What is the vision for SIOC?

• To create an ontology that fully describes the content and structure of most online community sites - including not limited to weblogs, bulletin boards, mailing lists, newsgroups, etc.
• To create new connections between discussion channels and posts, and to allow users to browse discussion data in interesting ways using these connections.
• To overcome a "chicken-and-egg" problem with the Semantic Web (no applications without data, and no data without applications) by making it easy to generate and use SIOC data.

How does it work?

SIOC provides methods for interconnecting discussion methods such as blogs, forums and mailing lists to each other. It consists of the SIOC ontology, an open-standard machine readable format for expressing the information contained both explicitly and implicitly in internet discussion methods, of SIOC metadata producers for a number of popular blogging platforms and content management systems, and of storage and browsing / searching systems for leveraging this SIOC data.

Where did the name SIOC come from?

The acronym SIOC came into use during April 2004 for a workshop paper draft (see origins of SIOC). It also corresponds to sioc (the Irish word for frost) and was inspired by a sister social networking project called sneachta (the Irish word for snow).

How does a UserAccount in SIOC correspond to a Person in FOAF?

Hopefully a picture speaks a thousand words: have a read of this forum post on SIOC, FOAF and SKOS. A FOAF Person can be the owner of many SIOC UserAccount profiles.