Creating connections between discussion clouds with SIOC
- Wordpress category:
(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.
Comments
I have a CDR version at
I have a CDR version at http://sw.deri.org/svn/sw/2005/08/sioc/media/discussion_clouds/ Nicolas.
Do you have an SVG version of
Do you have an SVG version of that diagram?
[...] Wonder what you could
[...] Wonder what you could do in SVG with all the SIOC clouds… [...]
[...] It’s been a year since
[...] 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 also think that 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. So, with this in mind and in terms of SIOC, I hope that we can use Microformats to help create closer interlinks between the objects that make up online communities - I’m talking mainly about posts, forums / blogs, communities and user profiles. I’m going to start with three or four things I want SIOC to do for Microformats and vice versa, and then we can go from there. These correspond to some of the links shown in my “connecting discussion clouds” picture. One User, Many User Accounts At the moment, it is quite difficult to identify all the posts made by a particular person through their various user personas or profiles on different sites - e.g. find all the blog posts and comments and forum threads I’ve created in the past year. In the SIOC and FOAF vocabularies, there are two properties linking people to user profiles: a Person is linked to a User using a “hasOnlineAccount” link, and a User is linked to a Person using an “account_of” relationship. Using a mf for sioc:account_of / foaf:hasOnlineAccount would help with the “One Person, Many User Accounts” issue - e.g. these links could be created from a user signature or other public profile field. For example, I have an account on boards.ie, and I want to say that I am the same person described by a FOAF profile on my own site, or that I hold another account on boards.jp. Maybe links are required in both directions to confirm that I am really am who I claim I am, but this can be done at least (even if it is tedious). This may also require some BBCodes for forums that translate to the appropriate HTML. Example <div class=”User”> [...]