Confomaton: A conference enhancer with social media from the cloud

Abstract

A scientific conference is a type of event for which the structured program is generally known in advance. The Semantic Web community has setup a so-called Semantic Web dog food server that exposes structured data about the detailed program of more and more conferences and their sub-events (e.g. sessions). Conferences are also events that trigger a tremendous activity on social media. Participants tweet or post longer status messages, engage in discussion with comments, share slides and other media captured during the conference. This information is spread over multiple platforms forcing the user to monitor many different channels at the same time to fully benefit of the event. In this paper, we present Confomaton, a semantic web application that aggregates and reconciles information such as tweets, slides, photos and videos shared on social media that could potentially be attached to a scientific conference.