Research Work: Formalizing Tagging

Taxonomy of Tagging

After looking at numerous publications and web content over the internet I am going to write the first edition of findings. While we sometimes refer to social tagging systems as a coherent set of applications, it is clear that differences between tagging systems have a significant amount of influence on resultant tags and information dynamics. It is also clear that the personal and social incentives that prompt individuals to participate affect the system itself in various ways. Therefore we can classify the tagging into two taxonomies such as
1. Characteristics of system design and
2. User incentives and motivations may influence the resultant tags in a tagging system
I’ll write about the user incentives and motivations in my later post. For now let’s talk about the Characteristics of system design. The design of the system may solicit tagging useful for discovery, retrieval, remembrance, social interaction, or possibly, all of the above. After reading the literature related to tagging system and the concepts around it, I have used some dimensions that may have direct and considerable effect on the content of the tags. Some of the dimensions are as under:
Tagging Rights:
Possibly the most important characterization of a tagging system design is the system’s restriction in certain scenarios. For instance, systems can choose the resources users are to tag (such as images in the ESP Game) or specify different levels of permissions to tag. As of now we are using Facebook integration to authenticate and display the list of user’s Facebook friends Likewise, systems can determine who may remove a tag, whether no one (e.g., Yahoo! Podcasts), anyone (e.g., Odeo), the tag creator (e.g., Last.fm) or the resource owner (e.g., Flickr). At the moment we have given rights to the resource owner and the person who is tagged.
Tagging Support:
According to the categories described by Cameron et al, our system falls in the category of viewable tagging, where the users can see the tags already associated with a resource (photo).
Aggregation:
This attribute is more of a future work thing, where the tags assigned to a particular resource can be used for the accuracy and in determining relationships between users, tags and resources.
Type of Object:
We are focusing on the photos, so images can be tagged wherever they are on a web page. Moreover, people can tag objects e.g a can of coke, this idea is potentially a business/revenue generating idea.
Source of material:
Resources to be tagged can be supplied by the participants (e.g., YouTube, Flickr, Technorati, Upcoming), by the system (e.g., ESP Game, Last.fm, Yahoo! Podcasts), or, alternatively, a system can be open for tagging any web resource (image).

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News: Facebook Launches the New and Improved Photo Tagging

You can now tag photos with the names of pages, in addition to people on your friends list who haven’t opted out of the capability in their security settings. This drastically improves upon even the promised enhancements originally announced in the middle of December, making the feature very much worth the extra wait.

tagging photo
tag, facebook tagging

Like these images above demonstrate, the actual rollout of improved photo tagging differs from the appearance of the originally promised improvements but the differences are all for the better.

The new tags offer page administrators a way to get mentioned more frequently in people’s news feeds.

To tag pictures, click on the link labeled photo on any of your friends’ profiles or on pages you’re already a fan of — and onlly on pages within the categories of brands, products or people.

Within the photo viewer, you can see the tagging option, which prompts with suggestions of names of both friends who allow themselves to be tagged along with pages you already like.
Fellows, what do you think of the newly available photo tagging improvements — in context of our project?

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Personas and Scenarios

In this post I have captured some possible scenarios of our project, since its targeting both the end users and the social enterprise; I have considered scenarios from both perspectives. Let’s name some of the potential users of our product, the most obvious would a general internet user who is socially active via the online communities, the next user could be a blog owner or a webmaster who blogs considerable amount of photos, similarly other users could be a new social networking website entering the market or an existing social network revisiting its value to the customer like Facebook etc.

Scenario 1:

Actor: Blog owner

Context: A blogger could be any one from a photographer to a software architect at Microsoft. All the webmasters and site owners can be the potential users of our system wherever they use the photos for different purposes.

Scenario: Consider a website owner who is used to upload lots of images on the website. So the scenario would be the owner using our system to tag the photos that are being displayed on his/her website. That way the people can be tagged not only on a particular social network but anywhere on the World Wide Web. This would save the site owner the troubles of uploading the pictures again to his/her preferred social network and then tagging it to share it with friends.

Scenario 2:

Actor: A new social network, enterprise

Context: An entrepreneur or an enterprise is going to launch a new social networking website which has some new and valued solutions for the end users.

Scenario: a good idea makes the business boom because of the value it caters to the customers. Therefore our system presents the added value to any new coming social network and that value is the “cross site photo tagging”. Any newly emerging social enterprise can use this to market their product.

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Establishing ownership of a domain

In order to allow a site owner to control settings about tagging on their site/images, we first need to establish who they are. To do this we decided to follow the same model used by Google Apps and a number of other services.

While taggr can be used with any website just by inserting the relevant HTML into the page, to have full control over moderation of users/tags, control of which images are taggable, etc. the webmaster will need to link their domain to their taggr account.

To do this they would add a <meta> tag to the website. We chose this rather than the other options used by Google (TX Record or uploading a file with specific content) because of the large amounts of blogs which are stored in subdirectories rather than subdomains. Most of the 150+ million blog owners would be unable to establish ownership of their website if we required a file upload or TX record.

