File:TwarqlConceptFeeds.png

We implement an aggregation service of social signals that helps users to cope with information overload. Through our approach, users can subscribe to more flexible “concepts” (Figure I) instead of only hashtags or users. We adapt the definition of concept from Tom Mitchell [8]. Each such concept can be viewed as describing some subset of objects or events defined over a larger set (e.g. subset of tweets that mention Obama’s birth place), or alternatively, each concept can be thought of as a boolean valued function defined over this larger set (e.g., a function defined over all tweets, whose value is true for tweets containing Obama’s birth place and false for all others). In our work, concepts are defined by SPARQL queries through user-friendly interfaces that do not require any knowledge of query language from the users. The system then publishes the evolving relevant content as an annotated web feed, proactively delivered through a push model, providing a simple interface for users to follow topic-relevant information in real-time.