General

General SIOC discussions.

SIOC Discussion

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

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:

SIOC Vision

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.

SIOC Thanks

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:

SFINUI GalwayDERI GalwayFOAF Project

Creating Connections Between Discussion Clouds with SIOC

(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

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

All the Latest SIOC Stuff

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

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

SIOC Roadmap

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.

SIOC Architecture

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

Forums?

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

Get your buttons!

A little button for SIOC developers and implementers:

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

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