sioc-project.org blogs

DERI “SIOC” Research Wins Seven-Year Influential Paper Award

Cloud — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 11:57:21 +0000

A paper on the SIOC framework from the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway, funded by Science Foundation Ireland, has just been announced as the winner of the seven-year influential paper award from the Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC), an annual conference held in Europe that focuses on next-generation web technologies.

The paper, entitled “Towards Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities”, was published in 2005, and has been cited over 170 times. The paper received glowing praise from the award reviewers in terms of impact, community, tool availability and sustainability.

SIOC provides methods for interconnecting Social Web platforms such as forums, blogs and microblogs to each other. It consists of the SIOC ontology, an open-standard machine readable format for expressing the structure of Internet discussion methods, of SIOC metadata producers for a number of popular social platforms and content management systems, and of storage and browsing/searching systems for leveraging this SIOC data. SIOC has since been deployed in hundreds of platforms on thousands of websites including Yahoo! SearchMonkey, the Newsweek website, and various US Government agencies powered by Drupal 7.

The paper authors are John Breslin, social software team leader at DERI and lecturer in Engineering and Informatics at NUI Galway; Andreas Harth, former researcher at DERI and now a postdoctoral researcher at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology; Uldis Bojars, a PhD graduate from DERI, NUI Galway and now a researcher at the National Library of Latvia, and Stefan Decker, director of DERI, NUI Galway.

Judging the competition were Asunción Gómez-Pérez, Artificial Intelligence (AI) director from UPM Madrid, Spain; James Hendler, an AI researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA, and one of the originators of the Semantic Web; and Frank van Harmelen, Professor of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning at the VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

The paper can be downloaded at: http://bit.ly/KQ2iK4

Tales From the SIOC-O-Sphere #10

Cloud — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 19:05:00 +0000

SIOC is a Social Semantic Web project that originated at DERI, NUI Galway (funded by SFI) and which aims to interlink online communities with semantic technologies. You can read more about SIOC on the Wikipedia page for SIOC or in this paper. But in brief, SIOC provides a set of terms that describe the main concepts in social websites: posts, user accounts, thread structures, reply counts, blogs and microblogs, forums, etc. It can be used for interoperability between social websites, for augmenting search results, for data exchange, for enhanced feed readers, and more. It's also one of the metadata formats used in the forthcoming Drupal 7 content management system, and has been deployed on hundreds of websites including Newsweek.com.

As part of our dissemination activities, I've tried to regularly summarise recent developments in the project so as to give an overview of what's going on and also to help in connecting interested parties. It's been much too long (over a year) since my last report, so this will be a long one! In reverse chronological order, here's a list of recent applications and websites that are using SIOC:

SMOB Version 2. As you may have read on Y Combinator Hacker News yesterday, a re-architected and re-coded version of SMOB (Semantic Microblogging) has been created by Alex Passant. As with our original SMOB design, a user's SMOB site stores and shares tweets and user information using SIOC and FOAF, but the new version also exposes data via RDFa and additional vocabularies (including the Online Presence Ontology, MOAT, Common Tag). The new SMOB suggests relevant URIs from DBpedia and Sindice when #hashtags are entered, and has moved from a client-server model to a set of distributed hubs. Contact @terraces.
on-the-wave. This script creates an enhanced browsing experience (that is SIOC-enabled) for the popular PTT bulletin board system. Contact kennyluck@csail.mit.edu.
Newsweek.com. American news magazine Newsweek are now publishing RDFa on their main site, including DC, CommonTag, FOAF and SIOC. Contact @markcatalano.
Linked Data from Picasa. OpenLink Software's URI Burner can now provide Linked Data views of Google Picasa photo albums. See an example here. Contact @kidehen.
Facebook Open Graph Protocol. Facebook recently announced its Open Graph Protocol (OGP), which allows any web page to become a rich object in their social graph. While OGP defines its own set of classes and properties, the RDF schema contains direct mappings to existing concepts in FOAF, DBpedia and BIBO, and indirect mappings to concepts in Geo, vCard, SIOC and GoodRelations. OpenLink also have a data dictionary meshup of some OGP and SIOC terms (ogp:Blog is mapped to sioct:Weblog). Contact @daveman692.
Linked Data from Slideshare. A service to produce Linked Data from the popular Slideshare presentation sharing service has been created, and is available here. Data is represented in SIOC and DC. Contact @pgroth.
Fanhubz. FanHubz supports community building and discovery around BBC content items such as TV shows and radio programmes. It reuses the sioct:MicroblogPost term and also has some interesting additional annotation terms for in-show tweets (e.g. twitterSubtitles). Contact @ldodds.
RDFa-enhanced FusionForge. An RDFa-enhanced version of FusionForge, a software project management and collaboration system, has been created that generates metadata about projects, users and groups using SIOC, DOAP and FOAF. You can look at the Forge ontology proposal, and also view a demo site. Contact @olberger.
Falconer. Falconer is a Semantic Web search engine application enhanced with SIOC. It allows newly-created Social Web content to be represented in SIOC, but it also allows this content to be annotated with any semantic statements available from Falcons, and all of this data can then be indexed by the search engine to form an ecosystem of semantic data. Contact wu@seu.edu.cn.
Django to RDF. A script is available here to turn Django data into SIOC RDF and JSON. View the full repository of related scripts on github. Contact @niklasl.
SIOC Actions Module. A new SIOC module has been created to describe actions, with potential applications ranging from modelling actions in a developer community to tracing interactions in large-scale wikis. There is a SIOC Actions translator site for converting Activity Streams, Wikipedia interactions and Subversion actions into RDF. Contact @pchampin.
SIOC Quotes Module. Another SIOC module has been developed for representing quotes in e-mail conversations and other social media content. You can view a presentation on this topic. Contact @terraces.
Siocwave. Siocwave is a desktop tool for viewing and exploring SIOC data, and is based on Python, RDFLib and wxWidgets. Contact vfaronov@gmail.com.
RDFa in Drupal 7. Following the Drupal RDF code sprint in DERI last year, RDFa support (FOAF, SIOC, SKOS, DC) in Drupal core was committed to version 7 in October, and work has been apace on refining this module. Drupal 7 is currently on its fifth alpha version, and a full release candidate is expected later this summer. Find out more about the RDFa in Drupal initiative at semantic-drupal.com. Contact @scorlosquet.
Omeka Linked Data Plugin (Forthcoming). A plugin to produce Linked Data from the Omeka web publishing platform is in progress that will generate data using SIOC, FOAF, DOAP and other formats. Contact @patrickgmj.
Boeing inSite. inSite is an internal social media platform for Boeing employees that provides SIOC and FOAF data services as part of its architecture. Contact @adamboyet.
Virtuoso Sponger. Virtuoso Sponger is a middleware component of Virtuoso that generates RDF Linked Data from a variety of data sources (working as an "RDFizer"). It supports SIOC as an input format, and also uses SIOC as its data space "glue" ontology (view the slides). Contact @kidehen.
SuRF. SuRF is a Python library for working with RDF data in an object-oriented way, with SIOC being one of the default namespaces. Contact basca@ifi.uzh.ch.
Triplify phpBB 3. A Triplify configuration file for phpBB 3 has been created that allows RDF data (including SIOC) to be generated from this popular bulletin board system. Various other Triplify configurations are also available. Contact auer@informatik.uni-leipzig.de.
SiocLog. SiocLog is an IRC logging application that provides discussion channels and chat user profiles as Linked Data, using SIOC and FOAF respectively. You can see a deployment and view our slides. Contact @tuukkah.
myExperiment Ontology. myExperiment is a collaborative environment where scientists can publish their workflows and experiment plans, share them with groups and find those of others. In their model, myExperiment reuses ontologies like DC, FOAF, SIOC, CC and OAI-ORE. Contact drn@ecs.soton.ac.uk.
aTag. The aTag generator produces snippets of HTML enriched with SIOC RDFa and DBpedia-linked tags about highlighted items of interest on any web page, but aiming at the biomedical domain. Contact @matthiassamwald.
ELGG SID Module. A Semantically-Interlinked Data (SID) module for the ELGG educational social network system has been described that allows UGC and tags from ELGG platforms to become part of the Linked Data cloud. Contact @selvers.
Liferay Linked Data Module. The Linked Data module for Liferay, an enterprise portal solution, supports mapping of data to the SIOC, MOAT and FOAF vocabularies. Contact @bryan_.
ourSpaces. ourSpaces is a VRE enabling online collaboration between researchers from various disciplines. It combines FOAF and SIOC with data provenance ontologies for sharing digital artefacts. Contact r.reid@abdn.ac.uk.
Good Relations and SIOC. This post describes nicely how the Good Relations vocabulary for e-commerce can be combined with SIOC, e.g. to link a gr:Offering (either being offered or sought by a gr:BusinessEntity) to a natural-language discussion about that thing in a sioc:Post. Contact sdmonroe@gmail.com.
Debian BTS to RDF. Discussions from the Debian bug-tracking system (BTS) can be converted to SIOC and RDF and browsed or visualised in interesting ways, e.g. who replied to whom. Contact quang_vu.dang@it-sudparis.eu.
RDFex. For those wishing to reuse parts of popular vocabularies in their own Semantic Web vocabularies, RDFex is a mechanism for importing snippets from other namespaces without having to copy and paste them. RDFex can be used as a proxy for various ontologies including DC, FOAF and SIOC. Contact holger@knublauch.com.
IRC Logger with RDFa and SIOC. A fork of Dave Beckett's IRC Logger has been created to include support for RDFa and SIOC by Toby Inkster. Contact mail@tobyinkster.co.uk.
mbox2rdf. A mbox2rdf script has been created that converts a mailing list in an mbox file to RDF (RSS, SIOC and DC). Contact mail@tobyinkster.co.uk.
Chisimba SIOC Export Module. A SIOC Export module for the Chisimba CMS/LMS platform has been created, which allows various Chisimba modules (CMS, forum, blog, Jabberblog, Twitterizer) to export SIOC data. Contact @paulscott56.
vBulletin SIOC Exporter. Omitted from the last report, the vBulletin SIOC plugin generates SIOC and FOAF data from vBulletin discussion forums. It includes a plugin that allows users to opt to export the SHA1 of their e-mail address (and other inverse functional properties) and their network of friends via vBulletin's user control panel. Contact @johnbreslin.
Discuss SIOC on Google Wave. You can now chat about SIOC on our Google Wave.

