SIOC Data Competition Finalists

The winners of the SIOC data competition have been announced. The competition ran from September to October 2008, and the brief was to produce an interesting creation based on a data set of discussion posts reflecting ten years of Irish online life from boards.ie, Ireland’s largest community website. The competition had about sixty registrants and there were eight final submissions of very high quality.

Winners:
1. SIOC.ME by Darren Geraghty
2. Boardsview by Stephen Dolan of Trinity College Dublin
3. Forum Activity Graph by Drew Perttula

Other final submissions included:

• “Forum Map Demonstration” by Tristan Webb and Ian Dickinson of HP Labs Bristol, a demonstration of self-organising maps applied to an information navigation problem in a big community site


• “WebThere: Semantic APML Profiles” by Brian MacKay from Pennsylvania, a service for creating and maintaining profiles of user interests and attention preferences in social websites


• “Find Something Interesting” by ITT Dublin’s Alexandra Roshchina and Aleksey Kharkov, an application to provide recommendations of the most interesting posts and threads based on interest-matching and graph-mining techniques,


• “ChartBoards” by Martin Harrigan of TCD, a tool for examining community trends via term frequencies, and


• “Visualising the boards.ie Community Culture with Charts” by Eoin McLoughlin of TCD, where various graph types were used to simplify the huge amount of available community data to something that could allow someone to easily grasp its size and depth.

(via www.johnbreslin.com)