Rethinking Microblogging: Open, Distributed, Semantic

In order to break down the walls that lock-in social data and social networks, new paradigms and architectures must be envisioned. There needs to be a focus on the one hand on distributed architectures -- so that users remain owners of their data -- and on the other hand on means to semantically-enhance their content -- so that it becomes more meaningful and interoperable. In this paper, we detail the anatomy of SMOB, a distributed semantic microblogging framework. In particular, we describe how it achieves the previous objectives using Semantic Web standards (including RDF(S)/OWL, RDFa, SPARQL) and Linked Data principles, as a consequence rethinking the microblogging experience and, more generally, providing Linked Social Data as part of the growing Linking Open Data cloud.