Yang Yang

I am a Web Science PhD candidate supervised by Dr. Nick Gibbins, Dame Prof. Wendy Hall and Prof. Nigel Shadbolt. I am currently working on the EPSRC funded EnAkting project.

I am the founder of the iamResearcher.com - the global researcher network. iamResearcher is a platform that breaks the boundary of research fields and connects researchers in a unique network and enables them to collaborate. 

One of the new concepts introduced by iamResearcher.com is that we enable the user to make links not only between people (e.g. making friends like in traditional social network) but also between data, therefore, a social network + web of data. When user sign up on the website, they establish colleagueship in addition to linking to the data which they have already created online. For instance, a researcher can set up a profile by linking to their publications and slides with few clicks. 

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PhD Research

The Semantic Web, as proposed by Tim Berners Lee, will use the existing Web Architecture to publish data in a similar fashion to that of publishing a webpage, so that when a person/agent looks at that data, they can understand the meaning of it, and therefore establish global understanding of the data. By doing this, we can make much greater use of the data and build more intelligent services. 

The Semantic Web idea can be implemented by 1) Giving a data a URI (a name), 2) Describing and publishing the data by using RDF (Resource Description Framework) 3) Adding links between data, so that people/agent can follow the link to discover more "other things".  This is also known as Linked Data, which is the core of the Semantic Web.

My PhD is about studying the methodology of how to "add links" to the Linked Data to make data better inter-linked. We propose an idea where we use crowd power to design the ecosystem on top of the Linked Data in order to enable the crowd to add links to make Linked Data a better linked space. For more information please read "Distributed Human Computation Framework for link discovery in the Linked Data". iamResearcher can also be understood as a demonstrator of such an ecosystem (note that we use ecosystem instead of system/software, because unlike the traditional software engineering approach which considers users as a separate layer of the system, we consider users as a part of system. The Web itself is also an ecosystem.)

For part of my PhD, I also devloped a Linked Data Validator called Hyperthing, which can tell you if your request URI link to a webpage (like it always do on the traditional web) or identifies a real world object (e.g. a person) on the Semantic Web.

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Additonal contact:

Twitter: @yang_squared

Send message directly to my phone via web: http://pushme.to/yangsquared

Talkbox: @yangSquared

Working Location: Room3005 Building 32 (EEE)