About

SMOB is a Semantic MicroBlogging framework that enables an open, distributed and semantic microblogging experience based on state-of-the-art Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies.

It relies on distributed hubs that communicate each other to exchange microblog posts and subscriptions (i.e. following / followers). Anyone can install his own hub and start following other users, while SMOB also allows cross-posting on other platforms such as Twitter.

Technologies

SMOB is entirely based on Semantic Web and Linked Data technologies. In particular, SMOB:

  • uses different ontologies to represent the structure of microblog posts and information about users in RDF (SIOC, FOAF, OPO);
  • allow interlinking of microblog posts with the Linking Open Data cloud, thanks to MOAT and CommonTag;
  • provides open and machine-readable information about the aforementioned structure and interlinkage using RDFa;
  • store RDF data of each hub in a local triple-store thanks to ARC2;
  • uses SPARQL to build the user front-end and to offer a public SPARQL endpoint for each hub;
  • uses the currently-standardized SPARQL Update (and its protocol) for remote synchronization of posts and users between hubs;
  • notifies Sindice for each new post to enable discovering and querying microblog posts across the (Semantic) Web.

Team

SMOB has been developed at DERI, NUI Galway in the Unit Social Software by the following people.

R&D lead

R&D team and advisors (past and present members, by alphabetical order)

Publications

The following publications describe the earliest SMOB architecture and principles:

Since SMOB v2.0 is a major rewriting of the architecture and includes new features, these publications may be obsolete. However, new publications are currently under review and may be linked from there in the future.

Download

SMOB can be downloaded from its google-code download page. If you wish, you can also get its source code via the subversion repository, at your own risks.

Bugs and features

If you wish to signal a bug or report a feature request, please fill-in an issue on the SMOB issue tracker.

Licence

SMOB is © 2008 - 2010 by DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway and is available under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence v2.0.

Commercial support

While SMOB is provided under the terms of the GNU GPL, we provide commercial support for it. For any enquiries, such as development of new features or custom integration of SMOB for enterprise microblogging purposes, please contact us at alexandre.passant[AT]deri.org, indicating [SMOB Support] in the subject line.

Acknowledgements

SMOB is supported by Science Foundation Ireland under grant number SFI/08/CE/I1380 (Líon 2).

Navigation