SIOC/WhatIsSIOC

SIOC [pron. as shock] is a project for Semantically Interlinked Online Communities.

It allows the description of information contained within online community sites (blogs, forums, wikis, ...) and by doing so make it possible to connect these sites together, forming a Social Web of Data.

By "describe information" we mean to express information in a form useable by computer tools, while preserving the meaning or semantic of the concepts of online community sites. Examples of these concepts are classes of objects like "Forum posts" and relations between them like "Post A is a reply_to post B".

SIOC is:

# Built with online communities in mind. It has all the types of objects and relations between them needed to express information in forums, blogs and wikis.
# ... generic - can connect different types of content.

Examples of answers to questions that can be expressed by SIOC:

# find all the comments created by Person P1
# find all the replies to Post A
# ...

How to find SIOC data

To detect the presence of SIOC RDF data on web pages you may use Semantic Radar - it is a Mozilla/Firefox extension that detects links to SIOC, FOAF and generic RDF and RDFa data (via auto-discovery information) and displays status bar icons. Clicking on an icon will allow you to browse the corresponding RDF data.

You can also download collected RDF pages with SIOC data here. We provide e. g. millions of pages from boards.ie.