These are the slides that accompanied the paper "Dominic DiFranzo, John S. Erickson, Marie Joan Kristine T. Gloria, Joanne S. Luciano, Deborah McGuinness, & James Hendler, The Web Observatory Extension: Facilitating Web Science Collaboration through Semantic Markup, Proc. WWW 2014 (Web Science Track), Seoul, Korea, 2014." They describe an extension to schema.org that can be used for sharing Web-related datasets and projects.

1. The Web Observatory Extension: Facilitating Web
Science
Collaboration through Semantic Markup"
Dominic DiFranzo, John S. Erickson, Marie Joan Kristine T. Gloria,
Joanne S. Luciano, Deborah McGuinness, James Hendler
The Tetherless World Constellation &
Institute for Data Exploration and Applications
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY

2. Introduction
6
• Web Science involves using and producing large amounts of
heterogeneous data about and from the web"
"
• As we (Web Science researchers) strive to collaborate and work
together, we must find ways to share, link and reuse each other’s
data and tools."
"
• To do this, we are striving to build “Web Observatories” – a
common infrastructure for enhancing this sharing, and to extend
it to also include tools, research project results(papers &
experiments), etc."
Tiropanis,T., Hall,W., Shadbolt, N., DeRoure, D., Contractor, N. and Hendler, J.,
TheWeb Science Observatory, IEEE Intelligent Systems, March/April, 2013.

3. Web Observatory Concept
WO Portal
Engaging communities with analytics
Publication of catalogues (schema.org)
Access with/without credentials
Searching and Indexing
Distributed Queries
Plugged in Datastores and App Servers
Harvesting
Dataset enrichment/curation
Dataset management
Provenance
Optimisation
WO Datastores
Hosting of analytic apps
Hosting of visualisation apps
Monitoring dependency on
datasets
Monitoring dependency on tools
Explicit links between
tools & datasets used
WO Apps
WO Portal
WO AppsWO Datastores
WO Portal
WO AppsWO Datastores
Links to resources in other
Web Observatories
Thanassis Tiropanis – University of Southampton

4. RPI Observatory Themes
Science Data Observatory Health & Life Sciences
Observatory
Open Government Observatory Social Spaces Observatory
Example:
Indian Election Twitter Dataset
Example:
Deep Carbon Obs. Datasets
Example:
Cancer Treatment Datasets
Example:
Int’l Open Govt Metadata

5. Data use (Social Spaces)
6

6. Data use (Open Govt Data)
6

7. Problem: putting these together across
laboratories (and fields)
6

8. Schema.org
6
• An initiative launched by the leading search
engine providers to create and support a
common set of schemas for structured data
markup on Web pages.
• These vocabularies enable the metadata to be
more machine readable, allowing for better
search, discover and display this information

9. Example RDFA Lite
6
<div http://schema.org/ >
<h1 >Avatar</h1>
<span>Director:
<span ">James Cameron</span>
</span>
<span >Science fiction</span>
<a href="../movies/avatar-theatrical-trailer.html"
>Trailer</a>
</div>

10. Schema.org in action
6

11. Schema.org in action
6
http://datasets.schema-labs.appspot.com/

12. Goals
6
• Describe Web Observatories
• Interconnect Web Observatories
• Facilitate discovery of tools, datasets,
and projects for researchers

13. Overview
6
Web
Observatory
Project
Dataset
Tool

14. Without Schema.org:
Search

15. 6
Web
Observatory
Project
Dataset
Tool
Web
Observatory
Project
Dataset
Tool
Web
Observatory
Project
Dataset
Tool
Search
With Schema.org:

16. Schema.org vocabulary extension
Web Observatory Class"

17. Schema.org vocabulary extension
Web Observatory Project"

18. Schema.org vocabulary extension
Web Observatory Dataset"

19. Schema.org vocabulary extension
Web Observatory Tool"

20. Schema.org vocabulary demo

21. Schema.org vocabulary demo
Social Spaces
WO
WO
Project:
Cosmic
WO
Project:
First
Responder

22. Schema.org vocabulary demo
Health/Life
Science WO
WO
Project:
Mobile
Health
WO
Project:
Health
Data
Challenge
WO Dataset:
Health Data
Challenge

23. Conclusions
Science Data Observatory
Social Spaces Observatory
• Integrating data on the Web, in general, is
growing
• Schema.org is a data embedding model
showing great success
• Schema.org/Dataset became official April
2013
• Search Engine tools are increasingly making
used of embedded markup
• Web Observatory extension aimed at use in
(Web) scientific community
• Also being used by AGU and DCO scientific

24. Future Work
Science Data Observatory
Social Spaces Observatory
• Further extend the vocabulary to fit more web
observatories
• Subcommunities can extend terminologies
• Build better tools to use and embed
schema.org vocabulary into web observatories
• Integrate into “telescope” toolbox
• Build tools to make use of schema.org WO
metadata (search engines, crawlers, etc)
• Google Domain Search underway