Major change to a SIOC term: User is now called UserAccount

Cloud — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 15:24:53 +0000

As per recent discussions on the SIOC developers mailing list and requests from many parties requesting clarification of the term sioc:User (which has oft been confused with foaf:Person), we are happy to announce that the new term sioc:UserAccount has been added to the ontology in replacement of the now-deprecated sioc:User term (in revision 1.35 of the SIOC ontology).

The SIOC specification has been updated accordingly, and knock-on effects to SIOC modules have been corrected.

We would ask all application maintainers to update your code to reflect this change, i.e., replace User with the new term UserAccount.

We are attaching updates to the various figures showing the connections internally between SIOC terms, and also between SIOC, FOAF and SKOS.

Please discuss this change here.

The main classes and properties in SIOC, reflecting the UserAccount change.

The relationships between SIOC, FOAF and SKOS, reflecting the UserAccount change.

An example of content created by a person across multiple sites, linked to a foaf:Person via multiple sioc:UserAccounts.

Obama Administration Using Technology Developed at NUI Galway

Cloud — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 19:47:50 +0000

An internet technology developed at NUI Galway is to be used by President Obama's administration in its new website devoted to the $800 billion economic stimulus package. The administration's 'Recovery.gov' site will employ a web standard, created at NUI Galway's Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), to bring an unprecedented level of transparency to the US Government.

Researchers at DERI focus on the Semantic Web, which is the next incarnation of the internet which will be more intuitive because data will be defined and linked. One of the outputs of DERI's research is called Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities or SIOC. Aimed at connecting online community sites and internet-based discussions, SIOC is set to be utilised by 'Recovery.gov'.

Creator of SIOC and lecturer in Electronic Engineering at NUI Galway, Dr John Breslin, said: "The possibilities afforded by deploying semantic technologies such as SIOC for government transparency are very exciting. Semantic technology allows the linking of government funding data, fed in from spreadsheets or forms, to contributions from the public, private organisations or the government themselves. This can be done not just within a single site but with external linked data from other public sources. You could imagine using this to discover the effect of how and where tax dollars and Euros are being spent on statistics for crime, education or innovation in a set of geographic regions”.

As announced by George Thomas, Chief Architect with the US General Services Administration, the Recovery.gov effort will bring transparency to the government towards allowing citizens and activists to access semantic data about everything from contracts and schedules to training and infrastructure costs.

Since 2003, DERI has been supported by Science Foundation Ireland with a Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology grant. During this time, DERI has grown to over 120 members.

Professor Stefan Decker, Director of DERI, says: “This is another example showing that investment in science and research has truly propelled Ireland into the forefront of technology. Our technology can bring a greater level of transparency and trust to governments as well as financial institutions - something that becomes increasingly important. The US Government has recognised this already".

The SIOC project from DERI at NUI Galway is already being used by a range of applications including Yahoo! SearchMonkey and Drupal.

