Rethinking Microblogging: Open, Distributed, Semantic Alexandre Passant 1 , John G. Breslin 1,2 , and Stefan Decker 1 1 Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway firstname.lastname@deri.org 2 School of Engineering and Informatics, National University of Ireland, Galway john.breslin@nuigalway.ie Abstract. 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 particu- lar, 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 experi- ence and, more generally, providing Linked Social Data as part of the growing Linking Open Data cloud. Keywords: Social Web, Semantic Web, Linked Data, Microblogging, Distributed Systems. 1 Introduction Founded in 2006, Twitter 1 defined the foundations of a now well-known phe- nomena: microblogging. While blogs let people openly share their thoughts on the Web, microblogging goes further by enabling real-time status notifications and micro-conversations in online communities. While it is mainly recognised as a way to provide streams of information on the Web, it can be used in various settings such as Enterprise 2.0 environments. The simplicity of publishing mi- croblogging updates, generally shorter than 140 characters, combined with the ubiquitous nature of microblog clients, makes microblogging an unforeseen com- munication method that can be seen as a hybrid of blogging, instant messaging and status notification. Moreover, by considering microblog content as being in- formation streams, new real-time applications can be imagined in the realm of citizen sensing [18]. So far, most of the current research around microblogging focuses on studying and understanding its communication patterns [10] [11]. However, its technical 1 http://twitter.com B. Benatallah et al. (Eds.): ICWE 2010, LNCS 6189, pp. 263–277, 2010. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010