Advatages and Disadvantages of SIOC
Ina
What are the main advantages of SIOC and also disadvantages of the
ontology.
Ina
Uldis Bojars
Ina is our (John's and my) colleague from DERI. She is asking this
question in regard to her work on the Master thesis (the related work
section of it) .
>
> What are the main advantages of SIOC and also disadvantages of the
> ontology.
>
It is hard to provide objective critique, therefore I hope to see some
more responses.
1. Advantages:
Main advantage of SIOC is the chance that it provides to express
information from community sites in machine readable form and to
provide these sites with better services that this semantically rich
information can enable.
While there are many efforts to describe various kinds of information
and those should be recognized, SIOC packs into one package all the
things necessary to describe contents and structure of the community
sites.
I like how a reviewer of our paper summarised that SIOC is a framework
[for describing information and connecting online community sites] - at
a time when we were more used to calling it an ontology with some tools
"attached".
Some argue that SIOC many properties duplicating what is present in
other ontologies (this may be considered one of disadvantages). We are
working on examining this duplication and getting rid of it when not
warranted.
2. Disadvantages / Challenges
The main challenge to SIOC in my view is the adoption. The interest and
enthousiasm in this working group is inspiring and I hope SIOC will get
useful, widespread and interesting practical applications, but we have
to recognise that the "community-sphere" is very large and the task to
become used by it is big as well.
One approach to solve this challenge may be to introduce SIOC into
multi-user sites, which once enabled would provide as large amount of
useful data (compared with weblogs where the task of getting every
individual blogger into SIOC is just not imaginable). E.g., Jona
expressed such a wish in a comment [1] asking "Do you know a way to get
these SIOC information out of wordpress.com (hosted) blogs?".
[1]
http://captsolo.net/info/blog_a.php/2006/05/26/sioc_weblog_rdf_export_tools#c30582
Apart from the things mentioned above I can't think of any other
disadvantages. Of course, there is still a question of "fit for
purpose" - is SIOC necessary and applicable to a particular domain. For
online community sites we believe the answer is Yes. :)
Best,
Uldis
Frederick Giasson
> The main challenge to SIOC in my view is the adoption. The interest
and
> enthousiasm in this working group is inspiring and I hope SIOC will
get
> useful, widespread and interesting practical applications, but we
have
> to recognise that the "community-sphere" is very large and the task
to
> become used by it is big as well.
Definitely. But I think that there is no 100 ways to make it happens.
Like everything else, you(we?) have to show people that it works. To
show them them that it works, people have to develop utilities like
you SIOC browser and the one of Alex; the drupal and wordpress
plugins, etc.
Then people will find: wow, this is cool, look at what I can do with
that, and that, and that.. etc. The people will start to adopt it
like RSS, etc.
However, the growing SIOC community is active and it is the only
thing we need (and to work toward our goal) to make it happens.
> One approach to solve this challenge may be to introduce SIOC into
> multi-user sites, which once enabled would provide as large amount
of
> useful data (compared with weblogs where the task of getting every
It is what I hope to do with Talk Digger (okay, it's not Livejournal,
but it could generate some interesting amount of content with a
couple of thousands of users).
This, in conjunction with Alex's SIOC explorer (crawler?), could be a
good proof of concept (as I said in my previous email).
It's the sort of things we have to develop to show the its potential.
I think it is where the "Semantic Web" is now: creating multiple
little "proof-of-concept" so that we have something to show to get
money to develop more important systems. (He! This is all about
startups doesn't it?)
> individual blogger into SIOC is just not imaginable). E.g., Jona
> expressed such a wish in a comment [1] asking "Do you know a way to
get
> these SIOC information out of wordpress.com (hosted) blogs?".
We have to make them use it without knowing it. It is all about
making deal with hosting services like wordpress.com, livejournal,
blogger, typepad, etc. There is no magic I think ;)
Salutations,
--
Frederick Giasson
www.fgiasson.com
www.talkdigger.com