July 2008 DERI launches competition based on ten years of online data reflecting Irish lif

The Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUI Galway will be running a unique competition from August to September in conjunction with boards.ie, Ireland's largest discussion forum site. The competition is an open contest in which entrants can win over €4000 in prizes by submitting an interesting creation based on a data set of discussion posts from boards.ie. The data reflects ten years of Irish online life, collected from between 1998 and 2008. boards.ie is one of Ireland's busiest websites, with over a million unique visitors a month. The most popular discussion areas are 'after hours', soccer, motors, poker, and computers. Popular topic threads include: a virtual pub (over 4000 pages); member discussions (2800 pages); poker stories (1800 pages); Liverpool rumours (1250 pages); recruitment in the Gardaí (800 pages long); and a freebie list (250 pages). Ten years of discussion data from boards.ie (approximately 9 million documents) has been represented in the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) open data format, developed by DERI at NUI Galway for expressing the information contained in social websites (forums, mailing lists, blogs, etc.). Dr John Breslin, a researcher with DERI and co-founder of the boards.ie site said: "Entrants may create whatever they feel is interesting based on this data: it could be a novel web application that makes use of the data set, a report on analyses performed on the data, a tool that allows one to visualise or browse the semantic structure, or whatever else the imagination can come up with!" To enter the competition, go to http://data.sioc-project.org to access the data sets and guidelines. There will be three prizes for the top entries, as judged by an independent panel of three experts: First prize is an Amazon voucher for €2500; second prize is a voucher for €1250; and third prize is a voucher for €625. One person may make multiple entry submissions. The closing date for entry is 30 September, 2008. ENDS