Large volumes of content (bookmarks, reviews, videos, etc.) are currently being created on the “Social Web”, i.e. on Web 2.0 community sites, and this content is being annotated and commented upon. The ability to view an individual’s entire contribution to the Social Web would be an interesting and valuable service, particularly important as social networks are often being formed through created content and things that people have in common (“object-centred sociality”). SIOC is a Semantic Web research project that aims to describe online communities on the Social Web. This paper describes how SIOC and the Semantic Web can enable linking and reuse scenarios of data from Web 2.0 community sites, and introduces a SIOC Types module to further specify the type of content items and act as a “glue” between user posts and the content items created and annotated by users.

The Web is increasingly becoming a social place: there has been a shift from just existing on the Web to participating on the Web. Community applications such as collaborative wikis, blogging, photo and bookmark sharing, and online social networks have become very popular recently, both in personal/social and professional/organisational domains [1]. Most of these collaborative applications provide common features such as content creation and sharing (images, user profiles, bookmarks, articles, etc.), provisions for discussions related to the content (comments, talk pages) and user-to-user connections (circle of friends, private messaging, etc.) and networks of users are also forming through content items of common interest (in what has been termed “object-centred sociality” [2]).

Moreover, applications are going beyond just data to provide categorising and interlinking for better search and retrieval. As examples of this, there has been huge growth in taxonomy and folksonomy usage [3] on sites like the Wikipedia, del.icio.us, CiteULike and Flickr and within some application areas interconnections between people as well as content have been formed through social networks, trackbacks, blogrolls and interwiki links. However, these applications are hitting boundaries in terms of information integration. For example, many people have multiple user accounts through which they will create new or replicated content across sites, and there is little in terms of connections between these user accounts and the associated content.

Download pdf Using the Semantic Web for linking and reusing data across Web 2.0 communities