sioc tactics: gaining acceptance for a semantic web vocabulary on the social web

Sioc tactics

image from tinyurl.com/siocshock

lecturer at Nui galway

Engineering and

informatics

Researcher at Deri, nui galway

Founder of new tech post

•  socialmedia.net blog

•  Galway-based publisher of stories focused on emerging, cutting-edge, innovative technologies

•  4000 readers in March -> 9000 readers in May 2011

•  Partners: IIC (San Jose) •  Newtechpost.com

Co-founder of Boards.ie

•  Ireland’s largest discussion forum site

•  2.25 million visitors/month

•  Irish people seeking information, or just chatting about sports, TV, politics, health, whatever

It's the social objects we create…

• Discussions • Bookmarks

• Annotations • Microblogs

• Multimedia

…that connect us to other people

Social media sites are like data silos

image from pidgintech.com

Many isolated communities of users and their data

image from pidgintech.com

Need ways to connect these islands

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Allowing users to easily move from one to another

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Enabling users to easily bring their data with them

image from pidgintech.com

Data silos Can be linked via semantics

Social Semantic Web

Two-way street: semantic web can help social web, vice versa • Can Use semantic web to describe people,

content objects and the connections that bind them all together so that social sites can interoperate via semantics

• In the other direction, object-centered social websites can serve as rich social data sources for semantic applications

image from tinyurl.com/highway2

Sioc = frost (gaelic)

image from tinyurl.com/siocfrost

Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC)

• Goal of the SIOC ontology is to address interoperability issues on the Social Web – sioc-project.org – W3c member submission in 2007

– SIOC has been adopted in a framework of 100 applications or modules deployed on hundreds of sites

– Web 2.0, enterprise info integ, HCLS, e-gov

image from tinyurl.com/friendship2

The steps taken

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

Some of the SIOC core ontology classes and properties

First attempt (foaf galway workshop 2004)

image from tinyurl.com/orionw

Sioc can be used to...

• ...provide a layer of rdfa metadata from a social website, e.g. to enhance search results

• ...get a Complete representation/xml dump of a social website (export, import)

• ...be a native format for social websites

• ...do other stuff; just imagine

Sioc food chain

Some applications using sioc

Growth of sioc apps (bojars)

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From October 2009

RDFA in drupal 7

• Drupal cms used by 1 percent of all sites

• drupal 7 released in january, semantic web support built-in:

• Rdfa (sioc, foaf, dublin core, skos) data for blog posts, forums, etc.

• Video at www.semantic-drupal.com

image from tinyurl.com/drupaper

Rdfa on newsweek.com

OGP in RDF (FOAF, DC, SIOC, GR)

An ontology stack for the social semantic web

Distributed

Architecture

www.Smob.me

dissemination

Sioc survey (1)

Sioc survey (2)

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boards.ie SIOC data competition