Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities
John Breslin
Digital Enterprise Research Institute
National University of Ireland, Galway
john.breslin@deri.org
http://sw.deri.org/~jbreslin/
www.deri.ie
 Copyright 2006 Digital Enterprise Research
Institute. All rights reserved.

The aims of SIOC
• To “semantically interlink online communities”
• To fully describe the content and structure of discussion
sites
• To create new connections between online discussions
• To browse connected posts and channels in interesting
ways
• To overcome a chicken-and-egg problem with the
Semantic Web
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timbl on the Semantic Web and online communities
“I think we could have Sir Tim Berners-Lee, podcast
interview during ISWC 2005
both Semantic Web
technology supporting
online communities, but
at the same time also
online communities can
support Semantic Web
data by being the
sources of people
voluntarily connecting
things together.”
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Existing connections using RSS, Atom syndication
• First step towards connecting online community sites:
– More visibility through aggregation and search
• Benefits:
– Good tool support
– Many consumers
• Shortcomings:
– Little information about structure of the site or community
– Feeds typically include only last five to 20 items
• How can we access information about the whole site?
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What is SIOC?
• Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC)
• Connecting forums, posts from many types of online
communities (blogs, forums, mailing lists, etc.)
• Interesting possibilities:
– Distributed linked conversations
– Decentralised discussion channels and communities
– “I […] think the concept is HOT” – Robert Douglass, Drupal
Developer
– “It just dawned on me that the burgeoning SIOC-o-sphere
(online communities exporting and exposing content via SIOC
Ontology) is actually: Blogosphere 2.0” – Kingsley Idehen,
Founder and CEO of OpenLink Software
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Everything we make and do…
• Video annotations
• Chats
• Photos
• Micro-blogs
• OSN profiles
• Bookmarks
…
…can connect us to other people
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The SIOC ontology
• The main classes and properties are:
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SIOC and other ontologies
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How to get traction with SIOC on the Web
1. Create SIOC metadata exporters for open-source discussion
systems and popular community sites:
• b2evolution, Dotclear, Drupal, phpBB, WordPress, mailing lists, IRC,
Twitter, Jaiku, aggregators, OpenLink Data Spaces, etc.
2. Produce easy-to-use APIs for writing your own SIOC applications:
• APIs already for PHP, Ruby on Rails and Java
3. As well as academic papers about SIOC (16 so far), provide easy-to-
read documentation and usage examples:
• http://sioc-project.org/
• SIOC aims to infect the Web infrastructure:
– During next upgrade cycle gigabytes of community data
become available!
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Number of SIOC Documents (via
PingTheSemanticWeb.com)
200000
180000
160000
140000
120000
100000
80000
60000
40000
20000
0
10/10/2006 29/11/2006 18/01/2007 09/03/2007 28/04/2007 17/06/2007 06/08/2007
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How can SIOC data be used?
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SIOC browser (4)
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Demonstration of SIOC Explorer
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AccessingSIOC from all sources source
Browsing SIOCcontent from one
Filter by “facet” content from multiple sources
• Facet can be a direct or
indirect property:
Direct
– The topic of the content item
– The creator of the item
– The date created
…
Indirect
– A geographic location of the
person who created it
– The gender of the person
– An interest shared by many
creators
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Where else is SIOC being used already?
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The aims of SIOC
• To “semantically interlink online communities”
• To fully describe the content and structure of discussion
sites
• To create new connections between online discussions
• To browse connected posts and channels in interesting
ways
• To overcome a chicken-and-egg problem with the
Semantic Web
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