Tales from the SIOC-o-sphere #9

Cloud — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 04:04:33 +0000

It's been another exciting six months in terms of SIOC-related developments. Here's a summary:

In today's blog post entitled "Obama’s Groundbreaking use of the Semantic Web", David Peterson references a recent presentation by George Thomas about recovery.gov at Transparency Camp where he details a variety of Semantic Web technologies (including SIOC) that will be used. The presentation also includes the SIOC ontology model as an illustration.
As mentioned in a previous message, Yahoo! SearchMonkey has published a list of recommended vocabularies for developers of SearchMonkey applications. SIOC has been chosen as a suitable reference vocabulary to describe the activities of online communities, e.g. “blogs, discussion forums, Q&A sites", and can be used along with FOAF to describe the social networking stack. This article from UMBC Ebiquity also discusses the recently-announced support for RDF in Yahoo! Search BOSS (Build your Own Search System).
Drupal creator Dries Buytaert wrote a very interesting and encouraging post last October entitled "Drupal, the Semantic Web and Search" in which he said: "On a social networking site built with Drupal, [semantic technology] opens up the possibility to do all sorts of deep social searches - searching by types and levels of relationships while simultaneously filtering by other criteria [...] and if Drupal core supported FOAF and SIOC out of the box, you could search within your network of friends or colleagues. This would be a fundamentally new way to take advantage of your network or significantly increase the relevance of certain searches." This was followed up with another post on Monday where Dries talked about some exciting possibilities for exposing the structured data that is available in many Drupal deployments, and the work that is ongoing to have RDFa available in Drupal 7 (read more in my RDFa and Drupal blog post from yesterday). There is also a great video which shows some use cases and examples for RDFa in Drupal.
Views Datasource is a set of plugins for the Drupal Views module for rendering node content in a number of shareable, reusable formats including RDF (FOAF, SIOC, and DOAP).
Claudia Wagner has published an extended version of the WordPress SIOC Exporter that also exports any semantic metadata embedded within the content of a blog post.
The Web Semantic blog has described how to process SIOC feeds with Jenabean. This was followed up by a nice description of how to write out SIOC triples using Jenabean.
David Newman has published the myExperiment ontology, reusing concepts from Dublin Core, FOAF and SIOC since they are closely related to the two main functions of myExperiment (i.e. a social networking framework and a metadata registry).
Chris Clarke from Talis and Fiona Greig from the University of Plymouth have written an interesting case study for the W3C SWEO IG entitled "A Linked Open Data Resource List Management Tool for Undergraduate Students", where FOAF and SIOC are being used for data appropriation in other contexts.
Founder of HyperWeek Raphael Briner and others have been discussing how FOAF and SIOC could be used to (semantically) describe a HyperWeek group.
TagCrumbs, a social placemarking service, have announced that they are now making placemark data available in RDF. Here is an example of a placemark for the Twestival in Galway.
Frank Van Harmelan has posted on the LarKC weblog about how SIOC data could be used by early adopters of LarKC-type technologies.
The FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) project is looking at effective work practices and dynamics in free and open source software development (teams). They are trying to use SIOC to model e-mail lists and threads.
Identi.ca, an open-source microblogging platform based on Laconi.ca, is now publishing both FOAF and SIOC data. For example, here is an Identi.ca user in FOAF and a SIOC-augmented RSS feed for that user, and here is a feed from an Identi.ca group about SIOC. Uldis Bojars (Happy Birthday to you today!) has started a collection of known minor issues here.
Fabrizio Orlandi and Alex Passant have created a new SIOC Semantic Web data exporter for MediaWiki-based wikis.
Michael Haschke has written a SIOC plugin for DokuWiki called "DokuSIOC". The plugin creates metadata with auto-discovery links and content negotiation, pings PingTheSemanticWeb.com on updates, and provides linked data.
The Creative Commons Network has been launched, with CC CTO Nathan Yergler saying: "The CC Network is where the semantic rubber meets the web road. With the CC Network we're leveraging everything we've learned over the past five years about metadata on the web, including the new RDFa standard, along with the work of many other groups, including FOAF, POWDER, and SIOC."
Metadata from the 7th International Semantic Web Conference is being published in RDF, including SIOC for the comments. The related Semantic Web Dog Food service was also announced by Moeller et al. as a central repository for Semantic Web conference metadata.
SIOC is now OWL-DL compliant. This change was motivated by the SWANSIOC initiative in the W3C HLCSIG (Semantic Web for Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group), which uses the Science Collaboration Framework based on Drupal.
A recent article from Joke van Niekerk discusses how health care management can be advanced with the (Social) Semantic Web, including SIOC.

Prize winners visualise Irish online life in the boards.ie SIOC Data Competition

Cloud — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:45:14 +0000

The winners of the SIOC (pronounced "shock") data competition being run by DERI at the National University of Ireland, Galway 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.

The top winning submission was entitled "SIOC.ME: A Real-Time Interactive Visualisation of boards.ie Semantic Data within a 3-D Space". The entry illustrates how 3-D visualisations may be harnessed to not only provide an interactive means of presenting or browsing data but also to create useful data analysis tools, especially for manipulating the "semantic" (meaningful) data from online communities and social networking sites. The entry was submitted by Darren Geraghty, a user interface and interaction designer, and it was praised by the judges for the huge amount of effort that went into creating it. A video of the application may be viewed here and a demonstration of the tool can be seen at go.sioc.me.

In second place was a visualisation application called "boardsview" by Stephen Dolan of Trinity College Dublin. This is an interactive, real-time animation where one can watch the historical content from many discussion forums changing in real or compressed time. In this application, you can zoom into a particular forum to see individual users posting messages or to see threads being created and destroyed.

Third prize was awarded to the "Forum Activity Graph" by Drew Perttula from California. This entry was a visualisation showing the popularity of forums on boards.ie as represented by coloured rivers of information, which were then rendered and displayed using Google Maps.

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.

The competition was judged by an independent panel of three experts: Ian Davis, Chief Technology Officer with Talis; Harry Halpin, researcher at the University of Edinburgh and chair of the W3C GRDDL working group; and Peter Mika, researcher at Yahoo! Research Barcelona and author of the book "Social Networks and the Semantic Web". The first prize is an Amazon voucher for $4000; second prize is a voucher for $2000; third prize is a voucher for $1000.

Tales from the SIOC-o-sphere #8

Cloud — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 18:43:45 +0000

It's time for another installment from the world of SIOC!

