3.1. GeoBlog Model
Taking the Nepal earthquake as an example, almost immediately after the earthquake, the cross-border community, including aid sectors, governments, and emergency response teams, arrived in Nepal to launch extensive search and rescue missions. However, the traditional system lacked the ability to aggregate and socialize transboundary data that came from outside sources, making it difficult to benefit from valuable crowdsourced information [
29]. Meanwhile, other sectors were much in demand of interaction and sharing critical information.
Blogs, as social software, are designed for rapid content creation, archiving, and syndication within online communities [
10]. Due to the community intelligence, blogs have lately become a valuable source of information. Blogs, used as collaboration environments, support people in associating tags with content that they generate, share, or consume within a community. More generally, by tagging content in the web, one makes this content shareable to other web participants, as well as links it to other web contents. Therefore, a blog is a practical way to capture and share borderland data.
However, such information without explicit geographical semantics cannot be understood and manipulated efficiently by computers. Once a blog system organizes the entries with geographical semantics and display localities, spatial analysis can be performed based on the user-tagged information. In order to develop such system, the domain specific ontologies that take geographical knowledge into account should be built [
30]. In information systems, ontology refers to “a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization” [
31].
In this paper, we propose a Conceptual Blog Model (CB-Model) as a formal specification to express the information contained in blog data sources. The ontology here is the means for capturing domain knowledge in a generic way that provides a commonly-agreed upon understanding of a domain, which may be reused and shared within communities or applications [
32]. The structure provided in the CB-Model can be used by users and applications to tag blog resources. Furthermore, the CB-Model can be used to support web applications in the study of how the information is disseminated within the blogosphere (information spread path). A conceptual specifies knowledge in terms of concepts, relations, and instances. In the following, we introduce the concept, relations, and instances of the CB-Model, as presented in
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
The conceptual model of GeoBlog.
Figure 2.
The conceptual model of GeoBlog.
The basic components are described as follows:
Web Participants and their Roles: Basically, a blog has one or more authors who are responsible for continually updating the published content (articles, images, video, etc.). More importantly, web participants are able to actively interact with this content by means of posting a reply to an article (e.g., making a comment to a post). In other words, a web participant can play different roles within blogs. Based on this description, we identify three main roles that an agent can play in the context of blogs: author, reader, and commentator.
User Groups and User Roles: Organizations or institutions are multivalent systems that can be conceived in terms of an organized society of individuals in which each agent plays specific roles and interacts with other agents. Moreover, organizations can have sub-organizations and roles as their “parts.” Considering this, a usergroup is an organization whose members are agents playing specific roles and interacting with other agents. Furthermore, a usergroup can be part of other usergroups and so on.
GeoBlog: Following the above design pattern, we describe a blog and its components. A blog, as a website, is the location (data space) of an online community.
Blog Components: A blog has an internal structure formed by a forum (discussion areas). Each discussion area consists of articles (or posts), which are composed of comments of posts. Furthermore, posts and comments contain several terms.
Figure 2 describes the BlogComponent entities, such as Forum, Post, Comment, and Terms.
Blog Profile: We define a blog profile as that which aggregates all relevant aspects of a blog, such as date of creation, update, version, license when applied, etc.
Blog Component Profile: Likewise, we define a blog component profile as that which aggregates all relevant aspects of a blog profile (e.g., date of creation, update, usergroup member, user member, moderator, etc.).
Blog Description: Each BlogComponent entity describes (expresses) a domain of study specific to a category of this domain and has a topic belonging to this category; domain, category, and topic represent BlogDescription entities.
Time Points and Intervals: A blog and its components, such as posts and comments, have a time period of existence, i.e., the duration interval between their date of creation and date of its end of use.
Blog Metrics: Blogs can be classified by their popularity (number of subscriptions), relevance (number of incoming links), repercussion (number of comments), and influence (number of friends). Popularity can be measured, for example, through citations, as well as popularity through affiliation. Popularity, relevance, repercussion and influence are metric entities (quality parameters) that indicate the quality of a blog and are valid for a specific period of time (process).
The basic relationships of the model are described as follows:
Generalization: This refers to the relationship between different things with common attributes such that something is a special type of another thing, connected with the upper and lower nodes through a property inheritance. For example, it is a generalization that a spatial object is a type of object.
Composition: This refers to the relationship between the part and the whole in an organization or structure, which is composed of no inheritance relationship. For example, a blog is composed of posts, comments, and terms, but the posts do not necessarily possess certain attributes of a blog.
Collaboration: This refers to the relationship between division and cooperation among users. The interaction of a blog is completed between different users with executive ability through collaboration.
Possession: This is the definition of a subordinate relationship. For example, the relationship between GeoBlog and spatial objects indicates that the creation process involves spatial representation of spatial objects, etc.