[Air-L] FYI: DERI, NUI Galway launches the boards.ie SIOC Data Competition

[Uldis Bojars]

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 at 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:

http://data.sioc-project.org/

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 at deri.org