Section: Overall Objectives

Presentation

Context and Objectives

The Web became a virtual place where persons and software interact in mixed communities. These large scale mixed interactions create many problems that must be addressed with multidisciplinary approaches [75]. One particular problem is to reconcile formal semantics of computer science (e.g. logics, ontologies, typing systems, protocols, etc.) on which the Web architecture is built, with soft semantics of people (e.g. posts, tags, status, relationships, etc.) on which the Web content is built.

Wimmics proposes models and methods to bridge formal semantics and social semantics on the Web. [74]

From a formal modeling point of view, one of the consequences of the evolutions of the Web is that the initial graph of linked pages has been joined by a growing number of other graphs. This initial graph is now mixed with sociograms capturing the social network structure, workflows specifying the decision paths to be followed, browsing logs capturing the trails of our navigation, service compositions specifying distributed processing, open data linking distant datasets, etc. Moreover, these graphs are not available in a single central repository but distributed over many different sources. Some sub-graphs are small and local (e.g. a user's profile on a device), some are huge and hosted on clusters (e.g. Wikipedia), some are largely stable (e.g. thesaurus of Latin), some change several times per second (e.g. social network statuses), etc. And each type of network of the Web is not an isolated island. Networks interact with each other: the networks of communities influence the message flows, their subjects and types, the semantic links between terms interact with the links between sites and vice-versa, etc.

Not only do we need means to represent and analyze each kind of graphs, we also do need the means to combine them and to perform multi-criteria analysis on their combination. Wimmics contributes to this understanding by: (1) proposing multidisciplinary approaches to analyze and model the many aspects of these intertwined information systems, their communities of users and their interactions; (2) formalizing and reasoning on these models using graphs-based knowledge representation from the semantic Web to propose new analysis tools and indicators, and support new functionalities and better management. In a nutshell, the first research direction looks at models of systems, users, communities and interactions while the second research direction considers formalisms and algorithms to represent them and reason on their representations.

Research Topics

The research objectivs of Wimmics can be grouped according to four topics we identify in reconciling social and formal semantics on the Web:

Topic 1 - users modeling and designing interaction on the Web: The general research question addressed by this objective is ”How do we improve our interactions with a semantic and social Web ?”. Wimmics focuses on specific sub-questions: ”How can we capture and model the users' characteristics?” ”How can we represent and reasons with the users' profiles?” ”How can we adapt the system behaviors as a result?” ”How can we design new interaction means?” ”How can we evaluate the quality of the interaction designed?”

Topic 2 - communities and social interactions analysis on the Web: The general question addressed in this second objective is ”How can we manage the collective activity on social media?”. Wimmics focuses on the following sub-questions: ”How do we analyze the social interaction practices and the structures in which these practices take place?” ”How do we capture the social interactions and structures?” ”How can we formalize the models of these social constructs?” ”How can we analyze and reason on these models of the social activity ?”

Topic 3 - vocabularies, semantic Web and linked data based knowledge representation on the Web: The general question addressed in this third objective is ”What are the needed schemas and extensions of the semantic Web formalisms for our models?”. Wimmics focuses on several sub-questions: ”What kinds of formalism are the best suited for the models of the previous section?” ”What are the limitations and possible extensions of existing formalisms?” ”What are the missing schemas, ontologies, vocabularies?” ”What are the links and possible combinations between existing formalisms?” In a nutshell, an important part of this objective is to formalize as typed graphs the models identified in the previous objectives in order for software to exploit them in their processing (in the next objective).

Topic 4 - analyzing and reasoning on heterogeneous semantic graphs on the Web: The general research question addressed in this last objective is ”What are the algorithms required to analyze and reason on the heterogeneous graphs we obtained?”. Wimmics focuses on several sub-questions: ”How do we analyze graphs of different types and their interactions?” ”How do we support different graph life-cycles, calculations and characteristics in a coherent and understandable way?” ”What kind of algorithms can support the different tasks of our users?”.