
descriptive tagsThese tag/bookmark relationships form a graph
that can be navigated Tag Yahoo with “search” If you look up “search”, Google has the same tag. Google is also tagged with “video”…
Walk the graph through the Internet, or through databases (as we will see)
Bookmark (drag or right-click)
Personalized Bookmarklet when you Login appears
Either Drag it into the Bookmark menu in Firefox or
Right-click and “Book this Link”
Searching the tag “research” gives a list of other users with this tag. Click the user name to navigate to the profile.
Harvesting NSF Tags
Harvesting NSF information to seed the system with relevant
proposal information.
Populating Tags with NSF Grant Information
The NSF Awards web site is a good source for data to import and convert into tags
We believe tagging will add value. Tagging gives you alternative paths through
database. Walk a graph
Tagging bridges multiple resources (databases, URLs, etc).
Ex: TeraGrid user database has overlap with nsf.gov on OCI users.
NSF Grants Tag SystemNSF has the ability to get information on all of the
grants a particular person worked on (in XML)We downloaded, parsed, and bookmarked this
info using a little scavenger robot. Each grant is represented by a bookmark and tagged
(using namespaces) with relevant information Grant tags point to URLs of the NSF award page.
The investigators are imported as users Each has a bookmark for each project they
worked on They are also represented in the tags of these projects.
Grant 1
Joe Smith
Large Award
Joe Smith
John Doe
sbe directorate
NSF Tag System Example
Grant 2
John Doe
John DoeSmall Award
A. Einstein
A. Einstein
NSF Tag NavigationYou can start at a user or a grantYou find “which grants has this user worked
on” or “which users worked on this grant”In this way, you can find users by crawling
from user to grant and vice versaAlso, you can use the tags to narrow your
search (e.g. only large awards, only a certain directorate)
We are working on a system to use tags to successively refine searches.
Looking Forward: Tagging Profiles, Folksonomies, and
MatchmakingSocial bookmarking sites are generally
geared toward managing URLs.But you can also use it to find like-minded
people with shared tagging profiles. Ex: LibraryThing.com
More direct social networking: LinkedIn, Facebook,
Tag clustering can also be investigated as a CS problem: Clustering, machine learning
More Information
[email protected] portal will debut at SC07
General bookmarking and NSF grant information tagging.
RSS Feeds and “click tagging”
Future Work: Matchmaking and Graphs
Now that we have a substantial amount of tags, we can investigate graph operations.
These are classic CS problems in clustering and machine learning.
We hope in this way to build recommendation systems: Find other users with similar research interests
(tagging profiles). Potentially interesting to tie this to scholarly journal
search engines.
Third Party Software Connotea used as a backing bookmark manager. Scriptaculous - A javascript framework incorporating animation effects and ajax functionality. - Used in interface for animations and page loading Pear - PHP framework to facilitate uses of xml, databases, and various other
functions - Used to interface with database Flex - Being used for advanced animated effects and navigation interface PHPClasses.org - a website that allows users to share classes and functions they created - A ‘queue’ class was adapted for use in the NSF loader - A ‘rssGenerator’ class is being used to create various rss feeds OpenKapow RoboMaker - Allows the creation of navigation robots to create REST and RSS services - Used in news rss feed and some other planned services
Internal Messaging / E-mail system
To send messagesReceive messagesContact GroupsOr some better way to communicate with
groups or each other
More Information
Portal snapshot is available from http://gf14.ucs.indiana.edu/
See demos at Supercomputing 2007Contact me: [email protected]