Tales from the SIOC-o-sphere #7
John Breslin
It's been three months since my last round-up of all things SIOC-ed, so
here is entry number seven in the series:
* Version 1.0 of a SIOC API for Perl has been released on CPAN! The
CPAN page for the SIOC API is here
<http://search.cpan.org/%7Egeewiz/SIOC-v1.0.0/>. A description of
the project itself is available here <http://sioc.socialware.at>.
Thanks to Jochen Lillich <http://www.jochen-lillich.de/>, Thomas
N. Burg <http://randgaenge.net/>, and also to Internet
Privatstiftung Austria (IPA) <http://netidee.at/> for funding this
work.
* A new RDF API module for Drupal <http://drupal.org/node/222788>
has been announced <http://groups.drupal.org/node/8930> that will
include sub-classes / sub-properties of popular terms from SIOC,
DC, etc. <http://groups.drupal.org/node/9311#comment-30373>
(Drupal creator Dries Buytaert has also said that an RDF API will
appear in the core of Drupal 7; see this video
<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8487255297768440860>.)
Stephane Corlosquet <http://openspring.net/> has also made
<http://openspring.net/blog/2008/03/06/first-rdf-schema-for-a-semantic-web-enabled-drupal>
an RDF Schema proposal for Drupal
<http://groups.drupal.org/node/9311> (which includes SIOC) and has
received very positive feedback. Some potential RDF use cases for
Drupal <http://groups.drupal.org/node/9010> have also been described.
* Gautier Poupeau <http://www.lespetitescases.net/> has written a
useful guide (en Français) on how to RDF-ise your blog in two
parts: the theory
<http://www.lespetitescases.net/rdfaiser-votre-blog-1-la-theorie>
and the practice
<http://www.lespetitescases.net/rdfaiser-votre-blog-2-la-pratique>.
It uses RDFa and vocabularies including SIOC, SIOC Types, DC
Elements, DC Refinements and XSD.
* SIOC data is now being produced by memoQ
<http://memoq.semanticweb.org/> by Yuki Matsuoka and Hideaki
Takeda <http://www-kasm.nii.ac.jp/%7Etakeda/> of the National
Institute of Informatics, Japan <http://www.nii.ac.jp/>.
* Keith Alexander <http://semwebdev.keithalexander.co.uk/blog/> at
Talis has described <http://blogs.talis.com/n2/archives/17> (and
shown
<http://kwijibo.talis.com/experiments/jsonp/comments.test.html#Post>)
how it is possible to create client-side Semantic Web applications
using their Convert <http://convert.test.talis.com/> service. For
example, on this page
<http://kwijibo.talis.com/experiments/jsonp/comments.test.html>
comments functionality is added to a section identified with a
"sioc:has_reply" property using a short piece of embedded widget code.
* ASP.net developer John Dyer has written a nice post on
DataPortability and its standards
<http://johndyer.name/post/2008/02/Introduction-to-the-state-of-DataPortability-and-its-standards.aspx>,
talking about OpenID, FOAF, SIOC, APML, etc. Daniel Lewis
<http://vanirsystems.com/> has also written a good overview of DP
<http://vanirsystems.com/danielsblog/2008/02/14/my-view-of-dataportability/>.
More recently, John announced the DataPortability pack for
BlogEngine.NET
<http://johndyer.name/post/2008/02/Data-Portability-Pack-for-BlogEngineNET.aspx>
that produces SIOC, APML and FOAF. BlogEngine.NET
<http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/> founder Mads Kristensen
<http://blog.madskristensen.dk/> has also written about data
portability and making an API to your website
<http://blog.madskristensen.dk/post/Make-an-API-of-your-website.aspx>.
* OpenLink <http://www.openlinksw.com/>'s Personal Data Space
Explorer <http://myopenlink.net/dataspace/> now also exposes SIOC
<http://myopenlink.net/dataspace/kidehen>, FOAF
<http://myopenlink.net/dataspace/person/kidehen> and other RDF
data. See Kingsley's post on linked data via FOAF and SIOC
<http://kidehen.typepad.com/kingsley_idehens_typepad/2008/01/foaf-ing-linked.html>.
* Uldis Bojars <http://captsolo.net/info/>, Alex Passant
<http://apassant.net/blog/> and I <http://www.johnbreslin.com/>
will present a tutorial entitled "Interlinking Online Communities
and Enriching Social Software with the Semantic Web
<http://www2008.org/program/program-tutorials-TP3.html>" at the
14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008
<http://www2008.org/>) in Beijing this month.
* I did an interview with SemanticWeb.com
<http://www.semanticweb.com/> called "SIOC-ing the Semantic Web
<http://www.semanticweb.com/insight/article.php/3721111>" in
January, and talked to PCWorld <http://www.pcworld.com/> about
data portability and SIOC
<http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/141541/data_portability_reasonable_goal_or_impossible_dream.html>.