After the news in May that Digg were incorporating RDFa in their pages, Digital Bazaar CEO Manu Sporny (in Blacksburg, where I lived for some time in 1996 and 2000) has written an excellent three-part guide on the public-rdfa list about how more semantic information can be incorporated into Digg pages using SIOC RDFa (parts 1, 2 and 3). You can view the result (as validating XHTML) here. See also this interesting related blog post on RDFa by Manu.
As part of their data portability drive, the mobile phonebook service ZYB (recently acquired by Vodafone) announced on their blog in June that their latest release introduced FOAF and SIOC exports from user's profile pages (with the full export only available to the users themselves at zyb.com/profilename.foaf and zyb.com/profilename.sioc respectively). SIOC is being used to describe actions performed by ZYB users such as shouting, writing comments or updating status messages on Facebook. You can also read more about their new public feeds API for ZYB.
The SemanticEngine.NET class library has just been released by Mads Kristensen, which supports various different formats ready to use in .NET (currently APML, FOAF, XFN, and soon SIOC and microformats).
Gautier Poupeau has written an Operator user script that checks if a SIOC-enabled post is referenced in del.icio.us.
Martynas Jusevičius talks about how technologies including SIOC can enable semantic social networks.
Brad Fallon gives SIOC a namecheck in his Freeline Report video podcast. Thanks Brad!
On the IBM Developer Works site, Rob Crowther mentions SIOC in his description of how to plan a Semantic Web site.
Ben O'Steen describes how he plans to ditch his database-based blog for a semantic one, using terms from SIOC.
Triplify 0.4 has been released which uses SIOC and other vocabularies to expose instance data as RDF from a variety of web applications.
Kingsley Idehen describes how WordPress blogs can be incorporated into the Linked Data Web using Virtuoso.
Daniel Lewis talks about a Universe of Discourse / Discussion and SIOC. He has also developed a WordPress theme called StraightWalker that links into the SIOC vocabulary.
I mentioned last time that the Sindice group would soon release the SWPop widget for WordPress. It's now available as the SIOC Widget and it allows you to view posts, comments, topics, etc. made by any blog commenter across the SIOC-o-sphere (as indexed by Sindice). They've also created a SIOC API for Sindice.
Alex Passant has led work on a prototype system called SMOB (Semantic Microblogging) for distributed / decentralised microblogging, that uses FOAF and SIOC to model microbloggers, services and microblog posts. You can read more in my blog post about SMOB or in Alex's blog post. You can also try the anonymous client and see a server view.
From IRC (1, 2), we found out about a French wiki system called WikiNi that has been adapted by Charles Nepote to allow publishing to SMOB. You can get the client here.
This SMOB post from Gautier Poupeau links to his Drupal 5 widget that shows the latest SIOC postings on a given SMOB server.
Steve Flinter has written a blog post entitled "Tangler versus SIOC", referring to the ProgrammableWeb announcement about Tangler, an API for discussion forums. I think it'd be great if SIOC could be used by Tangler, and I'm glad to see that others think so too.
TCD student Dave Langley has created the Online Semantic Community Framework (OSCF), a platform for managing online communities based on semantic technologies including SIOC. It uses a SPARQL endpoint as its data source.
David Peterson has been discussing on the public-rdf-in-html-tf list about which vocabularies should be used in Drupal core, and Manu Sporny replies with some reasons for using FOAF and SIOC independently or together.
Deirdre Lee, Vassilios Peristeras et al. have been working on a very nice enterprise application for SIOC, where it is being used in collaborative work environments (CWEs) as an interoperable format to share workspaces and documents between different CWE systems (e.g. BSCW and Business Collaborator). This work was carried out as part of the ECOSPACE integrated project, and you can find out more from their newsletter wiki, our IEEE IS publication or attend the presentation at ODBASE 2008 in November.
The Semantic MediaWiki Plus User Group has been set up, and they are investigating how SMW templates can support FOAF and SIOC.
I'm very pleased to announce that our SIOC "partner-in-crime" Alex Passant has joined DERI. Alex recently gave an interesting presentation at the Centre for Digital Music (repeated here in DERI) about where "Social Music Meets the Semantic Web".
Mike Alexrod has blogged about joining the SIOC-o-sphere, along with the unexpected SEO benefits that he experienced as a result!
Over 60 competitors have signed up for the boards.ie SIOC Data Competition and there’s still one month left...
Finally, the 1st Social Data on the Web Workshop (or what we like to call the "SIOC Workshop"!) will be held at the 7th International Semantic Web Conference in Karlsruhe this October. The list of accepted papers is now available; it's going to be a very interesting event. We hope that you can attend!

Previous SIOC-o-sphere articles:

#7 http://sioc-project.org/node/328
#6 http://sioc-project.org/node/310
#5 http://sioc-project.org/node/294
#4 http://sioc-project.org/node/272
#3 http://sioc-project.org/node/271
#2 http://sioc-project.org/node/138
#1 http://sioc-project.org/node/79

If you wish to contribute to the next article, join the SIOC Twine and use the tag "siocosphere9" when you add items.

Tutorial at the Semantic Technology 2008 Conference

CaptSolo — Tue, 20 May 2008 18:37:11 +0000

DERI team (Stefan, John and Uldis) was presenting a tutorial "The Future of Social Networks: The Need for Semantics" at the Semantic Technology 2008 conference in San Jose, CA.

Here are the tutorial slides (you can also download them from SlideShare):

| View | Upload your own

"Data Portability with SIOC and FOAF" slides from the XTech 2008 talk.

Tales from the SIOC-o-sphere #7

Cloud — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:47:26 +0000

It's been three months since my last round-up of all things SIOC-ed, so here is entry number seven in the series:

Version 1.0 of a SIOC API for Perl has been released on CPAN! The CPAN page for the SIOC API is here. A description of the project itself is available here. Thanks to Jochen Lillich, Thomas N. Burg, and also to Internet Privatstiftung Austria (IPA) for funding this work.
A new RDF API module for Drupal has been announced that will include sub-classes / sub-properties of popular terms from SIOC, DC, etc. (Drupal creator Dries Buytaert has also said that an RDF API will appear in the core of Drupal 7; see this video.) Stephane Corlosquet has also made an RDF Schema proposal for Drupal (which includes SIOC) and has received very positive feedback. Some potential RDF use cases for Drupal have also been described.
Gautier Poupeau has written a useful guide (en Français) on how to RDF-ise your blog in two parts: the theory and the practice. It uses RDFa and vocabularies including SIOC, SIOC Types, DC Elements, DC Refinements and XSD.
SIOC data is now being produced by memoQ by Yuki Matsuoka and Hideaki Takeda of the National Institute of Informatics, Japan.
Keith Alexander at Talis has described (and shown) how it is possible to create client-side Semantic Web applications using their Convert service. For example, on this page comments functionality is added to a section identified with a "sioc:has_reply" property using a short piece of embedded widget code.
ASP.net developer John Dyer has written a nice post on DataPortability and its standards, talking about OpenID, FOAF, SIOC, APML, etc. Daniel Lewis has also written a good overview of DP. More recently, John announced the DataPortability pack for BlogEngine.NET that produces SIOC, APML and FOAF. BlogEngine.NET founder Mads Kristensen has also written about data portability and making an API to your website.
OpenLink's Personal Data Space Explorer now also exposes SIOC, FOAF and other RDF data. See Kingsley's post on linked data via FOAF and SIOC.
Uldis Bojars, Alex Passant and I will present a tutorial entitled "Interlinking Online Communities and Enriching Social Software with the Semantic Web" at the 14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008) in Beijing this month.
I did an interview with SemanticWeb.com called "SIOC-ing the Semantic Web" in January, and talked to PCWorld about data portability and SIOC. Uldis recorded a podcast with Talis in February with SIOC as one of the main topics. (Eric Miller also described in another Talis podcast how FOAF and SIOC are useful not only for getting at historical content, but for providing fine-tuned content-delivery systems connecting people interested in various aspects of a particular domain.)
Alex has produced a universal SIOC reader widget. The widget can query for SIOC data from any SPARQL endpoint that provides a JSON output for SELECT queries. (Alex has also released the Meaning of a Tag ontology which links with SIOC and SCOT.)
Phillip Rhodes has been working on the OpenQabal "social software operating system" which integrates a set of applications (including Roller and JavaBB ) via single sign-on (SSO), a common look-and-feel, and SIOC.
Sean Palmer has written an interesting article entitled "One Semantic Application, One UI?" in which he talks about Tabulator and its interfaces, including application specific panes for FOAF, SIOC and DOAP.
Tim Berners-Lee talked about FOAF and SIOC in an interview with Marie Boran from Silicon Republic for the Irish Independent: "A project that started back in 2000 called Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) represents relationships between people, as well as basic contact details. SIOC does this for groups: it extends the FOAF idea to being able to talk about whole groups of people. Groups are a very important part of the Web because online communities are where we form our trust. It is very useful to build tools that apply to all the online communities so they can all generate this social trust information. I am excited about SIOC because you can use that information to determine trust, to let people in. If someone is in a group that a friend of mine is part of, I can create another relationship based on that."
Uldis, Tuukka Hastrup and Thomas Schandl are updating Uldis' WordPress SIOC Importer, which allows you to create blog posts based on SIOC data ported from weblogs, mailing lists, forums, IRC, etc.
Chris Bizer, Richard Cyganiak and Tom Heath have published a very useful document called "How to Publish Linked Data on the Web" (mentions vocabularies to use like FOAF, DC, SIOC, DOAP, SKOS, MO, Rev and CC). See also Leo Sauermann and Richard's "Cool URIs for the Semantic Web".
In the area of collaborative work environments, SIOC is being used in the Ecospace project to export metadata from both BSCW and BC. Here is a BSCW SIOC export service, and there is also a CWE version of the SIOC Explorer (which includes data from both BSCW and BC).
Sören Auer's team have produced Triplify, which enables simple mapping of RDB to RDF data in a variety of web applications. Using Triplify, SIOC and FOAF data can be produced from Drupal 5, WordPress, WackoWiki, and Open Journal Systems.
The new version of BoardTracker will have an API to export data using SIOC.
The Sindice group will soon release the SWPop widget for WordPress that allows you to view posts, comments, topics, etc. made by any blog commenter across the SIOC-o-sphere (as indexed by Sindice). You can see a preview here.
This is an interesting post by Andrew A. Peterson on how semantic standards like RSS, FOAF and SIOC (SIOD!) can provide sustainable SEO for websites, referencing the Yahoo! Search announcement regarding support for RDF and microformats.
Ben O'Steen describes a Pylons interface to carry out CRUD functionality where items are linked together semantically using SIOC.
Leigh Dodds has a fun FOAF (and SIOC) tale about Bee Node (told using SPARQL)!
I've presented at WebCamp on DataPortability, web standards, SIOC and FOAF and recorded a related video on DataPortability and me. It pales in comparison to this one from Danny Ayers!

