RE: SWEO Introduction: Uldis Bojars

Hi Paul,

If your question is about SIOC please note that SIOC does not focus on
social networks as such and re-uses FOAF to express relations between people
or information about them.

SIOC aims to "open up" online community sites (forums, blogs,...) and
express semantically rich information about their structure and content [in
RDF]. SIOC ontology is a data format for describing such information and
SIOC export tools [5] allow to generate this information from CMS engines
such as WordPress, Drupal, DotClear and b2evolution. 

[5] http://sioc-project.org/exporters


As a result SIOC can potentially provide larger sets of RDF data than pure
social networking sites because the amount of content created by people
grows significantly faster than the amount of connections they declare on
social networking sites. Further, you can view SIOC as a generic format to
represent any [web] content in RDF.

In a more generic context - about Social Software cluster in DERI - we are
working together with Klostu [6] who is building a "super social network" by
connecting together message boards and their communities. Currently we are
not working with any of the conventional social networking sites, but this
cluster is still quite young and this may change in the future.

[6] http://www.klostu.com/

 
There are a number of sites that are using FOAF to export data, such as Vox
(has FOAF autodiscovery), PeopleAggregator and eCademy. It would be
interesting to work with some of them or other social networking sites.
Again, getting content and structure in a machine readable form and deriving
social networks from content could lead to more interesting results than
just the relations that are explicitly defined.

Best,
Uldis

-----Original Message-----
From: public-sweo-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:public-sweo-ig-request@w3.org]
On Behalf Of Paul Walsh, Segala
Sent: Tuesday, December 05, 2006 12:29 AM
To: 'Uldis Bojars'; public-sweo-ig@w3.org
Subject: RE: SWEO Introduction: Uldis Bojars


Hi Uldis, are you working with any of the big social networks? If so, can
you name them?

Many thanks
Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: public-sweo-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:public-sweo-ig-request@w3.org]
On Behalf Of Uldis Bojars
Sent: 29 November 2006 16:00
To: public-sweo-ig@w3.org
Subject: SWEO Introduction: Uldis Bojars


Uldis Bojārs - a researcher in the Semantic Web / Social Software cluster at
DERI Galway.

I am working on the SIOC (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities)
project [1] aimed at putting the information from online community sites
(forums, weblogs, mailing lists, ...) on the Semantic Web and using this
information to derive new relations and provide richer services to users. 

This project involves a fair bit of education and outreach itself because
its users (both for generating data and consuming data) are regular people
and businesses who may not have heard about the Semantic Web before. While
the core of this project is the SIOC ontology there are many tools built
around it and some of these tools have outgrown the project, e.g.:
 - Semantic Radar [2] - a Firefox extension that lets users discover the
"invisible" Semantic Web as they browse the web and also ping PTSW. 
 - PingTheSemanticWeb (PTSW) [3] - a Semantic Web ping service created by
Frederick Giasson which collects pings from applications like Semantic Radar
and acts as a source of URLs of RDF data for use by Semantic Web
applications. A good example of such application is the new doapstore.org by
Alexandre Passant.

[1] http://sioc-project.org

[2] http://rdfs.org/sioc/spec/

[3] http://ping.semanticweb.org/


Semantic Web Education and Outreach is a very important initiative and I
look forward to working together with you in achieving its goals. I have
been interested in and doing Semantic Web related work for >4 years and hope
to contribute to SWEO education efforts (tutorials, documentation...) and in
practical demonstrations of SemWeb. DERI Galway has an Education and
Outreach program which Ina O'Murchu is working on - I hope this program and
SWEO IG can work together and benefit from each other.

I have been doing some Semantic Web education on my weblog [4] and together
with others have formed a Latvian SemWeb interest group (SemWeb.LV). As a
part of my master thesis I worked on representing personal resume/CV
information in RDF. Unfortunately I have not had much time to follow up on
this work and it is good that now there is the ExpertFinder initiative which
aims to develop this area.

I come from Riga, Latvia and am now living in Galway, Ireland. Current
telecon time (it's 4pm local time) is good for me, can participate almost
any weekday. For communication you can use email: uldis.bojars@deri.org or
contact me on IRC (CaptSolo @ #swig, #sioc on irc.freenode.net) or Skype
(id: uldis.bojars).

Personal interests: photography, science fiction, cinema.

Uldis

[ http://captsolo.net/info/ ] = [4]




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Received on Wednesday, 13 December 2006 18:37:08 UTC