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

[Uldis Bojars]

The winners of the boards.ie SIOC data competition have been selected:
http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2008/11/26/prize-winners-visualise-irish-online-life-in-the-boardsie-sioc-data-competition/

"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historical content from discussion forums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 at 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 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
>