Towards a Computer Algebra Social Network

Links to the currently available infrastructure

Vision

The vision is a digitally supported Distributed Social Semantic Network within Open Science for the needs of the Computer Algebra Community.

The general architecture of such a network rests on three pilars:

At the long run we plan to build up such a CASN using the architectural concepts of a DSSN network stack designed and developed by the AKSW group at U Leipzig. A first implementation of these concepts is under development within the Xodx project (Natanael Arndt, U Leipzig).

Current State

With SymbolicData Release 3.1 (Jan 2016) we reorganized the experimental CASN structure and shut down the separate RDF store and SPARQL endpoint for the CASN structure.

The current CASN data base contains different RDF graphs within the namespace <symbolicdata.org/Data/> that are available at Linked Data standards from our central RDF store http://symbolicdata.org/Data and also as files from our RDF upload area. Additional data can be supplied by partners that run CASN nodes to provide own publicly available RDF based data for remote applications without running an RDF store, hence also no Linked Data.

We run the CASN showcases for several years to show the potential of the concepts. Most of the services were terminated in 2018 due to limited staff capacity.

CASN and CA People

The main challenge to get a Social Network running is to get a sufficient number of stakeholders interested in the project.

We permanently identify people involved with Computer Algebra and maintain personal information about such people, i.e., potentially active users, in the RDF Graph http://symbolicdata.org/Data/People/ as foaf:Person instances with URI structure <symbolicdata.org/Data/Person/LastName_Initials> and predicates

as a central resource of people URIs. This information is permanently extracted from public sources, in particular conference announcements.

Such an URI provides a “hook” for more information, that should be provided by the users or user communities themselves along the FOAF principles. The FOAF Project (FOAF = “friends of a friend”) is a widely recognized and used standard to build up distributed networks of people with common interests.

The RDF Graph http://symbolicdata.org/Data/PersonalProfiles/ with links to personal FOAF profiles with more information about the person demonstrates how such information should be included into the system that is best maintained at a local CASN node. E.g., the German Fachgruppe provides at http://www.fachgruppe-computeralgebra.de/rdf/FOAF-Profiles such FOAF Profiles of their (current and former) board members.

As proof of concept this information is used to display the members of the board of the German Fachgruppe at their website. This view is collected by the following workflow:

and cache it at the local web site.

CASN Data at the main SymbolicData RDF store

The main SymbolicData RDF store provides in particular this data:

Data at the local CASN node of the German CA Fachgruppe

The local CASN node of the German CA Fachgruppe provides this data:

Additional data at the CASN node of the SymbolicData Team

The local CASN node of the SymbolicData Team provides this data:

Additional concepts about bootstrapping a distributed CASN

We played around with a first prototype to technically support such a social network upon the Xodx implementation (Natanael Arndt, U Leipzig).