Each subdomain can be assigned to a different owner to its parent, otherwise it defaults to inheriting the ownership from the parent.

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Decentralisation through the help of Semantic Web Technologies.

Social networking sites now are limited to the management of user accounts that are present in their own network. But there is a need to address the cross networking linkage where a user doesn’t have to bother about the multiple login credentials for logging into one of the other social websites.

To enable this functionality to happen, we need to give access to the multiple sites, in terms of 1) identification of personal profiles and friend networks and 2) user contents that are expressed on each site. This task is made easy by the representation mechanism that connects people. The semantic web finds a solution to the above mentioned problems by FOAF and SIOC.

The FOAF project provides a way of representing social network data in a machine readable way because for each of the people and their relationships in the social web sites there is always some ontology that is defined. That means that every such site which exports the RDF related information has a unique FOAF representation of the users.

For example, each person in a network has a FOAF instance like :- “foaf:Person” with a unique URI. Each of those instance will have some properties like “foaf:name”, “foaf:nickname” and ”foaf:birthday”.

The following code snippet will give a idea about the above mentioned points for the profile created in flickr using FOAF:-

flickr:33669349@N00 a foaf:Person ;

foaf:name “Deep Ray” ;

foaf:mbox_sha1sum “528b95cc44060ceea571d7498a9fd2c7e3ca8a4c” .

foaf:knows flickr:32233977@N00 .

In order to consolidate the data of the distributed profiles from the different sites, we take the help of the property such as “owl:sameAs” which is used to identify two resources that have completely two different URI but they belong to one person who is having accounts at different social web sites.  Thus people can refer to one main FOAF URI which can be described by other automatically generated FOAF profile which links to other existing profile.

:me owl:sameAs flickr:33669349@N00 ;

owl:sameAs twitter:terraces ;

owl:sameAs facebook:foaf-607513040.rdf#me .

The other way of doing this is by using the concept of SIOC where online community forms such as blogs,message boards and mailing lists are described and linked. SIOC also lets developers to link user created content items to other related items, to people and to topics.

For example, a SIOC exporter plugin for a blog engine would create a SIOC

RDF representation of every blog post and comment, including information

about:

– the content of a post (sioc:content)

– the author (sioc:has creator)

– the creation / update date (dct:created / dct:updated)

– tags and categories (sioc:topic)

– all comments on the post (sioc:has reply)

– information about the container blog (sioc:has container)

References: – Uldis Bojars, Alexandre Passant, John G. Breslin, Stefan Decker. Social Network and Data Portability using Semantic Web Technologies.

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What’s being Researched on Decentralised Social Networking

1. Decentralisation: The Future of Online Social Networking

Problems Addressed:-

Potential privacy and Information access limited to respective social networking sites.

Suggested Solution: –

A decentralised social networking framework.

Advantages:-

  • High level of user interaction.
  • Users have higher control of their data.
  • Based on Linked data as suggested by Sir Lee 2006.
  • Application and data linked via URL.

Citation:-

Yeung, C. & Liccardi, I & Lu, K. & Seneviratne, O. & Lee, T.B, “Decentralization: The Future of Online Social Networking”, Decentralized Information Group, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, US

2. A Decentralised Social Networking Infrastructure

Problems Addressed:-

Loss of data ownership in social networks once shared.

Suggested Solution:-

A decentralised PrPI infrastructure prototype.

Advantages:-

  • Prevents loss of ownership of data.
  • Decentralised OpenID management system.
  • Person centric architecture.
  • Better privacy settings.

Citation:-

Seong, S. & Seo, S. & Nasielski, M. & Sengupta, D. & Hangal, S. & Teh, S. & Chu, R., “PrPl: A Decentralized Social Networking Infrastructure”, MCS 10 Proceedings of the 1st ACM Workshop on Mobile Cloud Computing & Services: Social Networks and Beyond ACM New York, NY, USA 2010

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What’s new with Decentralised Social Networking

Four Nerds and a Cry to Arms Against Facebook
Diaspora is what they call it. Four college geeky students thought of developing a decentralised social network which will not be centralised to any business giant like Facebook. They say “We talk to our friends directly, then why we have to submit our feeds to a centralised server and then wait for them to distribute it to our friends?”
The Diaspora team has already raised $23,676 for the development of Diaspora over a span of 2-3 month.
News Link:-
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/nyregion/12about.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss
Related Video:-

OneSocialWeb: We’re Ahead Of Diaspora In The Creation Of An ‘Open Facebook’

Decentralised web is not only used by Diaspora In fact, another  group called as OneSocialWeb is working on “free open decentralised social networking platform”. Though, OneSocialWeb was unsuccessful to catch more eyes in the market, but they are claiming that they are far ahead then Diaspora in terms of  concept and implementation.

News Link:-

http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/13/onesocialweb-were-ahead-of-diaspora-in-the-creation-of-an-open-facebook/

Related Video:-

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Peer to Peer

Peer-to-peer is “The sharing of computer resources and services by direct exchange between systems” (Ding, et al., 2004). This was initially created to allow for higher performance by connecting computers together directly without needing to be coordinated by a central server (which would have to be very powerful to coordinate a large number of computers). This had the side effect of creating decentralised networks where no computer is more powerful than the others, with each node on the network storing it’s own data and nodes managing trust of each other to decide which other nodes to work with.

