FOAF and SIOC
January 16th, 2008Just wanted to blog about the Friend of a Friend (FOAF) and the Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) projects, as I recently installed Wordpress plugins for these two Semantic Web initiatives.
FOAF (an acronym of Friend of a Friend) is a machine-readable ontology describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects. Anyone can use FOAF to describe him or herself. FOAF allows groups of people to describe social networks without the need for a centralised database.
FOAF is an extension to RDF and is defined using OWL. Computers may use these FOAF profiles to find, for example, all people living in Europe, or to list all people both you and a friend of you know. This is accomplished by defining relationships between people. Each profile has a unique identifier (such as the person’s e-mail addresses, a Jabber ID, or a URI of the homepage or weblog of the person), which is used when defining these relationships.
Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities Project (SIOC) is a Semantic Web technology. SIOC provides methods for interconnecting discussion methods such as blogs, forums and mailing lists to each other. It consists of the SIOC ontology, an open-standard machine readable format for expressing the information contained both explicitly and implicitly in Internet discussion methods, of SIOC metadata producers for a number of popular blogging platforms and content management systems, and of storage and browsing/searching systems for leveraging this SIOC data.
Plugin Links:
FOAF: http://www.wasab.dk/morten/blog/archives/2004/07/05/wordpress-plugin-foaf-output
SIOC: http://sioc-project.org/wordpress/