Previous SIOC-o-sphere articles:

#6 http://sioc-project.org/node/310
#5 http://sioc-project.org/node/294
#4 http://sioc-project.org/node/272
#3 http://sioc-project.org/node/271
#2 http://sioc-project.org/node/138
#1 http://sioc-project.org/node/79

SIOC tutorial accepted for WWW2008

Cloud — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 11:53:30 +0000

I'm happy to announce that our tutorial proposal on SIOC entitled "Interlinking Online Communities and Enriching Social Software with the Semantic Web" (Uldis Bojars and John Breslin of DERI, NUI Galway, Alexandre Passant of EDF R&D / LaLICC, Université Paris 4) has been accepted for WWW2008, the 14th International World Wide Web Conference to be held in Beijing, China in April. The abstract is as follows:

This tutorial will give an overview of current research issues and solutions for using Semantic Web technologies in order to enrich social software and to interlink online communities. We will discuss current standardisation activities as well as research prototypes, focusing on the work of the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) project. This initiative recently produced the W3C Member Submission for the SIOC Ontology, which describes a standard way to represent rich data from online community sites and Web 2.0 tools in an interoperable form using RDF.

On a larger extent, we will cover additional topics such as search and browsing based on community metadata, large-scale data integration in decentralised communities, and linking social media contributions to the social graph. We will also focus on implementations of tools that work with SIOC data, providing the audience with the know-how to build such systems using open-source APIs and frameworks. We will also discuss how the technologies described in this tutorial can be applied to enterprise scenarios, and we will detail some commercial applications that are now using SIOC.

Finally, we will describe how a network of interlinked communities powered by semantic social software can lead towards the creation of Social Semantic Information Spaces.

A full list of the accepted tutorials is available here.

Tales from the SIOC-o-sphere, part 6

Cloud — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 10:05:19 +0000

Here are the latest happenings from the world of SIOC during the past few months, with thanks to all involved in supporting the initiative! (Note to new readers that SIOC is an open data format for community description.)

Engage, the community information application from Talis, is using SIOC, SKOS and FOAF.
Loic Le Meur's Seesmic microvlogging service ("the video Twitter") has decided to adopt the SIOC ontology as one of their open platform formats (along with FOAF and DC; see 1, 2).
OpenLink have released an EC2 / S3 Amazon Image-version of their Virtuoso product, which includes SIOC support: "your blogs, wikis, bookmarks, etc. are based on the SIOC ontology (think open social graph++)".
PTSW's namespace statistics page lists SIOC as their fourth most used namespace out of 423.
Planet Semantic Focus has launched, and plans to expose PSF community member discussions using SIOC and to interlink these with comments from the original blogs themselves shortly.
Dan Brickley has published a nifty FOAF classes and properties diagram which shows the internal and external links (to SIOC, DOAP, Geo, etc.).
Thomas Burg has received a grant from IPA's "netidee" funding call which will be used to develop a SIOC API for Perl.
Oskar Welzl has SIOC-enabled the skin on his own blog and a friend's to produce combined RSS and SIOC descriptions (with an aggregate archive). You can view this in Tabulator starting at this URL.
Dorai Thodla has written about Doug Englebart's "Networked Improvement Community" idea, and he discusses the overlap between improvement communities and the interlinked communities created via SIOC.
Phillip Rhodes tells us about OpenQabal, an open source social networking and collaboration platform that will include SIOC support, allowing Roller, JavaBB and other component applications to become part of the SIOC-o-sphere.
ImageMatters have announced a new open source social bookmarking and mashup application called gnizr, that exports saved bookmarks using SIOC and a tag ontology.
Finally, the forthcoming Semantic Technologies Conference 2008 has listed SIOC among their appropriate topic areas in their call for proposals. Start writing now, the deadline has been extended to 10th December!

State of the SIOC-o-sphere (#5)

Cloud — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 12:20:39 +0000

It's that random time of the year again where I summarise what's been going on in the world of SIOC...

