The SIOC Project

The SIOC Project: Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities John Breslin, Uldis Bojars

What is SIOC?
An effort to discover how we can create and establish ontologies on the Semantic Web
Aim of the SIOC ontology is to address interoperability issues on the (Social) Web
Adopted in a framework of 50 applications or modules deployed on over 400 sites

Enabling SSIS

Motivation
Need to understand how to create and establish ontologies on the Web:
Social engineering is required
Disconnected sites on the Social Web require ontologies for interoperation:
Lots of social data, inherent semantics (chicken and egg)
Potential for high impact
In parallel, lack of integration between social software and other systems in enterprise intranets

The SIOC solution
Develop an ontology of terms for representing rich data from the Social Web
Create a food chain for producing, collecting and consuming SIOC data
As well dissemination via papers about SIOC, provide docs and examples at sioc-project.org
SIOC aims to enrich the Web infrastructure:
During the next upgrade cycle, gigabytes of community data become available!

1. The SIOC ontology
The main classes and properties are:

Interlinking with FOAF and SKOS

Challenges that had to be overcome
Earlier efforts failed to generate the momentum required to achieve successful deployment
If you build it, they won’t necessarily come
We needed some “social engineering” to facilitate the adoption of a de-facto standard ontology:
Model
Agree
Deploy
Re-model

2. The SIOC food chain

Producing SIOC data
Over 20 a pplications for p roducing SIOC d ata :
Many are f ree and o pen s ource
Blogs and forums: WordPress, phpBB, Drupal, b2evolution
“ Legacy” applications: m ailing lists, IRC
New media: Twitter, Jaiku , Facebook, Flickr
APIs for those who may wish to make their own producers:
PHP, Perl, Java, Ruby on Rails

Using SIOC and FOAF to represent portable data

Collect SIOC from various sources

Consuming SIOC via a Sindice API

Consuming SIOC via Exhibit

3. Dissemination

Publications and other outputs
~25 SIOC-related publications from DERI, including the Journal of Web Semantics, IEEE Intelligent Systems, IEEE Internet Computing, European Semantic Web Conference (2)…
139 papers from Google Scholar matching “sioc semantic”
SIOC-related tutorials at WWW2006, WWW2008, SemTech 2008 (next week); workshop at ISWC2008
W3C Member Submission of the SIOC ontology:
http://www.w3.org/Submission/2007/02/
Media interviews about SIOC for PC World / WashingtonPost.com, SiIicon Republic, IEEE Computer, SemanticWeb.com, etc.

Quotes about SIOC
“ 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
“ SIOC has the potential to become one of the foundational vocabularies that make Semantic Web applications useful” – Ivan Herman, W3C / ERCIM
“ A project that started back in 2000 called Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) represents relationships between people, as well as basic contact details. SIOC does this for groups: it extends the FOAF idea to being able to talk about whole groups of people. I am excited about SIOC because you can use that information to determine trust, to let people in.” – Tim Berners-Lee, Creator of the World Wide Web

SIOC metrics
SIOC documents at PTSW:
107759 (SIOC)
96540 (SIOC Types)
42911 hits in Swoogle
Sites producing SIOC data:
373 listed in PTSW pings
SIOC ontology is ranked 4 th and SIOC Types module 5 th in 500 ontologies at PTSW
SIOC developer mailing list:
200 members
900 posts

BSCW and BC

OpenLink DataSpaces
ODS provides access to SIOC instance data from a range of ODS application instances including blogs, wikis, aggregated feeds, shared bookmarks, discussions, photo galleries, briefcases, etc.

Talis Engage

Seesmic

Adoption of SIOC

List of some SIOC implementations
Creating SIOC data
SIOC APIs
SIOC Export API for PHP*
SIOC API for Java*
Weblog, forum and CMS exporters
WordPress SIOC Exporter
Dotclear SIOC Exporter*
b2evolution SIOC Exporter
Drupal SIOC Exporter
phpBB 2.x SIOC Exporter
Triplify*
Other exporters
OpenLink DataSpaces*
TalkDigger*
SWAML*
Mailing List Archives*
Mailing List Exporter*
Twitter2RDF*
IRC2RDF*
Sioku (Jaiku2RDF)
gnizr*
OpenQabal*
BlogEngine.NET*
Using SIOC data
SPARQL endpoints, querying SIOC data
ODS demo server and MyOpenLink.net*
#B4mad.Net SPARQL endpoint*
Crawling and browsing SIOC data
SIOC Crawler
SIOC Browsers* and SIOC Explorer
Buxon*
Using SIOC for new data
Fishtank*
BAETLE*
RDFa on Rails*
IkeWiki*
int.ere.st
OpenLink Virtuso AMI*
Talis Engage*
Reusing SIOC data
IKHarvester, notitio.us and JeromeDL
BSCW*, BC*, Corona*
SIOC utilities
Finding and indexing SIOC data
Semantic Radar
PingTheSemanticWeb.com*
* Green created outside DERI

What is SIOC?
An effort to discover how we can create and establish ontologies on the Semantic Web
Aim of the SIOC ontology is to address interoperability issues on the (Social) Web
Adopted in a framework of 50 applications or modules deployed on over 400 sites

http://sioc-project.org	824
http://www.johnbreslin.com	74
http://planetrdf.com	15
http://www.sioc-project.org	15
http://www.slideshare.net	7
http://www.semanticaweb.info	4
http://www.johnbreslin.org	3
http://static.slideshare.net	2
http://sioc-project.org.	1
http://nextaudience.net	1
http://translate.googleusercontent.com	1

The SIOC Project

by John Breslin on Jul 11, 2008

Accessibility

Categories

Tags

Upload Details

Usage Rights

11 Embeds 947

Statistics

The SIOC Project — Presentation Transcript