Uldis <http://captsolo.net/info/> recorded a podcast with Talis
<http://blogs.talis.com/nodalities/2008/02/a_chat_with_uldis_bojars.php>
in February with SIOC as one of the main topics. (Eric Miller
<http://zepheira.com/team/eric/> also described in another Talis
podcast
<http://talk.talis.com/archives/2008/03/eric_miller_tal_1.html>
how FOAF and SIOC are useful not only for getting at historical
content, but for providing fine-tuned content-delivery systems
connecting people interested in various aspects of a particular
domain.)
* Alex <http://apassant.net/> has produced a universal SIOC reader
widget
<http://apassant.net/blog/2008/01/30/sioc-reader-universal-widget/>.
The widget can query for SIOC data from any SPARQL endpoint that
provides a JSON output for SELECT queries. (Alex has also released
<http://apassant.net/blog/tag/moat/> the Meaning of a Tag
<http://moat-project.org/> ontology which links with SIOC and SCOT
<http://scot-project.org/>.)
* Phillip Rhodes has been working
<http://www.jroller.com/openqabal/entry/so_what_is_openqabal_and>
on the OpenQabal <http://openqabal.dev.java.net/> "social software
operating system" which integrates a set of applications
(including Roller <http://rollerweblogger.org/> and JavaBB
<http://www.javabb.org/> ) via single sign-on (SSO), a common
look-and-feel, and SIOC.
* Sean Palmer <http://inamidst.com/sbp/> has written an interesting
article entitled "One Semantic Application, One UI?
<http://inamidst.com/whits/2008/omniui>" in which he talks about
Tabulator <http://www.w3.org/2005/ajar/tab> and its interfaces,
including application specific panes for FOAF, SIOC and DOAP.
* Tim Berners-Lee <http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/> talked
about FOAF and SIOC in an interview with Marie Boran from Silicon
Republic
<http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/news.nv?storyid=single10386>
for the Irish Independent
<http://www.independent.ie/business/technology/the-man-who-wove-the-web-1301437.html>:
/"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. Groups
are a very important part of the Web because online communities
are where we form our trust. It is very useful to build tools that
apply to all the online communities so they can all generate this
social trust information. I am excited about SIOC because you can
use that information to determine trust, to let people in. If
someone is in a group that a friend of mine is part of, I can
create another relationship based on that."/
* Uldis, Tuukka Hastrup <http://tuukka.iki.fi/> and Thomas Schandl
<http://www.deri.ie/about/team/member/thomas_schandl/> are
updating Uldis' WordPress SIOC Importer
<http://wiki.sioc-project.org/w/SIOC_Import_Plugin>, which allows
you to create blog posts based on SIOC data ported from weblogs,
mailing lists, forums, IRC, etc.
* Chris Bizer <http://www.bizer.de/>, Richard Cyganiak
<http://richard.cyganiak.de/> and Tom Heath
<http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/tom/> have published a very useful
document called "How to Publish Linked Data on the Web
<http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/pub/LinkedDataTutorial/>"
(mentions vocabularies to use like FOAF, DC, SIOC, DOAP, SKOS, MO,
Rev and CC). See also Leo Sauermann and Richard's "Cool URIs for
the Semantic Web <http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/>".
* In the area of collaborative work environments, SIOC is being used
in the Ecospace <http://www.ip-ecospace.org/> project to export
metadata from both BSCW <http://public.bscw.de/> and BC
<http://www.groupbc.com/>. Here is a BSCW SIOC export service
<http://vmecos01.deri.ie:8081/bscw2sioc/>, and there is also a CWE
version of the SIOC Explorer <http://www.activerdf.org:8043/>
(which includes data from both BSCW and BC).
* Sören Auer <http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/%7Eauer/>'s team
have produced Triplify <http://triplify.org/>, which enables
simple mapping of RDB to RDF data in a variety of web
applications. Using Triplify, SIOC and FOAF data can be produced
from Drupal 5 <http://drupal.org/>, WordPress
<http://wordpress.org/>, WackoWiki <http://wackowiki.com/>, and
Open Journal Systems <http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/>.
* The new version of BoardTracker <http://www.boardtracker.com/>
will have an API to export data using SIOC.
* The Sindice <http://www.sindice.com/> group will soon release the
SWPop widget for WordPress that allows you to view posts,
comments, topics, etc. made by any blog commenter across the
SIOC-o-sphere (as indexed by Sindice). You can see a preview here
<http://140.203.154.234/swpop/blog/>.
* This is an interesting post
<http://andrewapeterson.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/semantic-standards-are-sustainable-seo-for-you-your-business-website/>
by Andrew A. Peterson <http://andrewapeterson.wordpress.com/> on
how semantic standards like RSS, FOAF and SIOC (SIOD
<http://andrewapeterson.wordpress.com/2008/02/10/sioc-should-be-called-siod-discussions-not-communities-right/>!)
can provide sustainable SEO for websites, referencing the Yahoo!
