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Ruben Verborgh

Adding Meaning to Facebook Microposts via a Mash-up API and Tracking Its Data Provenance

Thomas Steiner, Ruben Verborgh, Joaquim Gabarró Vallés, and Rik Van de Walle

The social networking website Facebook offers to its users a feature called “status updates” (or just “status”), which allows them to create microposts directed to all their contacts, or a subset thereof. Readers can respond to microposts, or in addition to that also click a “Like" button to show their appreciation for a certain micropost. Adding semantic meaning in the sense of unambiguous intended ideas to such microposts can, for example, be achieved via Natural Language Processing (NLP). Therefore, we have implemented a RESTful mash-up NLP API based on a combination of several third party NLP APIs in order to retrieve more accurate results in the sense of emergence. In consequence, our API uses third party APIs opaquely in the background in order to deliver its output. In this paper, we describe how one can keep track of provenance, and credit back the contributions of each single API to the combined result of all APIs. In addition to that, we show how the existence of provenance metadata can help understand the way a combined result is formed, and optimize the result combination process. Therefore, we use the HTTP Vocabulary in RDF and the Provenance Vocabulary. The main contribution of our work is a description of how provenance metadata can be automatically added to the output of mash-up APIs like the one presented in this paper.

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Published in 2011 in Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Next Generation Web Services Practices.

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Cite this article easily using its BibTeX entry: 

@inproceedings{steiner_nwesp_2011,
  title = {Adding Meaning to {Facebook} Microposts via a Mash-up {API} and Tracking Its Data Provenance},
  author = {Steiner, Thomas and Verborgh, Ruben and Gabarr\'o Vall\'es, Joaquim and Van de Walle, Rik},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Next Generation Web Services Practices},
  year = 2011,
  month = oct,
  pages = {342--345},
  doi = {10.1109/NWeSP.2011.6088202},
  isbn = {978-1-4577-1126-8},
  url = {http://research.google.com/pubs/archive/37426.pdf},
}

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ACM
Thomas Steiner, Ruben Verborgh, Joaquim Gabarró Vallés, and Rik Van de Walle. 2011. Adding Meaning to Facebook Microposts via a Mash-up API and Tracking Its Data Provenance. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Next Generation Web Services Practices, 342–345.
APA
Steiner, T., Verborgh, R., Gabarró Vallés, J., & Van de Walle, R. (2011). Adding Meaning to Facebook Microposts via a Mash-up API and Tracking Its Data Provenance. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Next Generation Web Services Practices, 342–345.
IEEE
T. Steiner, R. Verborgh, J. Gabarró Vallés, and R. Van de Walle, “Adding Meaning to Facebook Microposts via a Mash-up API and Tracking Its Data Provenance,” in Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Next Generation Web Services Practices, 2011, pp. 342–345.
LNCS
Steiner, T., Verborgh, R., Gabarró Vallés, J., Van de Walle, R.: Adding Meaning to Facebook Microposts via a Mash-up API and Tracking Its Data Provenance. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Next Generation Web Services Practices. pp. 342–345 (2011).
MLA
Steiner, Thomas, et al. “Adding Meaning to Facebook Microposts via a Mash-up API and Tracking Its Data Provenance.” Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Next Generation Web Services Practices, 2011, pp. 342–45.

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