Peer-to-peer technologies are often associated with piracy due to the early uses by the likes of Napster and later KaZaa, however they have more recently been used by projects as diverse as medical research, search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, or even distributed currencies.

Through discussion we decided that having a centralised store of the tags would dissuade other companies from using the system due to the fact that they often like to be in control of their own data. A peer-to-peer system ensures that even if someone wanted to take control of the tags they could not as the other peers could simply start ignoring that node.

Most peer to peer systems use their own binary protocol for communications although some standardised communication protocols exist which are open, such as Sun JXTA. This project has not really caught on and complete implementations only exist for C and Java. JXTA is XML based and as such is quite verbose – a quality which is not really needed in a high performance peer-to-peer network.

It is likely that the servers in the etags system will use a custom (but standardised) protocol to communicate. Possibly using HTTP (so that implementations could be created using entirely web-based languages such as PHP), although this imposes its own overhead on communication so this may need to be avoided. More details about the protocol will be published on this blog when they are known.

For now, one potential problem with a decentralised tag store as we have proposed is that whenever a server is attempting to find out if another servers “owns” a user’s data, it is possibly that a malicious server could claim ownership of every user, and establish itself as a very important node on the network. This could be avoided by first posting the “looking for the owner” request with a hashed version of the user’s identification, and the server claiming ownership must respond with the identifying information hashed using a different algorithm. This would prove that both servers know the user and will stop faking.

Ding, C. H., Nutanong, S., & Buyya, R. (2004, February 10). P2P Networks for Content Sharing. arXiv.org.

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Privacy settings

Privacy is a big concern when grouping photographs of people together. Facebook has very complex privacy settings to decide who can see which photos and we need to consider this carefully.

First to be considered is the privacy of the image owner, who may not want his photos tagged. This is solved via the permissions as mentioned in the post “Who is allowed to tag?”.

Next, it must be considered that some users do not wish to be tagged, and these could be opted-out through a simple button on the website, this would show them as disabled when someone attempts to tag them (so that they don’t think it’s just a bug in the software missing them from the list).

Apart from users who have opted out completely, it is also important to ensure that people can only tag other users who they have some relationship with. For the case of etags we will consider facebook friends, twitter “friends” (who you are both following, and being followed by), and other standard definitions of “friends” as being taggable.

When trying to view tags on a photograph, we will follow the Facebook model of showing every tag on the photograph regardless of privacy settings, even to unauthenticated users. This is because managing privacy of showing only some tags on a photograph would be excessively complication. This may change in a future version of the software depending on demand.

When viewing photographs of a particular user, it will be checked that the users are linked by a friendship on at least one social network. This is a very simple model and is not nearly as powerful as facebook. It can be a target of future work to ensure that the privacy model is more complete before releasing the software.

When a user removes a tag of themselves from a photograph, they can not be tagged again on that photograph – this is consistant with the way currently existing tagging systems work.

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Week 8

Today we were joined by Richard Gomer, who is acting as a critical friend to Tag4Fun and provides an external viewpoint on the project.

This week we started by discussing and finalising the scope of idea. There were some concerns about the decentralisation being too much additional work on top of the front end, although we came to an agreement that the scope should be fixed at the current point (decentralised open-source storage and commercial front end).

We also discussed a number of technical details such as how the servers storing the tags communicate ownership of a domain or user, and how a site owner specifies which server they wish to use. This showed that it isn’t specified clearly enough on the blog presently and we will work to explain it better in future blog posts.

We realised that privacy has not been covered in enough detail on the blog and if anyone is to take this project seriously we need to clearly state how privacy will be protected. This includes who is allowed to tag another person, who is allowed to remove that tag, and who is allowed to view tags (and in what way). This will be covered on the blog soon.

The browser plugin, which was a big part of the original project vision but has been neglected recently in favour of the decentralisation portion, was mentioned again. The group felt that this is still a strength to the project and should be completed in line with the other goals. This will be another topic needing to be covered more completely on the blog.

With the easter holiday approaching we also needed to decide what needed to be completed in the coming week, as we attempt to bring the project to a close. It was decided that by the end of next week the following work would be complete:

The welcome & project brief would be modified by Jonny to include the new work done on decentralisation.

An analysis of existing decentralised social networking tools will be completed by Deep.

Sumair, Deep, and Bharat will write up the results of research into academic work related to decentralisation and linked data.

Bharat will write about news related to decentralised social networks in the tech media.

Sumair will attempt to gain input from webmasters about the idea of decentralised tagging.

Jonny will continue development of the prototype, including producing mockups, uml diagrams, and storyboards.

Larry will produce scenarios and personas which cover the features in a more formal manner than we have discussed so far. This will cement exactly where the project is going.

The protocol for peer to peer communication between servers will be documented by Jonny, and the OpenID protocol will be documented by Larry.

Larry will also conduct a usability evaluation of the current version of the software with potential end users.

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