Search announcement regarding support for RDF and microformats
<http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000527.html>.
* Ben O'Steen <http://oxfordrepo.blogspot.com/> describes a Pylons
interface to carry out CRUD
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Create,_read,_update_and_delete>
functionality where items are linked together semantically using SIOC.
* Leigh Dodds <http://www.ldodds.com/> has a fun FOAF (and SIOC)
tale <http://www.ldodds.com/blog/archives/000321.html> about Bee
Node (told using SPARQL)!
* I've presented at WebCamp on DataPortability, web standards, SIOC
and FOAF
<http://www.slideshare.net/Cloud/dataportabilityorg-web-standards-sioc-and-foaf>
and recorded a related video on DataPortability and me
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh-4bRDmTd0>. It pales in
comparison to this one
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eGcsGPgUTw> from Danny Ayers!
Previous SIOC-o-sphere articles:
#6 http://sioc-project.org/node/310
#5 http://sioc-project.org/node/294
#4 http://sioc-project.org/node/272
#3 http://sioc-project.org/node/271
#2 http://sioc-project.org/node/138
#1 http://sioc-project.org/node/79
John.
--
Dr. John Breslin
DERI, NUI Galway
http://sw.deri.org/~jbreslin/
john.b...@deri.org
Uldis Bojars
> From: http://sioc-project.org/node/328
Great stuff! There is so much happening in the SIOC-o-sphere that your
status updates are getting very long. Shows that SIOC and the Semantic
Web in general are getting quite some traction. But if SIOC status
reports grow any longer we might need summaries / extracts of the
summaries (just kidding). ;-)
What would be interesting is to have follow-ups on the mailing list,
with participants highlighting things which were most interesting to
them or which they want to develop further.
It is hard to choose any of these news in particular (all are
interesting) so I will just take some at random:
> * Version 1.0 of a SIOC API for Perl has been released on CPAN! The
> CPAN page for the SIOC API is here: http://search.cpan.org/%7Egeewiz/SIOC-v1.0.0/
people are using MovableType (it used to be 2nd most popular blog
engine on Planet RDF, but it was a while ago when I was checking it).
It would be good if someone built a SIOC exporter for MovableType and
having a SIOC API for Perl will make it easier to build one for people
who are not necessarily Semantic Web or SIOC experts.
> * The Sindice <http://www.sindice.com/> group will soon release the
> SWPop widget for WordPress that allows you to view posts,
> comments, topics, etc. made by any blog commenter across the
Sindice team has created a nice WordPress widget for displaying a
summary of the content created by people all over the SIOC-o-sphere.
Now we just need to SIOC-enable all sites which have information /
content that we are interested in. While there are SIOC plugins for
WordPress, Drupal, etc., enabling these sites one-by-one can be a long
and boring task. That's why we need tools and services for mass-
production of SIOC such as:
- wrappers for existing social media sites (e.g., Sioku for SIOC-
enabling Jaiku and Tom Morris' Twitter2RDF for doing the same with
Twitter)
- add SIOC export directly to large multi-user sites (e.g.,
wordpress.com)
Currently I am not aware of large sites doing SIOC export directly,
but they will show up sooner or later. Think about something similar
as LiveJournal being a pioneer in using FOAF data (now put to good use
by the Social Graph API and other apps).
> Talis has described a SIOC-powered distributed comments widget
> at http://blogs.talis.com/n2/archives/17
Semantic Web technologies are great for distributing conversations
(and all other kinds of data) over the Web. An important step in
thinking is realising that annotations and comments can have a
separate life and do not necessarily have to be located on the same
page. This idea has been around for ages, yet it can be easily
forgotten when concentrating just on better ways to embed metadata in
a web page.
It is great to see this widget which allows to add distributed
comments to any web page. Takes just seconds and a couple of lines in
HTML. But the most exciting feature (to me) is what happens after you
press the "Activity" button next to commenter's name. The widget will
display a list of comments made by the author across all widget-
enabled pages (in this it is similar to SWPop widget described above).
As more people add this widget to their pages, it can become an
interesting game - tracking activity of people commenting all across
the web. I've also added this widget at: http://captsolo.net/feedback.php.
Try it out and add it to your pages.
P.S. There are some services (e.g., CoComment) for creating and track
distributed comments on the web. What Keith's widget adds is using
Semantic Web technologies and vocabularies such as SIOC (an open,
extensible data format for representing comments), FOAF (parsed to
find a name of a person given an identifier) and URIs (used to
identify people). Is it creating Linked Data too?
What snippets of information from the reports from SIOC-o-sphere have
caught your attention?
Uldis
[ http://captsolo.net/info/ ]