We now have a SIOC W3C Member Submission! Along with W3C members Asemantics, DFKI, FZI, Fraunhofer, Fundación CTIC, OpenLink, Opera, STFC, UPM, University of Trento and other co-authors, Uldis and I edited three main documents as part of the submission describing the SIOC core ontology specification, SIOC applications and implementation status, and some ontologies and RDF vocabularies related to SIOC. You can also read the W3C Team Comment for our submission. Thanks again to everyone involved!
The Semantically-Interlinked Scientific Communities project aims to improve how scientific data and knowledge is represented and communicated. It will use SIOC, FOAF, DC, Creative and Science Commons, OBO and HCLS ontologies and technologies as its basis.
Mark Wahl has written a useful article entitled "organizing principles for identity systems: embedding SIOC in XHTML with RDFa" which details how to describe blog post structures using SIOC and RDFa.
There is a Google Summer of Code project from the Apache Software Foundation on creating plugins for embedding/producing RDF/XML and microformats in Forrest content objects, and SIOC is one of the target vocabularies.
John Wubbel has an interesting post about how SIOC and semantic technologies can connect real estate networks.
Lee Faus has been telling us on the #sioc IRC channel how the forthcoming Stuff project will use SIOC to facilitate searching, creating, and maintaining all kinds of 'stuff' online (from wikis, forums, knowledge bases, IM, support tickets, e-mails, etc.).
SIOC metadata is being used in a very cool demonstrator from OpenLink on how to inject Facebook data into the Semantic Web. This is something I had been waiting for, so nice work!
There are also a number of modules for the OpenLink Data Spaces (ODS) platform that each export SIOC metadata, including ODS-Blog, ODS-Wiki, ODS-Bookmarks, ODS-AddressBook, ODS-Calendar, ODS-Polls, ODS-Gallery (for photos), ODS-Feeds (for feed aggregation and exposure via SIOC), and ODS-Discussion (for comments across blogs, wikis or any other data space that supports some form of commenting).
Another interesting SIOC-enabled application is the Mailing List Explorer. MLE is a tool that allows the exploration of mailing lists via query, timeline view, etc. It provides RDF representations (including SIOC metadata) for any valid W3C public mailing list archive.
On the wiki front, IkeWiki is a semantic wiki for knowledge engineering. IkeWiki allows discussions (following a forum style with threaded views) to be attached to wiki pages. These discussions are represented using the SIOC ontology, which allows one to use semantic queries to investigate the structure of any discussion.
SIOC is being discussed for use by the Italian workgroup for internet and web technologies. The group already produces metadata in FOAF and OPML.
Harry Chen has written an interesting post about how ontologies like FOAF and SIOC can play important roles in the development of a people search engine. This post was made in relation to the forthcoming Finding Experts on the Web with Semantics workshop at ISWC 2007, for which SIOC is a major topic of interest.
SIOC gets referenced in Mark Canter's blog post about posting to multiple social media sites, and this time it isn't referred to as STOIC!
For Russian speakers, here's a blog conversation in Russian about the SIOC discussion clouds picture. SIOC has also received coverage in Korean (ZDnet), Austrian (ORF, Computerwelt), and German (Computer Zeitung) media following talks by Stefan.
Tom Morris has created a MySpace parser that produces SIOC data; unfortunately due to some web hosting issues, this is currently offline.
In a joint collaboration between DERI, NUI Galway and BiKE, Seoul National University, int.ere.st provides metadata creation and sharing support across online communities that use tag data. int.ere.st aims to build a tag-mediated society based on Semantic Web technologies, and resources in the site are based on RDF vocabularies including SIOC, FOAF, and SCOT. You can view a demonstration video for int.ere.st at YouTube.

SIOC is a W3C Submission

Cloud — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 11:08:57 +0000

I am happy to announce that SIOC is now a W3C Member Submission, as mentioned today on the W3C SW blog.

The SIOC Ontology Submission is composed of:

Thanks to Uldis for all his work, and to all our authors, contributors and supporters! More information about SIOC is available from sioc-project.org. Our SIOC work in DERI, NUI Galway is funded by Science Foundation Ireland.

State of the SIOC-o-sphere (#4)

Cloud — Fri, 18 May 2007 12:42:25 +0000

Since my last SIOC update in November, here are some of the latest happenings from the SIOC-o-sphere:

Update! Adam Gzella has reminded me of the integration of SIOC support within both Social Semantic Collaborative Filtering (SSCF) and JeromeDL. To see SSCF in action, try out notitio.us/bookmarks, which can also display SIOC data.
Jaroslaw Dobrzanski reported on his use of SIOC in IKHarvester, a component for Didaskon. He has since produced a longer description of what IKHarvester does. IKHarvester collects data from semantic social spaces (wikis, blogs, etc.) and provides it to Didaskon as informal Learning Objects (LOs).
I've written the first version of a SIOC exporter for phpBB 2.0.x.
Eyal and Benjamin have produced an explorer for SIOC forums. It's written using Ruby on Rails and their ActiveRDF / SWORD Semantic Web application framework for Rails. You can get it from the SIOC explorer page.
SWAML has moved from Debian unstable to testing, and also won a Spanish free software contest for universities. Congratulations!
OpenLink Data Spaces (ODS) SPARQL endpoints now provide access to SIOC instance data from a range of ODS application instances including blogs, wikis, aggregated feeds (RSS 1.0, 2.0 and Atom), shared bookmarks, discussions (i.e. comment threads), photo galleries, briefcases (e.g. WebDAV file servers), etc. The live ODS demo server and MyOpenLink.net (alpha) service are examples of ODS instances that can expose SIOC instance data to SPARQL query service clients, also in the form of real and virtual RDF graphs. The ODS SIOC reference guide describes how each application realm is mapped to SIOC alongside SPARQL query examples for interacting with the SIOC instance data.
To help describe other application areas for online communities (e.g. as described via ODS above), a lot of new terms have been added to the separate SIOC types module (T-SIOC). New types of Container include AddressBook, AnnotationSet, AudioChannel, BookmarkFolder, Briefcase, EventCalendar, ImageGallery, ProjectDirectory, ResumeBank, ReviewArea, SubscriptionList, SurveyCollection, VideoChannel, and Wiki. New types of Forum include ArgumentativeDiscussion, ChatChannel, MailingList, MessageBoard, and Weblog. Poll has been created as a type of Item, and new types of Post include BoardPost, Comment, InstantMessage, and MailMessage. I've also drawn a picture of how T-SIOC and FOAF can create networks of object-centred sociality through the content that people create.
Tom Morris has written an RDF-iser for Twitter that uses SIOC and FOAF. You can see an RDF version of a person's twitterings by using their username instead of these examples: johnbreslin, captsolo.
Mike Bergman has written an interesting post called "An Intrepid Guide to Ontologies". This follows on nicely from his recent "Eat Your Greens: FOAF and SIOC are Good for You". Thanks Mike!
Patrick Gosetti Murray-John talks about SIOC descriptions of fora for teaching and learning, and uses some SIOC in the Fishtank for Faculty Academy.
Patrick and Jim Groom have also demonstrated how to use the structure and searching power of RDF to fully utilise tags and feeds on blogs. They combined RSS feeds from about ten people with SIOC data using RAP and Dave Beckett’s Triplr.
Mary McKnight from RSS Pieces (guesting on the Future of Real Estate Marketing blog) talks about how SIOC and FOAF can be applied to the application domain of real estate.
Uldis Bojars gave a very well-received presentation on SIOC entitled "The Semantic Web for Social Media Sites" at BarCamp Ireland 3. He also presented a paper about SIOC and Klostu called "The Boardscape: Creating a Super Social Network of Message Boards", written with Ron Kass for ICWSM. Alex Passant presented a paper about strengthening folksonomies using ontologies (including SIOC) at the same conference.
There are plans to support SIOC and POWDER content labels on my.opera.com.
The Semantic Web FAQ is published (SIOC gets a mention in the community topic).
Tuukka Hastrup is logging some IRC channels in both HTML and Turtle RDF, and SIOC is being used as one of the representation formats.
Hak-Lae Kim has launched an ontology and framework for sharing social semantic clouds of tags (SCOT) that works with FOAF, SIOC and SKOS. Let's share tags!
Eileen Brown references SIOC in an article entitled "Beyond Web 2.0".
For our DERI Research Day in December, I gave a SIOC overview talk entitled "Information Centric Access: The Case of SIOC" (lots of attendees from academia, industry and state organisations), and I also gave a brief presentation in January on how to use SIOC for expert finding at the first ExpertFinder Workshop in Berlin. (I am an organiser for the follow-on workshop "Finding Experts on the Web with Semantics" to be held at ISWC 2007, and SIOC will be a relevant topic.)
Matthias Samwald told us about the bio-zen ontology framework, which includes SIOC as one of its base ontologies since it "is an excellent tool to describe scientific discourse in a practical, web-centric manner".
John Hoogstrate has written some SIOC data producers for a forum he runs.
SIOC is being used by Henry Story et al. in BAETLE (Bug And Enhancement Tracking LanguagE). See Henry's blog post on BAETLE for more.

