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Data Portability with SIOC and FOAF
Social media sites, including social networking sites, have captured the attention of millions of users as well as billions of dollars in investment and acquisition. To better enable a user’s access to multiple sites, portability between social media sites is required in terms of both (1) the personal profiles and friend networks and (2) a user’s content objects expressed on each site. This requires representation mechanisms to interconnect both people and objects on the Web in an interoperable, extensible way.
Two Semantic Web projects – SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) and FOAF (Friend of a Friend) – can be combined to enable data portability between social media sites. The FOAF vocabulary allows us to represent people and their social networks, and can be utilised with the OpenID identity system. The SIOC vocabulary allows us to express information about user-generated content in an interoperable way. By using common formats like FOAF and SIOC to describe people, content objects, and the connections between them, social media sites can interoperate and provide portable data by appealing to some common semantics.
This presentation will begin with a description of the need and requirements for data portability, and continue with a demonstration of SIOC applications which allow SIOC and FOAF data to be produced from existing online community sites (blogs, forums, etc.). We will then describe how this information can be ported to other sites with tools such as the WordPress SIOC Import plugin. Finally we will talk about how this data can be augmented with other vocabularies to represent a richer set of Web 2.0 content objects.
Uldis Bojārs
DERI Galway
Uldis Boj?rs is a Semantic Web and Social Media researcher and a PhD student at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) Galway. He is a member of ACM and an organiser of the WebCamp on Social Network Portability.
His work focuses on the SIOC project (pron. “shock”) which aims to express information about the structure and content of online community sites in a interoperable form. Uldis is one of the editors of the W3C member submission of SIOC and the author of the Semantic Radar extension for Firefox and various tools for the SIOC project. He has experience presenting Semantic Web and SIOC to both academic and web developer audiences.
Uldis received his M.Sc. degree from the University of Latvia in 2002, with master thesis on expressing data from persons’ resumes on the Semantic Web.
John Breslin
DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway
John Breslin received his PhD degree from the National University of Ireland, Galway in 2002. He is currently a researcher and adjunct lecturer at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway, and is leader of the Social Software research group there. He is founder of the SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) initiative, which provides an open-data format for community description. He co-founded Ireland’s largest message board site, boards.ie Ltd., in 2000. The Irish Internet Association presented him with Net Visionary awards in 2005 (for boards.ie) and 2006 (for adverts.ie). He organised the first workshop on FOAF, social networks and the Semantic Web in 2004, and also set up the WebCamp series of workshops. He is chair of the 5th International Conference on Social Software (BlogTalk 2008).
Alexandre Passant
LaLIC institute (at Université Paris Sorbonne) and Electricité de France R&D
Alexandre Passant received the M.Sc. degree from the Universit Paris Dauphine in 2004. He is currently a PhD student from the LaLIC institute (at Universit Paris Sorbonne) and Electricit de France R&D.
His PhD focuses on enriching Web 2.0 services with Semantic Web technologies in a corporate context, by combining meta-data and domain ontologies in blogs and wikis to offer value-added services to end-users. He is one of the co-author of the SIOC specifications and related documents, and also released some on-line services reusing and displaying Semantic Web data in a user-friendly way, such as foafmap.net.