Herring et al. (2004) defined three types of blogs: personal journals, “filters” (because they select and provide commentary on information from other websites) and “knowledge logs”. The majority of blogs are the online diary type. Bloggers are interested in reading new information, sharing knowledge and being connected with other are more extroverted, blog readers are more consumerist.
The use of blogs and semantic blogs has recently been associated with a decentralised form of knowledge management (Cayzer, 2004, Breslin & Decker 2007). Semantic blogging is a technology that builds upon blogging and enriches blog items with metadata. For publishing information such as research publications, there is need of some structure and semantic blogging provides this. Items may be classified using ontologies. Semantic links may exist between items (Cayzer, 2004b). Semantic blogging uses desirable features of both blogging and the semantic web to deal with the challenges of traditional blogging. The semantic web is well suited for incrementally publishing structured and semantically rich information. On the other hand, the easy publishing nature of blogging can boost the semantic web by publishing enough data and resources (Cayzer 2004a; Cayzer, 2004b).
Semantic blogging can help users discover items of interest in blogs. Navigation through the blogosphere can be more flexible and meaningful due to interconnections among various items and topics. Aggregation of useful materials across multiple blogs and the semantic web is possible. Semantic blogging can extend blogging from simple diary browsing to informal knowledge management (Cayzer, 2004b). Publication is easy in semantic blogs too because only some additional metadata data have to be added compared to traditional blogs. The users do not need to put any effort to enjoy the additional features provided. Hence, there is not much effort added in using a semantic blog instead of a conventional one. The rich metadata and semantic structure work behind to give the user the added value experience of semantic blogging. However, the semantic capabilities currently implemented for semantic blogging are still limited. It is difficult to obtain blog entries relevant to a topic in an aggregated and organized form.
There is newly developed framework for semantic blogging capable of organizing results relevant to user requirement (Shakya, 2006). Attempts for implementation of that framework are made at Varna Free University (VFU) to provide more effective navigation and search by exploring semantic relations in blogs.
The system is built upon a blogging infrastructure backed up by an RDF metadata store. The metadata schema enriches the blog entries input. The metadata schema also helps the query processor to search by metadata. Users input queries to the system according to their information requirement. The query processor searches for matching blog entries and instances in the ontology of the domain of application. Integrated with the ontology is the inference engine, which can deduce implicit relations from the ontology. All the blog entries related to the relevant ontology instances are obtained from the blogontology mapping. The total relevant blog entries obtained are finally organized into an aggregated and navigable collection by the organizer. The system also produces output in RSS format which computers can understand and aggregate.
Some edu-blogs that are used at Varna Free University (Figure 1.7, Figure 1.8, Figure 1.9):
- 1301 reads
