Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities Project

In my last post Semantic Web Tools I said you are running blind when surfing the Web. If a site has Semantic-Web Data you will not realize it without a nice little tool to act as your radar screen. As I have mentioned often in previous posts, Firefox is the application framework of choice simply because in 5 seconds you can extend its power with the installation of a plugin or extension. Semantic Radar is such an extension or tool that will greatly aid you in being alerted to sites with Semantic Data.

The Title to this post should be something easy for you to relate to because after all, Active Rain is an online community. Everyone likes what it does and may have a summary understanding as to why it works as well as it does. Everyone now has a pretty good idea what networking is and social media. Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) Project comes to us from the National University of Ireland, Galway. Their Digital Enterprise Research Institute brings us Semantic Radar.  It is a browser extension which inspects web pages for links to Semantic Web metadata and informs us about the presence of it by showing an icon in the browser's status bar. Currently it supports SIOC, FOAF and DOAP metadata. Semantic Radar can now ping the Semantic Web Ping Service when metadata are detected. This allows for a community based discovery of the Semantic Web Data. In other words Active Rain could be linked to The Real Estate Tomato and to Sellsius Real Estate Blog, etc.

Now do not let SIOC, FOAF or DOAP scare you. Everyone and anyone that comes out with a vocabulary will probably acronymize their name. SIOC is taken from the name of this project¹. The developers wrote the Ontology or vocabulary if you will, specifically as a framework aimed at connecting online community sites and Internet-based discussions. These online communities like blogs are like islands. If you have a blog on your Web site it stands alone. SIOC enables the interlinkage of sites. It enables the extraction of richer information from various discussion services. 

For a faster understanding of this project go to the sioc-project.org Home Page and read the Executive Summary PDF. You might also note that the SIOC Ontology is written in RDF the same as a PropertyClubPro.com Property Bank. Also, notice the SIOC Project has more Semantic Web Tools for developers as well as a Semantic Web Browser called SIOC Explorer.

So the question you might have is how do I interlink my blog and why would I want to? In order for example to link up your WordPress Blog you would use an SIOC Exporter. And the following quotation from the SIOC Project tells you why!

"The power of discussion methods via online community sites such as weblogs, bulletin boards and mailing lists lies in their number and the large amount of data that is available for harvesting. Most blog engines already have RSS export functionality, and some boards are beginning to export RSS as well. Since the majority of these discussion engines are based on open source software or can be extended by using plugins, it is straightforward to modify existing export functions or to create plugins to generate metadata conforming to the SIOC ontology. A SIOC API for PHP makes the development of such SIOC plugins and exporters as easy as possible."

Unless you have some technical skill, you may need the assistance of your IT guy to plug you in with an Exporter. 

¹Where did the name SIOC come from?

The acronym SIOC came into use during April 2004 for a workshop paper draft (see origins of SIOC). It also corresponds to sioc (the Irish word for frost) and was inspired by a sister social networking project called sneachta (the Irish word for snow).