Distributed Semantic Social Networks: Architecture, Protocols and Applications

Online social networking has become one of the most popular services on the Web. Especially Facebook with its 845Mio+ monthly active users and 100Mrd+ friendship relations creates a Web inside the Web. Drawing on the metaphor of islands, Facebook is becoming more like a continent. However, users are locked up on this continent with hardly any opportunity to communicate easily with users on other islands and continents or even to relocate trans-continentally. In addition to that, privacy, data ownership and freedom of communication issues are problematically in centralized environments. The idea of distributed social networking enables users to overcome the drawbacks of centralized social networks. The goal of this thesis is to provide an architecture for distributed social networking based on semantic technologies. This architecture consists of semantic artifacts, protocols and services which enable social network applications to work in a distributed environment and with semantic interoperability. Furthermore, this thesis presents applications for distributed semantic social networking and discusses user interfaces, architecture and communication strategies for this application category.Soziale Netzwerke gehören zu den beliebtesten Online Diensten im World Wide Web. Insbesondere Facebook mit seinen mehr als 845 Mio. aktiven Nutzern im Monat und mehr als 100 Mrd. Nutzer- Beziehungen erzeugt ein eigenständiges Web im Web. Den Nutzern dieser Sozialen Netzwerke ist es jedoch schwer möglich mit Nutzern in anderen Sozialen Netzwerken zu kommunizieren oder aber mit ihren Daten in ein anderes Netzwerk zu ziehen. Zusätzlich dazu werden u.a. Privatsphäre, Eigentumsrechte an den eigenen Daten und uneingeschränkte Freiheit in der Kommunikation als problematisch empfunden. Die Idee verteilter Soziale Netzwerke ermöglicht es, diese Probleme zentralisierter Sozialer Netzwerke zu überwinden. Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist die Darstellung einer Architektur verteilter Soziale Netzwerke welche auf semantischen Technologien basiert. Diese Architektur besteht aus semantischen Artefakten, Protokollen und Diensten und ermöglicht die Kommunikation von Sozialen Anwendungen in einer verteilten Infrastruktur. Darüber hinaus präsentiert diese Arbeit mehrere Applikationen für verteilte semantische Soziale Netzwerke und diskutiert deren Nutzer-Schnittstellen, Architektur und Kommunikationsstrategien. 

Next generation assisting clinical applications by using semantic-aware electronic health records

The health care sector is no longer imaginable without electronic health records. However; since the original idea of electronic health records was focused on data storage and not on data processing, a lot of current implementations do not take full advantage of the opportunities provided by computerization. This paper introduces the Patient Summary Ontology for the representation of electronic health records and demonstrates the possibility to create next generation assisting clinical applications based on these semantic-aware electronic health records. Also, an architecture to interoperate with electronic health records formatted using other standards is presented

Internet and the flow of knowledge: Which ethical and political challenges will we face?

The term “knowledge” is used more and more frequently for the diagnosis of societal change (as in “knowledge society”). According to Bell (1973), since the 1970s we have been experiencing the ?rst phase of such a change towards a knowledge society, consisting of a rapid expansion of the academic system and a growth of investments in research and development in many countries. In this phase, as Castells (1996) points out, information technology has been rapidly changing the workplace as well as the composition of social organisations. In this first phase, the focus has been on scienti?c knowledge, its production and application in expert cultures. Since the Mid-1990s, however, this focus has been widening, such that one can speak of a second phase of the knowledge society (Drucker 1994a, 1994b; Stehr 1994; see also Knorr-Cetina 1998; Krohn 2001). Now it is no longer only scientific knowledge that is seen as driving the change, but also ordinary knowledge and practical knowledge, as know-how. The change is, as I would put it, autocatalytic, for typical of knowledge societies is “not the centrality of knowledge and information, but the application of such knowledge and information to knowledge generation and information processing/communication devices, in a cumulative feedback loop between innovation and the uses of innovation“ (Castells 1996: 32). Science has also been changing to be part of this loop, as shown in the rise of applied sciences and in the acknowledgement of uncertainty and ignorance issues (cf. Heidenreich 2002: 4 ff.; see also Hubig 2000 and Böschen & Schulz-Schaeffer 2003). The most significant change in this second phase however is the popularization of the Internet, that is seen as a key factor that governs societal change today. So what exactly is this “knowledge” that is driving present knowledge societies? Can we rely on the philosophical analysis of the term to get some insight here