As lots of classes and groups are taking off with blogging, we're starting to address something that I hinted at in my last post, the possibilities for sparking more intellectual interaction between the classes that have overlapping topics. One is Talkdigger, the subject of my last post. But deeper down is one of the ontologies Talkdigger depends on, the SIOC (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities) project.

The idea is pretty simple--gee, we have all these wonderful online communities within blogs, community sites, discussion boards, etc. Wouldn't it be neat if the Drupal-powered ones could share information with the Wordpress-powered ones? Plugins let that happen by exporting the relevant info and making it available on the Semantic Web, ready for something like Talkdigger or another applicatoin to pick up and bring together. Or, just for it to be in a repository ready to get sparqled by another app. Voila and ta-daa! Youv've got the connections between those communities!

The Drupal SIOC module is here, and the Wordpress plugin is here.

SIOC includes properties (roughly the same as fields) for things like membership in a forum, roles within a forum, avatars used, and of course information about replies, links, and relations. The full technical spec is here.

Up to this point in this post, here's what the SIOC info looks like (how to view this data is coming up...):

At first, it doesn't look like much more than what RSS will give. But notice that it's produced a link to go along with the topics I'm filing this post under. That's a part of the semantic web trick of disambiguation. What I've tagged as 'semanticWeb' someone else will tag as "Semantic Web' and someone else .... you get the idea. Part of what the semantic web facilitates is disambiguation between those different naming patterns based on the URL. Some small semantic web tricks will let semantic web browsers know that the two terms are the same if they are connected to the same URL.

The SIOC Browser pictured comes along with the Firefox Semantic Radar plugin. It looks for semantic web info embedded in web pages as you browse them, and sends the info along to a repository of semantic web info.

I'm exploring more, especially to see what more information the Drupal and Wordpress SIOC exporters produce with comments and links.