The winners of the boards.ie SIOC data competition have been selected: http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2008/11/26/prize-winners-visualise-irish-onl... "The winners of the SIOC (pronounced "shock") data competition being run by DERI at the National University of Ireland, Galway have been announced. The competition ran from September to October 2008, and the brief was to produce an interesting creation based on a data set of discussion posts reflecting ten years of Irish online life from boards.ie, Ireland's largest community website. The competition had about sixty registrants and there were eight final submissions of very high quality." Winning submissions: 1) "SIOC.ME: A Real-Time Interactive Visualisation of boards.ie Semantic Data within a 3-D Space" 2) "BoardsView" - an interactive, real-time animation of the historical content from discussion forums 3) "Forum Activity Graph" - visualizes the popularity of forums on boards.ie as represented by colored "rivers of information" The post also lists information about other final submissions. Looking forward to explore the submissions, now that information about them is public. If any of them are (or will be) publicly available then there is a good chance that they can work with data from other sources if they use the same data format (i.e., SIOC and FOAF). Uldis [ http://captsolo.net/info ] On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 6:36 PM, Uldis Bojars <captsolo@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
Please find attached information about a competition involving a large amount of online community data. Feel free to forward this message to others who may be interested in this competition.
Uldis http://captsolo.net/
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: John Breslin <john.breslin@deri.org> Date: Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 4:52 PM Subject: DERI, NUI Galway launches the boards.ie SIOC Data Competition
The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUI Galway is running a unique competition from 1st August to 30th September 2008 in conjunction with boards.ie, Ireland's largest discussion forum site. The competition is an open contest in which entrants can win over €4000 in Amazon.com vouchers by submitting an interesting creation based on an RDF data set of discussion posts from boards.ie over the past ten years:
* The first prize is an Amazon voucher for $4000 (~€2500) * The second prize is a voucher for $2000 (~€1250) * The third prize is a voucher for $1000 (~€625)
Read the rules and find out more information on the contest at:
The data set (approximately 9 million documents) has been represented in the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) RDF format developed by DERI, NUI Galway for expressing the information contained in social websites (forums, mailing lists, blogs, etc.). Entrants may create whatever they feel is interesting based on this data: it could be a novel web application that makes use of the data set, a report on analyses performed on the data, a tool that allows one to visualise or browse the semantic structure, or whatever else the imagination can come up with!
The data reflects ten years of Irish online life, collected between 1998 and 2008 from boards.ie. boards.ie is one of Ireland's busiest websites, with over a million unique visitors a month. The most popular discussion areas are 'after hours', soccer, motors, poker, and computers. Popular topic threads include one about a virtual pub (over 4000 pages), member discussions (2800 pages), poker stories (1800 pages), Liverpool rumours (1250 pages), recruitment in the Gardaí (800 pages long), and a freebie list (250 pages).
To enter the competition, go to http://data.sioc-project.org/ to access the data sets and view the guidelines. There will be three prizes for the top entries, as judged by an independent panel of three experts. The contest is open to anyone except current / former researchers with DERI and employees of boards.ie Ltd. One person may make multiple entry submissions. The closing date is the 30th September 2008.
The purpose of this contest is to generate interesting applications or creations that make use of community data represented in the SIOC Semantic Web format. All rights to these creations will remain with the contest participants (not including the underlying data, whose copyright remains with the creators). Neither DERI nor boards.ie Ltd. will acquire any commercial rights to these applications or creations as submitted through this contest. Up until now, this data has been publicly viewable, but it was difficult to leverage it without any added semantics due to the fact that it was embedded in heavily-styled HTML pages.
(DERI is a Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology (CSET) established at NUI Galway in 2003 with funding from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI). After five years of operation, DERI has become an internationally-recognised institute in Semantic Web research, education and technology transfer.)
-- Dr. John Breslin DERI, NUI Galway http://www.johnbreslin.org/ john.breslin@deri.org