Questions for 4-12

Mislove, et al.

Rating: 3

1) Do people behave differently in a social network that is based off of sharing a particular type of media (photos in Flickr, videos on YouTube, etc.) as opposed to social networks specifically built for connecting socially(like Orkut)? If so, is this change in behavior significant? How would it manifest itself in this study?

2) The authors mention that their study will be of import to fields outside of just computer science. They mention sociology specifically. But who else benefits from this study? Since we are reading this article we can safely assume that iSchools would be interested, but what about business? Economics? Humanities? How would they find value in this study? What other fields are being overlooked?

3) The article’s methodology was a little different for Orkut than for the other sites because Orkut does not export an API for external developers. This meant that the information had to be gathered a little differently and the authors explain that this will have skewed the results slightly for Orkut. I get that partial BFS crawls have shown sampling bias in other instances, but couldn’t at least some of the differences between Orkut and the other sites stem from the differences between Orkut and the other sites? Orkut’s main purpose is social networking; the other sites are focused on blogs or photos or videos. Orkut has a user base that is largely Brazilian and Indian; the other sites are more globally balanced. Couldn’t these differences account for some of the differences in the results?

Bizer et al.

Rating: 2

1) Maybe I’ve just missed the point, but why is RDF format so much better than using traditional HTML documents? I get that RDF gives additional information about the relationship between two things, but can’t that relationship often be understood without being explicitly stated?

2) As demonstrated in the article, linked data has the potential to really improve several services/apps we use on-line and on mobile devices. How would linked data improve apps like: eReading technology? Games? Schedulers? Financial planners? The list goes on.

3) Is linked data really the next big thing? Or is it more of a buzzword that people get excited about today, only to forget about tomorrow like their now forgotten Palm Pilots and MySpace accounts? Sure there are advantages to linked data over standard HTML style browsing, but will people be willing to put forth the effort to get there?

I Horrocks

Rating: 4

1) How does WordNet fit into the semantic web? Horrocks talks about an ontology that would allow us to include the term SnowyOwl within the larger classification of Owl, and Owl within Raptor, and so on. Isn’t this closely related to WordNet? Is this a main motivation for WordNet being developed?

2) Horrocks tells us on page 6 that “query answering in OWL is not simply a matter of checking the data, but may require complex reasoning to be performed.” Should OWL and RDF searches ever really begin to take off wouldn’t this extra reasoning mean longer processing times on searches? Will people be willing to wait the extra time for the process to run if it means they get highly integrated answers from Linked data? Or will they stick to their old, tried-and-true methods that maybe aren’t as detailed in their response but can process much faster?

3) Future directions include continuing progress in ontology alignment – where ontologies whose domains overlap are reconciled and all are the better for it. Does this mean that the eventual end goal is one large ontology that covers everything? All subjects are going to overlap somehow into other subjects and everything can be connected in this way. How would it change the semantic web if we had an ontology covering almost every topic ready to go today?