If you wish to discuss SIOC, the primary channel is our mailing list at:

• http://groups.google.com/group/sioc-dev

A #sioc irc channel exists on irc.freenode.net.

Our discussion forums on sioc-project.org can also be used; the sioc-dev mailing list is linked to the SIOC Developers forum in Drupal.

Finally, to further connect SIOC to other Semantic Web topics, we have moved our wiki section to:

• http://wiki.sioc-project.org/
  

The visions of SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) are:

• 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.
  

This resource is being funded by Science Foundation Ireland under grant number SFI/02/CE1/I131 at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway.

We would like to thank and acknowledge the following for their support and/or inspiration:

(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.

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

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.

Edit: The SIOC to do list will also give you a good idea of some things that need to be done with SIOC.

Here are some future plans for SIOC development:

• SIOC Drupal/CivicSpace: Complete export and begin import part. This will involve looking at parsing methods for RDF in PHP. This is currently a priority of CivicSpace research and the task that John Breslin will be leading.
• SIOC WordPress/WordPress MU: Complete the exporters for WP and WPMU. This task is being carried out by Uldis Bojars.
• SIOC b2evolution: Also to be done by Uldis.
  

The attachments below show the proposed SIOC architecture and a typical query to the system.

I'm just wondering why forums aren't available for authenticated users here? This type of post would seem more appropriate in a forum.

A little button for SIOC developers and implementers:

[http://rdfs.org/sioc/button]