[foaf-dev] DERI, NUI Galway launches the boards.ie SIOC Data Competition

[John Breslin]

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 a 
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) open data format 
developed by DERI, NUI Galway for expressing the information contained 
in social websites (forums, mailing lists, blogs, etc.). There's some 
FOAF data in there too! (We will also be making some LOD-type 
connections to DBpedia available shortly.) 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