Microformats and SIOC

Cloud — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 17:44:48 +0000

(Copied from here.)

It's been a year since I last took a look at the overlap between the SIOC Project and Microformats (mf). I've been trying to catch up with recent developments, especially the cite-rel draft by Ryan King and Eran Globen.

I admire the Microformats resolve to "solve problems", rather than provide generic things that may in the future be used for X or Y (even though I believe that too is important, or else I wouldn't be a Semantic Web researcher!). I also think that there is no good reason that both the Semantic Web and Microformats communities can't work together (despite arguments like this). There are people on both sides who strongly feel that the other is going in the wrong direction, but it would be a mistake to let any such voices dominate. Both communities are trying to add semantics in the Web, and using things like GRDDL and Micromodels / mf RDF representations, the existing work from both sides can be reused.

So, with this in mind and in terms of SIOC, I hope that we can use Microformats to help create closer interlinks between the objects that make up online communities - I'm talking mainly about posts, forums / blogs, communities and user profiles. I'm going to start with three or four things I want SIOC to do for Microformats and vice versa, and then we can go from there. These correspond to some of the links shown in my "connecting discussion clouds" picture.

One User, Many User Accounts

At the moment, it is quite difficult to identify all the posts made by a particular person through their various user personas or profiles on different sites - e.g. find all the blog posts and comments and forum threads I've created in the past year. In the SIOC and FOAF vocabularies, there are two properties linking people to user profiles: a Person is linked to a User using a "hasOnlineAccount" link, and a User is linked to a Person using an "account_of" relationship. Using a mf for sioc:account_of / foaf:hasOnlineAccount would help with the "One Person, Many User Accounts" issue - e.g. these links could be created from a user signature or other public profile field. For example, I have an account on boards.ie, and I want to say that I am the same person described by a FOAF profile on my own site, or that I hold another account on boards.jp. Maybe links are required in both directions to confirm that I am really am who I claim I am, but this can be done at least (even if it is tedious). This may also require some BBCodes for forums that translate to the appropriate HTML.

Example

<div class="User"> I am <a rel="account_of" href="http://johnbreslin.com/">John Breslin</a>, and I also have another account, <a rel="hasOnlineAccount" href="http://microformats.org/wiki/User:Cloud">Cloud on microformats.org</a>. </div>

Virtual Forums

Wouldn't it be nice if you could have a virtual forum of all your posts on blogs, forums, mailing lists, whatever? Apart from going around to all of your favourite sites and linking to your posts from a page, another option would be to do it in reverse - when you create your post, link back to your own post aggregation resource. From the user side, this could be achieved by creating a mf for sioc:has_container that allows linking to "Virtual Forums" from the post creator side, e.g. from the post content. Also, virtual forums could be created that list all the posts by people in a restricted social network, or constructed for posts / threads that refer to a certain resource or topic.

Example

<div class="Post"> Another post that is related to my love of <a rel="has_container" href="http://www.johnbreslin.com/forums/electronicmusic/">electronic music</a>, Tangerine Dream are releasing five previously unreleased albums next week... </div>

Unified Communities

This kind of corresponds to Eran's idea of "distributed social anything". In SIOC, we use has_part and part_of to link any object to a particular community. The concept of Community in SIOC is very generic - but the idea is that you should have a structured way to link different things (forums, people, etc.) to a community object. Let's say that there's a community talking about the TV series Lost, and they have a blog, a mailing list, an aggregation of Lost-related blogs, or just a news website - these could be linked to an identified central community resource through part_of / has_part relation. Similarly, I could identify myself or my user profile on a particular site as being part of that Lost community. From forums, a mf for has_part / part_of would allow one to link a forum or blog or any discussion channel to a larger community, e.g. this could be done from a forum description. Also, a mf for has_part / part_of would help to link a user to a community, e.g. by creating a typed link from a user signature.

Example

<div class="Forum"> Welcome to the <a href="http://sioc-project.org/forum/">SIOC forums</a>, where we talk about the <a rel="part_of" href="http://www.semanticweb.org/">Semantic Web</a> and internet discussions. </div>

Distributed Conversations

Ryan and Eran have already done a lot towards this idea with the cite-rel draft. In terms of SIOC, we already have the has_reply and reply_of relationships, which match up to their proposals: rel-reply corresponds to sioc:has_reply, and rev-reply corresponds to sioc:reply_of. Using the mf cite-rel versions of has_reply / reply_of would allow these distributed threads to form, e.g. if used from the post content. cite-rel brings the reply idea a step further by introducing rel-forward and rev-forward (basically, has_reply and reply_of with quoted content). Ultimately, we need ways to say that a post is in agreement or disagreement with a previous post or even with specific parts of a previous post (see picture below). Also, we may need to describe other reply types that are needed, as with IBIS. (Note: rev-update and rel-update may correspond to sioc: previous_version and sioc:next_version respectively, and via may be compared with sioc:related_to.)

Example

<div class="Post"> As a follow up to my previous post about <a rel="reply_of" href="http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2006/09/07/creating-connections-between-discussion-clouds-with-sioc/">connecting discussion clouds</a>, I have realised that I need to say more about people and topics, especially as discussed <a rel="related_to" href="http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2005/11/11/iswc-2005-over-won-an-ipod-aligning-sioc-with-foaf-and-skos/">here</a>. Edit: I've since posted about how <a rel="has_reply" href="http://www.johnbreslin.com/blog/2006/09/27/sioc-foaf-skos/">FOAF and SKOS can be used to describe people and topics</a>. </div>

(Edit: Eran has replied to my original post - thanks!)

