Marrying Social Media with Semantic Media

This is a recreation of the original blog at LSDIS lab, UGA, before I moved to Kno.e.sis Center, Wright State University posted on 12/03/05.

A lot has been written about social networking and we can see a number of success stories around this phenomenon. Flickr exemplified taking social networking to media (photos in this case), and hence the emerging focus on social media (see The Flickrization of Yahoo). The power of users playing the roles of authors and editors is undeniable, but the lack of organization it creates is an antithesis to how Yahoo! organized the early web around a directory (that we can now replace by ontologies) and human cataloging (which we can to a good extent replace by automatic and ontology-assisted semi-automatic semantic annotation). Is it possible to get such organization back into naturally unconstrained and entropic collection of stuff (in this case media and associated human given tags without the supporting nomenclature)? I think it quite is, and the current approaches for and technologies behind the Semantic Web provide the most promising paths.

Indeed there is already an independent set of activities in developing semantic multimedia and semantic media. What can we attain by marrying semantic media with social media? Quite a lot. What we get is a multiplicative outcome that combines social media organized to make it much easier to search, integrate and exploit, with semantic media enhanced by the power of people. This will also make it much easier to integrate all shared information whether in text or in digital media of any format. It will be easier to serve up multimedia and multimodal applications. And it will unlock a lot of untapped potential with targeted advertisements and refined personalization that underlying semantic infrastructure could provide, significantly enhancing the business potential associated with shared media.

Here is just one enticing example. You are looking a photo of a church in Innsbruck. And you want to sell an advertisement that takes you on a landing page on Priceline that has a flight from US gateways to Munich. (I had a chance to checked out what types of Google ads are servied today in this context of Innsbruck, and it did not seem to me that anyone would likely close a sale, and especially a sale with a high value). What will tell you that the nearest airport with transatlantic flights is Munich, do not bother to try to sell a ticket to Innsbruck especially from a non European distination, and how to get the specific page on Priceline for North America to Munich flights? Context, semantic metadata, ontologies that have a load of real world and factual knowledge, and a set of rules.

Some of the lovers of information retrieval and dumb keyword search would tell you all this is too complex, not scalable or not maintainable. It is not. Contact me if you want to see a demonstration of how we are working to realize this promise.