yourHistory - Semantic linking for a personalized timeline of historic events

In this paper we present yourHistory: a Facebook application that aims to generate a tailor-made, personalized timeline of historic events, by matching a semantically enriched Facebook profile to a pool of candidate historic events extracted from DBPedia. Two aspects are central to our application: (i) semantic linking technologies backed by rich open web knowledge bases for generating semantically enriched user profiles, and (ii) semantic relatedness metrics for ranking historic events to user profiles. This paper describes the development of a Facebook application that aims to be engaging for users, whilst at the same time being a source for data that can be applied to evaluating or improving the application. We describe our Wikipedia-based semantic relatedness metric for event ranking, but also the restrictions and constraints concerning privacy-sensitive and ethical matters, around data storage and user consent. Finally, we reflect on how this type of user data can be applied for evaluating or improving both the semantic linking and event ranking methods in future work.