Weaving SIOC into the Web of Linked Data

Weaving SIOC into the Web of Linked Data Uldis Boj ā rs 1 , Alexandre Passant 2 , Richard, Cyganiak 1 , John Breslin 1 1 Digital Enterprise Research Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway 2 LaLIC, Université Paris-Sorbonne / Electricité de France R&D

SIOC Overview

SIOC - Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities

SIOC is a standard way for expressing information on online community sites in a rich, machine-readable form.

W3C Member Submission – June 2007

http://www.w3.org/Submission/2007/02/

Academic and Industrial Partners

3 documents

SIOC Core Ontology Specification

SIOC Ontology: Applications and Implementation Status

SIOC Ontology: Related Ontologies and RDF Vocabularies

The SIOC Core Ontology SIOC Ontology Specification http://rdfs.org/sioc/spec/

SIOC d ata p roducers

SIOC a pplications l ist :

http://rdfs.org/sioc/applications/

> 20 a pplications for p roducing SIOC d ata :

F ree and o pen s ource

SIOC e xport t ools for:

Blogs and forums: WordPress, phpBB, Drupal, b2evolution

“ Legacy” applications: m ailing lists, IRC

New media: Twitter, Jaiku , Facebook, Flickr

Enterprise applications: CWE (collaborative work environments)

SIOC RDF Browser

http://sparql.captsolo.net/browser

The SIOC food chain

~50 applications for working with SIOC data (producing, finding, consuming, …) listed at http://rdfs.org/sioc/applications/

SIOC Tutorial @ WWW ’08

Look here for more information about the SIOC Project

<> rdfs:seeAlso < http://url.ie/bwk > .

SIOC Project homepage

http://sioc-project.org/

This presentation concentrates on SIOC as a citizen of the Linked Data Universe

Firsts steps towards Linked SIOC Data

Exporters create interlinked SIOC data

Using rdfs:seeAlso links or dereferencable URIs

E.g. RDF document describing a sioc:Post links to a document describing the User that created it, …

Yet, this can still be viewed as « walled garden »

Interlinking users and content inside a community

The sioc:Site instance provide a unique entry point for the whole RDF data

Site links to Posts; Posts link to Comments & Users; …

All SIOC RDF pages are linked together starting from the top of the tree

Useful to crawl SIOC data

Interlinking SIOC and FOAF data

FOAF – Friend Of A Friend

FOAF and SIOC can be combined to describe one’s social activity:

foaf:Person is used to represent the physical person

sioc:User is used to represent his user account(s)

Since FOAF is widely used on the Semantic Web, it can provide a great source of linked data between different datasets

Use owl:sameAs between different FOAF URIs to provide more linked data

SIOC profiles can link to an external FOAF URI

Example of linking from SIOC to FOAF

A person and their user accounts

Linking to SIOC data « from the outside »

foaf:holdsOnlineAccount

Relationships between persons and their account(s)

Linking FOAF profiles to sioc:User accounts

sioc:User rdfs:subClassOf foaf:OnlineAccount .

PersonQ foaf:holdsOnlineAccount UserAccountQ .

UserAccountQ a sioc:User .

Use dereferencable URIs and/or seeAlso

This depends on how RDF data are exposed by the target system

Making SIOC data easier to discover

RDF autodiscovery

Content negotiation

RDFa

Interlinking SIOC and SKOS data

SKOS – Simple Knowledge Organisation System

Can be used to link to Tags and Categories

The Tag Ontology defines Tag as subclass of skos:Concept

The sioc:topic property provides a way to define topic(s) of any content using (among others) SKOS concepts

Topics can be shared between communities

Interlinking data between communities thanks to those topics

SparqlPress

A WordPress/SPARQL Linked Data Project (work in progress)

http://wiki.foaf-project.org/SparqlPress

Interlinking SIOC, FOAF and SKOS

Interlinking SIOC and other resources

Reference datasets from the LOD initiative

DBPedia

GeoNames

MusicBrainz

… .

E.g., Semantic Microblogging (SFSW ’08)

Weaving microblogging into the Semantic Web

Producing AND consuming data

Interlinking with existing RDF data (e.g. GeoNames)

Faceted browsing

Interlinking SIOC and other resources (2)

MOAT – Meaning Of A Tag

Provide an ontology and tools to assign meanings to your tags with existing resources and then link tagged content with URIs of those resources rather than simple tags

Using URIs from reference datasets helps to interlink data

Eg: « SPARQL » tag => http://dbpedia.org/resource/SPARQL

A Pipeline for Enriching SIOC Data

Post-process generated SIOC data

E.g. extract links to HTML, RDF and other types of data from the content

Extracting links

Simple, performed by a part of SIOC export plugins

sioc:links_to, rdfs:seeAlso

What about richer data?

Named entity extraction

Retrieve a subset of properties of resources a post links to

Enrich RDF data about a post with this information

Extract structured data contained within content items

Structured blogging, microformats

RDFa, GRDDL

Future directions

RDF-based online community sites

Some producers of SIOC data

Sioku:

SIOC data from Jaiku microblogging service

http://sioku.sioc-project.org/

Flickr:

Flickr to RDF wrapper

http://apassant.net/home/2007/12/flickrdf/

SWAML:

Exports mailing list archives in RDF

Interlink with FOAF profiles using Sindice / SWSE

http://swaml.berlios.de/

OpenLink DataSpaces:

Uses SIOC as a representation format for multiple social spaces

http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/wiki/main/Main/OdsIndex/

FlickrRDF using SIOC, FOAF, SIOC Types, Geo

Social Media Data and SIOC

SIOC « type » module

http://rdfs.org/sioc/types

Defines subclasses of sioc:Container and sioc:Item

Blog, Wiki, MessageBoard …

BlogPost, WikiArticle, BoardPost …

Provides types for most of social media conributions

Object-centered sociality

Data portability

SIOC provides an open and machine-readable way for social data

SIOC and Data Portability

Open Questions

Choice of URIs

SIOC Community working on best practices

Issue: content negotiation may not always be available

Paging for large amounts of data

rdfs:seeAlso(s) ?

Your Comments / Questions?

Summary

SIOC is a part of the Linked Data Universe

RDF documents generated by SIOC export tools are usually interlinked between themselves

User-created content on online community sites can be a source of links to other LOD resources

Linking to external FOAF profiles

Extracting links to other resources from the content

SIOC-enabled sites generate SIOC and FOAF data that can be linked to by other data sources

Making data discoverable is important

SIOC can interlink LOD resources from a user-centric point of view

Object-centred sociality

SIOC competition with boards.ie

boards.ie has been publishing social graph information online using FOAF since 2004

With its 10 years of discussions, boards.ie can serve as a rich source of SIOC data for the Social Semantic Web:

The data to be “SIOC-ified” is already all publicly viewable, but it is difficult to leverage without any added semantics due to the fact that it is embedded in heavily-styled HTML pages

DERI are sponsoring a competition with prizes (the top prize is €3000) for whoever is judged to have produced the most interesting application(s) that makes use of the SIOC data exported from boards.ie