Social Media Research Blog

Semantic Ecoblogging and Citizen Science

Today during our weekly eBiquity lab group meetings, Joel Sachs updated us on the Spire project. Spire is a research project investigating how semantic web technologies can be used to support science in general and the field of ecoinformatics in particular. During lunch, Joel and I talked about crowdsourcing and how social media and citizen science can help innovation and discovery in scientific applications. Many of the tasks of a field researcher involves tedious and careful logging of the ecology and habitat in an environment. This is exactly where amateur scientists and hobbyists can make a big difference and contribute to science. Most amateurs contribute to such projects, just because they enjoy it and love working on it as a hobby. One example of how crowdsourcing is currently done in Spire is through: Splickr tool: that allows you to query for geotagged photos on Flickr. Spotter tool: "Spotter allows you to easily create RDF/OWL for species observations. It places a button on your Firefox toolbar that calls up a form with fields taken from our observation ontology (Observer, Reporter, Location, Common Name, Scientific Name, etc.)." (description quoted from the site) While reading the book crowdsourcing, I learned of similar efforts by NASA, and Cornell University's Ornithology lab. Many discoveries in science are now coming from amateur researchers -- ant not just from folks with multi-million dollar grants backing them. A few examples from the book are: InnoCentive many open research problems are being solved by a part-time-hobbyist-amateur type researchers. INSPIRE NASA is harnessing wisdom of the crowds to help analyze images The rediscovery of Cozumel Thrasher, a rare bird species by a bunch of amateur birders. And many more examples .... (I really recommend reading the book - it is well written and you will not be able to put it down!) During the meeting and later, we were intrigued by the idea of developing an iPhone app to allow researchers and 'citizen scientists' to take pictures of species in the wild and upload them to spire. One important point here is that often an amateur researcher might not be aware of the scientific name of a species, but given we have enough eyes looking at the data being uploaded, we can divide the task of labeling and categorizing the findings. Citizen scientists can contribute at various levels -- performing field studies, annotating, building ontologies, etc. Since, Spire is a Semantic Web application backed by ontologies, one can now reason over the findings and learn that an invasive species is posing a significant threat to the local habitat. This is the ultimate aim of Spire and to me, this is the killer app for Web 3.0 -- if you really insist on a term like that! For more information on Spire please refer to the following publications.

Geo-Location Based Music Playlists

What if you could geo-code every song you heard on your iPhone/MP3 device and share it with everyone? Could we then build geo-location based music playlists? Know any sites that already do something like this?

Last.fm to some extent supports basic geo-information and can provide recommendations for events and show the top artists and tracks for each country. But what I am thinking of is more detailed than this: Sort of like saying "Hey! I wonder what are the cool music vibes at San Fransisco right now?" or when sitting at the waterfront in downtown Baltimore; "I wonder what folks like to listen to while watching the ocean?".

We geo-tag our images, videos and profiles -- so why not music too? Imagine going on a road trip and "tuning in to" to any "local station" as you travel from one state to another. Or a heat-map interface that would show the type of music that is trendy in each location -- and the ability to query which are the top songs for any place by genre. I think Last.fm would be a great platform to implement this, since they perhaps already have a location associated with each profile.

BTW, here is a Google Maps mashup built using the Last.fm API that shows which are the two countries that have the most similar musical taste. If you know any cool music+geolocation mashup sites, I would love to know about them!

My First FireEagle App: Pizza Coupons Search

Yesterday, I discussed an idea around the FireEagle geolocation API. I was envisioning an app where you could have a mobile phone and as you walk down the Mall or any location, it would pre-fetch relevant coupons and offers from the local restaurants. Being a grad student, we always learn to find good Pizza deals online. So I decided to use the FireEagle API to develop a Pizza  coupon finder. The way it works is that it authenticates with FireEagle to access your current location and then fetches the coupons from Google Maps and then parses the output to display on your mobile phone or a browser. You can try it at the following URL  http://wikimatix.com/coupon/pizza.php
if you have a FireEagle account already. First the application will try to authenticate with FireEagle and request the appropriate permission to access the exact or approximate location information and then passes this to the Google Coupon Finder.

Finally you have all the coupons you need to order your fresh pizza. The Documentation and example walkthrough code on FireEagle's developer area is excellent. It took hardly any time to put together this demo!

I think that the possibilities that this opens up for mobile advertising are exciting. We should also keep an eye on Android -- this space is gonna be fun to watch. [Update: Fixed the broken link. Sorry]

SocialTouch: iPhone and Social Networks

I just finished watching the iPhone enterprise and SDK launch webcast. What I saw there completely blew my mind! Although, I do not own an iPhone (its still a bit of a luxury on a student stipend) I cant believe the revolution Apple is quietly launching! To me it seems obvious that the enterprise is going to absolutely love the seamless integration of iPhone with Microsoft Exchange Server. And whats more, the neat SDK really offers a great opportunity for service  providers to port to iPhone all the great apps and tools that are currently being used.

One great thing about the iPhone is the ability to manage contacts. Its almost like you can touch your entire social network with your fingers. And I think this is how iPhone itself will become the next generation social network tool. Facebook, Twitter and a host of other social network sites  and instant messaging tools  will be rushing to put their apps on the iPhone. This should make it easy for us to have access to our entire social network on the go. Lifestreaming on steroids! Imagine if you could go beyond just updating status messages and sharing photos. iPhone offeres much more by way of its location technology. Now its not just interacting with your network -- but doing it in real time, live, and on location. And THAT would be really cool.

In a way, the timing of Charlene Li's talk titled "The future of social networks: Social networks will be like air", couldnt have been more perfect. It is exactly this revolution that will make Social Networks omnipresent and pervasive. Welcome to a world of SocialTouch!