Interlinking online communities

Abstract

As relevant information from blogs, forums and other discussion primitives increasingly turns up in searches, solutions are required to access, leverage and interlink this information across community platforms in a standard way. The SIOC initiative (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) aims to enable the integration of online community information. SIOC provides a Semantic Web ontology for representing rich data from social websites in RDF. It has recently achieved significant adoption through its usage in a variety of commercial and open-source software applications, and is commonly used in conjunction with the FOAF vocabulary described earlier. By becoming a standard way for expressing user-generated content from such sites, SIOC enables new kinds of usage scenarios for online community site data, and allows innovative semantic applications to be built on top of the existing Social Web. We shall describe some of these applications, ranging from healthcare to business use.