(Copied from here.)

It's been a year since I last took a look at the overlap between the SIOC Project and Microformats (mf). I've been trying to catch up with recent developments, especially the cite-rel draft by Ryan King and Eran Globen.

I admire the Microformats resolve to "solve problems", rather than provide generic things that may in the future be used for X or Y (even though I believe that too is important, or else I wouldn't be a Semantic Web researcher!). I also think that there is no good reason that both the Semantic Web and Microformats communities can't work together (despite arguments like this). There are people on both sides who strongly feel that the other is going in the wrong direction, but it would be a mistake to let any such voices dominate. Both communities are trying to add semantics in the Web, and using things like GRDDL and Micromodels / mf RDF representations, the existing work from both sides can be reused.

Alex mentioned that may be some confusion between foaf:Person and sioc:User - I hope that this picture showing the alignments between SIOC, FOAF and SKOS will help to clarify that a foaf:Person can own many sioc:User profiles (via the foaf:holdsOnlineAccount relationship). I have also included some connections from SIOC to the SKOS ontology (aliman, hope you don't mind the logo!).

The PHP Export API provides an easy way for developers to create SIOC exporters, as it maps SIOC Classes to PHP objects, with simple functions to export the created data.

More informations about the API are available on this wiki page.

API is currently used in DotClear and B2evo exporters

Frédérick Giasson recently launched a Semantic Web ping service called PingtheSemanticWeb.com.

This service can receive notifications of Semantic Web documents (such as SIOC) that have been updated, and works with the Semantic Radar plugin for Firefox.

You can read more about the API, or you can export a list of recently pinged documents.

Kingsley Idehen and the people at OpenLink Software have recently integrated SIOC with OpenLink Data Spaces (ODS).

OpenLink Data Spaces allows SPARQL queries to be performed on ODS data via SIOC ontology mappings.

For more information, please visit these links:

• http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/wiki/main/Main/ODSSIOCRef
• http://swik.net/OpenLinkDataSpaces

(Extract from our forthcoming BlogTalk paper about browsers for SIOC.)

SIOC provides a unified vocabulary for content and interaction description: a semantic layer that can co-exist with existing discussion platforms. Using SIOC, various linkages are created between the aforementioned concepts, which allow new methods of accessing this linked data, including:

• Virtual Forums. These may be a gathering of posts or threads which are distributed across discussion platforms, for example, where a user has found posts from a number of blogs that can be associated with a particular category of interest, or an agent identifies relevant posts across a certain timeframe.
• Distributed Conversations. Trackbacks are commonly used to link blog posts to previous posts on a related topic. By creating links in both directions, not only across blogs but across all types of internet discussions, conversations can be followed regardless of what point or URI fragment a browser enters at.
• Unified Communities. Apart from creating a web page with a number of relevant links to the blogs or forums or people involved in a particular community, there is no standard way to define what makes up an online community (apart from grouping the people who are members of that community using FOAF or OPML). SIOC allows one to simply define what objects are constituent parts of a community, or to say to what community an object belongs (using sioc:has_part / part_of): users, groups, forums, blogs, etc.
• Shared Topics. Technorati (a search engine for blogs) and BoardTracker (for bulletin boards) have been leveraging the free-text tags that people associate with their posts for some time now. SIOC allows the definition of such tags (using the subject property), but also enables hierarchial or non-hierarchial topic definition of posts using sioc:topic when a topic is ambiguous or more information on a topic is required. Combining with other Semantic Web vocabularies, tags and topics can be further described using the SKOS organisation system.
• One Person, Many User Accounts. SIOC also aims to help the issue of multiple identities by allowing users to define that they hold other accounts or that their accounts belong to a particular personal identity (via foaf:holdsOnlineAccount or sioc:account_of). Therefore, all the posts or comments made by a particular person using their various associated user accounts across platforms could be identified.

Edit: Here's SIOC acting as middleware.

The latest bits and pieces people have been saying and doing related to SIOC:

• Enabling SIOC for AI3 - Adaptive Information - Mike Bergman installs the SIOC WordPress exporter and describes his experiences
• SIOC and AtomOWL: a new way to describe content… - [GNU] remarks on bblfish's proposal to use AtomOWL's content:encoded to describe enhanced sioc:Post content
• Using SKOS to describe communication structures - [GNU] shows us that we don't need all these sub-types of sioc:Role, sioc:Post, sioc:Forum if we use SKOS...
• SIOC data I use to crawl - [GNU] creates a plan file for scuttering SIOC data
• seeAlso for SIOC hooked in page via RDFa - [GNU] shows how to help with SIOC autodiscovery using RDFa
• Semantic Radar for FireFox and the Semantic Web Services environment - fgiasson talks about CaptSolo's Semantic Radar plugin for autodetecting SIOC data in Firefox (as well as FOAF and DOAP)
• Ping the Semantic Web.com: a pinging service for the Semantic Web - fgiasson's excellent web service for notifying TalkDigger of new Semantic Web data, including SIOC instances
• ODS SIOC Reference - Overview of how OpenLink Data Spaces allows SPARQL queries to be performed on ODS data via SIOC ontology mappings

There's been quite a few happenings in the "siocosphere" during the past month:

• Christoph Goern posted some details about how to enable SIOC output for a community site such as a planet aggregator; I hope to work on this myself WRT Planet PHP.
• Again, Christoph has detailed how to generate SIOC data from mailing list archives. Next, we could look at systems like MailMan and MHonArc.
• Alex Passant visited us in DERI last week, and together with Uldis Bojars he worked on both a SIOC browser and also a SIOC module for PEAR and PHP5. It was great to have Alex visiting, and he did amazing stuff during the few short days he was here... Thanks Alex!
• Christoph has also done some SIOC live query work, in parallel with #3, as well as describing how SIOC can be autodiscovered using RDFa.
• Fred Giasson has produced a detailed post on how he has made use of SIOC to connect stuff within the TalkDigger community... Nice one Fred - love this!
• More people are installing SIOC plugins on their blogs, including Christoph Goern, Harry Chen.

Wow! I am blown away by all this... I hope to contribute more myself now that I'm back.