Tagging Aware Portlets Oscar Díaz, Sandy Pérez and Cristóbal Arellano ONEKIN Research Group University of the Basque Country San Sebastián (Spain) The 9th International Conference on Web Engineering June 25th, 2009

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 2 Agenda  Background  Problem statement Tagging through portals can lead to tagging data scattering  Contribution Portal tagging commodity  Conclusions

Background What is a corporate portal? What is social tagging? Corporate portal + social tagging What is a portlet?

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 4 What Is a Corporate Portal? Calendar Discussions Wiki Blogs Localization Personalization Portal Aggregation of content Messaging & Collaboration Enterprise Search Customization & Personalization Security Browser Content Management Content Presentation Workflow  A web application whose main focus is on integration and pesonalization Aggregation of content Content Management Messaging & Collaboration Enterprise Search Security Content Presentation Customization & Personalization Workflow

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 5 What Is Social Tagging? javascript ajax Peter Bob ajax web2.0  Social Tagging = 

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 6 Portals & Social Tagging: Company Perspective  Advantages Harnessing collective intelligence Creating links to connect information together Intelligent content suggestions Effective enterprise search and discovery  The DOGEAR experience Enterprise tagging service saves IBM $4.6 million a year.

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 7 Portals & Social Tagging: Employee Viewpoint  Advantages: Future retrieval Contribution and sharing Attract attention Play and competition Self presentation Opinion expression (Marlow et al.)

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 8 What Is a Portlet?  A Java technology based Web component.  Managed by a portlet container.  Processes requests and generates dynamic content.  Are used by portals as pluggable user interface components that provide the presentation layer of Information Systems. …

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 9 Remote Portlets INTERNETINTERNET dblp.uni-trier.de ? Consumer consumes presentation- oriented web services offered by content producers. Producer provides portlets as presentation-oriented web services that can be used by aggregation engines.

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 10 INTERNET Portlets as Presentation-Oriented Web Services  Presentation-oriented web services  Traditional Web Services INTERNET

Problem Statement Antecedents The problem

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 12 Tagging through Dedicated Sites (e.g. Delicious)  Delicious is self-sufficient. all is needed for tagging (i.e. resources, users & tags) is kept within the tagging site  Delicious is self-centered. all Delicious care about is its own resources, users and tags. No links exist with other tagging sites.

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 13 Tagging through a Portal  Current approaches: Tagging as part of an integrated application Tagging as a portal functionality

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 14 Tagging as Part of an Integrated Application INTERNET Tag User REMOTE Resource  A third-party provider offers tagging capabilities on its own (e.g. amazon)  Drawbacks… collective intelligence is created outside the company every provider is a tagging island REMOTE Resource User Tag

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 15 Tagging as a Portal Functionality INTERNET Tag User LOCAL Resource  The portal offers tagging for its own content (this is the current approach)  Advantage collective intelligence is retained in the context of the organization  Disadvantage tagging is restricted to those resources within the realm of the portal. LOCAL Resource User Tag

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 16 Problem Statement INTERNET Tag User LOCAL Resource Tag User REMOTE Resource LOCAL Resource REMOTE Resource User Tag UserTag  Tagging data is scattered!! At the portal –for local resources At the remote place1 –for resources at place1 At the remote place2 –for resources at place2

Contribution Portal tagging commodity Challenges & their solutions

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 18 Portal Tagging Commodity: What Is a Commodity?  A commodity is a general functionality to be used by other services Services realized through portlets

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 19 Portal Tagging Commodity: Vision & Aims INTERNET  Homogenous tagging of resources no matter where they reside  Tagging data of external resources (e.g. amazon books) does not leak outside the company Tag User LOCAL Resource Tag User REMOTE Resource LOCAL Resource REMOTE Resource User Tag UserTag

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 20 INTERNET Homogenous Tagging of Resources INTERNET resource resource user tag

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 21 Tagging Data Retention within the Organization INTERNET resource user tag

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 22 Portal Tagging Commodity: Design Requirement  Tagging must be conducted at the place tag-able resources are rendered (i.e. the portlet)

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 23 Vision Realization: Challenges  Tag-able resource identification What can be tagged?  Tagging functionality location Where is tagging conducted?  Location transparency Tagging data query span over all resources no matter where they are located

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 24 Challenge: Tag-able Resource Identification  How can portlets make the portal aware of their tag-able resources?

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 25 INTERNET Facing the Challenge …  The main means for portlet-to-portal communication is the markup fragment  We propose to annotate this markup with tagging concerns using RDFa  To this end, an ontology – PartOnt– is defined, which should serve to indicate what to tag user tag resource

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 26 Example: Identifying Tag-able Resources Ajax: The Definitive Guide by Anthony T. Holdener <div xmlns:books=“ xmlns:partont=“ Ajax: The Definitive Guide by Anthony T. Holdener …

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 27 Challenge: Tagging Functionality Location  Tagging must be conducted at the place tag-able resources are rendered (i.e. the portlet markup fragment).  However, portlets should not deliver their own tagging functionality which should be provided by the portal.  That is, portals own the tagging front-end (i.e. tagging widgets) that needs to be injected into the portlet markup.  How can the portal know where to inject these widgets?

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 28 Facing the Challenge …  The PartOnt ontology should also serve to indicate where to tag.  To this end, a Hook class is included, with a subclass TagListHook that denotes an extension point for adding markup to show/update the tag list.

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 29 Facing the Challenge … <div xmlns:books=“ xmlns:partont=“ Ajax: The Definitive Guide by Anthony T. Holdener … <div xmlns:books=“ xmlns:partont=“ Ajax: The Definitive Guide by Anthony T. Holdener <div rel="partont:relatedWith" typeof="partont:TaglistHook" style="display: none;" /> …

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 30 The PartOnt Ontology

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 31 Challenge: Location Transparency  E.g. A query for resources being tagged as “forDevelProject” should deliver… books (LibraryPortlet) publications (AllWebJournalPortlet) post blogs (locally provided), etc  …being tagged as used in this project.

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 32 However…  External resources are outside the portal realm Amazon’s books belong to Amazon  A portlet-based portal hands presentation over the portlets.  So, a mean is needed for the user to express the query and expand it across resources, no matter their location.

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 33 Facing the Challenge …  Expressing the query… A new portlet –TagBarPortlet– has been built. This portlet renders the tags available in the tagging repository, and permits the user to select one of them.  Expanding the query across resources… To this end, we use the event mechanism available in the Portlet Specification.

Conclusions

O. Díaz, S. Pérez & C. Arellano 35 Conclusions  A tagging commodity for portals has been proposed (and implemented in Liferay)  Advantages: Portal ownership of tagging data Folksonomy consistency

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