The SIOC Project

Copyright 2008 Digital Enterprise Research Institute. All rights reserved.

Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie

The SIOC Project: Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities

John Breslin, Uldis Bojars

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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

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Enabling SSIS

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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

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The SIOC solution

1. Develop an ontology of terms for representing rich data from the Social Web

2. Create a food chain for producing, collecting and consuming SIOC data

3. 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!

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1. The SIOC ontology

The main classes and properties are:

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Interlinking with FOAF and SKOS

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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

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2. The SIOC food chain

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Producing SIOC data

Over 20 applications for producing SIOC data: Many are free and open source Blogs and forums: WordPress, phpBB, Drupal,

b2evolution “Legacy” applications: mailing 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

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Using SIOC and FOAF to represent portable data

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Collect SIOC from various sources

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Consuming SIOC via a Sindice API

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Consuming SIOC via Exhibit

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3. Dissemination

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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.

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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

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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 4th

and SIOC Types module 5th in 500 ontologies at PTSW

SIOC developer mailing list:200 members900 posts

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BSCW and BC

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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.

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Talis Engage

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Seesmic

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gnizr

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Adoption of SIOC

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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 ExporterDotclear SIOC Exporter*b2evolution SIOC ExporterDrupal SIOC ExporterphpBB 2.x SIOC ExporterTriplify*

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 CrawlerSIOC Browsers* and SIOC ExplorerBuxon*

Using SIOC for new data Fishtank*BAETLE*RDFa on Rails*IkeWiki*int.ere.stOpenLink Virtuso AMI*Talis Engage*

Reusing SIOC data IKHarvester, notitio.us and JeromeDLBSCW*, BC*, Corona*

SIOC utilities Finding and indexing SIOC data

Semantic RadarPingTheSemanticWeb.com*

* Green created outside DERI

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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

Technology

The SIOC Project