State of the SIOC-o-sphere (number 3)

Cloud — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 13:42:00 +0000

Since my last "SIOC-o-sphere" summaries (see 1 and 2), there've been quite a few developments!

I'll begin by ripping off Alex Passant's summary from last month...

A first version of the API documentation is online. It explains the different classes and methods of the API, which are designed to create SIOC data without any knowledge of SIOC nor RDF.

Drupal exporter has been updated. It now exports data according the latest version of the specs (1.08), and is ready for FOAF mappings. There are still adjustements to be done about the FOAF module, but you can apply a patch that can be found and explained here to make it work - you need to install FOAF module for Drupal first of course;

Some bugs have also been fixed in b2evo exporter (see SVN) and DotClear one (release 1.4.2 (src | pkg)). As things seems now quite stable in PHP, is there any volunteer for coding Perl or RoR exporters for SIOC ?

SIOC export in ODS is now compliant with SIOC crawler, so it can be crawled and put in any triple-store, as Kingley's one which is now here among other blogs from various engines;

John wrote 3 different SIOC pdf guides, and also designed a shema about FOAF / SIOC / SKOS, to help people to get rid of ambiguity between foaf:User and sioc:User;

Wikier mentionned on #sioc that SWAML, a project he's involved in to translate mailing lists in RDF, will use SIOC;

Finally, SIOC will be exposed at BlogTalk, with a SIOCYourBlog experiment.

And since then there've been more happenings...

As Alex Passant mentioned, SWAML, the Semantic Web Archive of Mailing Lists, is now using SIOC as its base ontology. Last week, the developers also announced that SWAML now incorporates Buxon, a sioc:Forum visor written in PyGTK (see screenshot). Excellent stuff...
Fred Giasson's TalkDigger is now serialising its SIOC documents using N3, and PingtheSemanticWeb can also detect and index these documents - cool!
Kingsley Idehen details that you can view the RDF graph of SIOC data from OpenLink Data Spaces, and that all of the SIOCRef demos can be run via the SPARQL endpoint.
A Semantic Web activist called Alex Piner was to give a talk referencing the SIOC project at CommerceNet in California.
OpenLink Software and Fred Giasson have come together to form ZitGist LLC, a company that will implement ODS' Virtuoso in the TalkDigger and PingtheSemanticWeb projects. WRT to ZitGist, Fred has also been writing about the three dimensions of the Web - there are some interesting followup posts on his blog about these dimensions. I'm happy to see that this new venture has been made possible through their common membership of the SIOC community, and look forward to their results...

Creating Connections Between Discussion Clouds with SIOC

Cloud — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 13:13:38 +0000

(Extract from our forthcoming BlogTalk paper about browsers for SIOC.)

SIOC provides a unified vocabulary for content and interaction description: a semantic layer that can co-exist with existing discussion platforms. Using SIOC, various linkages are created between the aforementioned concepts, which allow new methods of accessing this linked data, including:

Virtual Forums. These may be a gathering of posts or threads which are distributed across discussion platforms, for example, where a user has found posts from a number of blogs that can be associated with a particular category of interest, or an agent identifies relevant posts across a certain timeframe.
Distributed Conversations. Trackbacks are commonly used to link blog posts to previous posts on a related topic. By creating links in both directions, not only across blogs but across all types of internet discussions, conversations can be followed regardless of what point or URI fragment a browser enters at.
Unified Communities. Apart from creating a web page with a number of relevant links to the blogs or forums or people involved in a particular community, there is no standard way to define what makes up an online community (apart from grouping the people who are members of that community using FOAF or OPML). SIOC allows one to simply define what objects are constituent parts of a community, or to say to what community an object belongs (using sioc:has_part / part_of): users, groups, forums, blogs, etc.
Shared Topics. Technorati (a search engine for blogs) and BoardTracker (for bulletin boards) have been leveraging the free-text tags that people associate with their posts for some time now. SIOC allows the definition of such tags (using the subject property), but also enables hierarchial or non-hierarchial topic definition of posts using sioc:topic when a topic is ambiguous or more information on a topic is required. Combining with other Semantic Web vocabularies, tags and topics can be further described using the SKOS organisation system.
One Person, Many User Accounts. SIOC also aims to help the issue of multiple identities by allowing users to define that they hold other accounts or that their accounts belong to a particular personal identity (via foaf:holdsOnlineAccount or sioc:account_of). Therefore, all the posts or comments made by a particular person using their various associated user accounts across platforms could be identified.

Edit: Here's SIOC acting as middleware.

Latest Developments in the SIOC-o-Sphere

Cloud — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 13:06:50 +0000

The latest bits and pieces people have been saying and doing related to SIOC:

Enabling SIOC for AI3 - Adaptive Information - Mike Bergman installs the SIOC WordPress exporter and describes his experiences
SIOC and AtomOWL: a new way to describe content… - [GNU] remarks on bblfish's proposal to use AtomOWL's content:encoded to describe enhanced sioc:Post content
Using SKOS to describe communication structures - [GNU] shows us that we don't need all these sub-types of sioc:Role, sioc:Post, sioc:Forum if we use SKOS...
SIOC data I use to crawl - [GNU] creates a plan file for scuttering SIOC data
seeAlso for SIOC hooked in page via RDFa - [GNU] shows how to help with SIOC autodiscovery using RDFa
Semantic Radar for FireFox and the Semantic Web Services environment - fgiasson talks about CaptSolo's Semantic Radar plugin for autodetecting SIOC data in Firefox (as well as FOAF and DOAP)
Ping the Semantic Web.com: a pinging service for the Semantic Web - fgiasson's excellent web service for notifying TalkDigger of new Semantic Web data, including SIOC instances
ODS SIOC Reference - Overview of how OpenLink Data Spaces allows SPARQL queries to be performed on ODS data via SIOC ontology mappings

All the Latest SIOC Stuff

Cloud — Fri, 09 Jun 2006 11:27:53 +0000

There's been quite a few happenings in the "siocosphere" during the past month:

Christoph Goern posted some details about how to enable SIOC output for a community site such as a planet aggregator; I hope to work on this myself WRT Planet PHP.
Again, Christoph has detailed how to generate SIOC data from mailing list archives. Next, we could look at systems like MailMan and MHonArc.
Alex Passant visited us in DERI last week, and together with Uldis Bojars he worked on both a SIOC browser and also a SIOC module for PEAR and PHP5. It was great to have Alex visiting, and he did amazing stuff during the few short days he was here... Thanks Alex!
Christoph has also done some SIOC live query work, in parallel with #3, as well as describing how SIOC can be autodiscovered using RDFa.
Fred Giasson has produced a detailed post on how he has made use of SIOC to connect stuff within the TalkDigger community... Nice one Fred - love this!
More people are installing SIOC plugins on their blogs, including Christoph Goern, Harry Chen.

Wow! I am blown away by all this... I hope to contribute more myself now that I'm back.