It's been three months since my last round-up of all things SIOC-ed, so here is entry number seven in the series:

• Version 1.0 of a SIOC API for Perl has been released on CPAN! The CPAN page for the SIOC API is here. A description of the project itself is available here. Thanks to Jochen Lillich, Thomas N. Burg, and also to Internet Privatstiftung Austria (IPA) for funding this work.
• A new RDF API module for Drupal has been announced that will include sub-classes / sub-properties of popular terms from SIOC, DC, etc. (Drupal creator Dries Buytaert has also said that an RDF API will appear in the core of Drupal 7; see this video.) Stephane Corlosquet has also made an RDF Schema proposal for Drupal (which includes SIOC) and has received very positive feedback. Some potential RDF use cases for Drupal have also been described.
• Gautier Poupeau has written a useful guide (en Français) on how to RDF-ise your blog in two parts: the theory and the practice. It uses RDFa and vocabularies including SIOC, SIOC Types, DC Elements, DC Refinements and XSD.
• SIOC data is now being produced by memoQ by Yuki Matsuoka and Hideaki Takeda of the National Institute of Informatics, Japan.
• Keith Alexander at Talis has described (and shown) how it is possible to create client-side Semantic Web applications using their Convert service. For example, on this page comments functionality is added to a section identified with a "sioc:has_reply" property using a short piece of embedded widget code.
• ASP.net developer John Dyer has written a nice post on DataPortability and its standards, talking about OpenID, FOAF, SIOC, APML, etc. Daniel Lewis has also written a good overview of DP. More recently, John announced the DataPortability pack for BlogEngine.NET that produces SIOC, APML and FOAF. BlogEngine.NET founder Mads Kristensen has also written about data portability and making an API to your website.
• OpenLink's Personal Data Space Explorer now also exposes SIOC, FOAF and other RDF data. See Kingsley's post on linked data via FOAF and SIOC.
• Uldis Bojars, Alex Passant and I will present a tutorial entitled "Interlinking Online Communities and Enriching Social Software with the Semantic Web" at the 14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008) in Beijing this month.
• I did an interview with SemanticWeb.com called "SIOC-ing the Semantic Web" in January, and talked to PCWorld about data portability and SIOC. Uldis recorded a podcast with Talis in February with SIOC as one of the main topics. (Eric Miller also described in another Talis podcast how FOAF and SIOC are useful not only for getting at historical content, but for providing fine-tuned content-delivery systems connecting people interested in various aspects of a particular domain.)
• Alex has produced a universal SIOC reader widget. The widget can query for SIOC data from any SPARQL endpoint that provides a JSON output for SELECT queries. (Alex has also released the Meaning of a Tag ontology which links with SIOC and SCOT.)
• Phillip Rhodes has been working on the OpenQabal "social software operating system" which integrates a set of applications (including Roller and JavaBB ) via single sign-on (SSO), a common look-and-feel, and SIOC.
• Sean Palmer has written an interesting article entitled "One Semantic Application, One UI?" in which he talks about Tabulator and its interfaces, including application specific panes for FOAF, SIOC and DOAP.
• Tim Berners-Lee talked about FOAF and SIOC in an interview with Marie Boran from Silicon Republic for the Irish Independent: "A project that started back in 2000 called Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) represents relationships between people, as well as basic contact details. SIOC does this for groups: it extends the FOAF idea to being able to talk about whole groups of people. Groups are a very important part of the Web because online communities are where we form our trust. It is very useful to build tools that apply to all the online communities so they can all generate this social trust information. I am excited about SIOC because you can use that information to determine trust, to let people in. If someone is in a group that a friend of mine is part of, I can create another relationship based on that."
• Uldis, Tuukka Hastrup and Thomas Schandl are updating Uldis' WordPress SIOC Importer, which allows you to create blog posts based on SIOC data ported from weblogs, mailing lists, forums, IRC, etc.
• Chris Bizer, Richard Cyganiak and Tom Heath have published a very useful document called "How to Publish Linked Data on the Web" (mentions vocabularies to use like FOAF, DC, SIOC, DOAP, SKOS, MO, Rev and CC). See also Leo Sauermann and Richard's "Cool URIs for the Semantic Web".
• In the area of collaborative work environments, SIOC is being used in the Ecospace project to export metadata from both BSCW and BC. Here is a BSCW SIOC export service, and there is also a CWE version of the SIOC Explorer (which includes data from both BSCW and BC).
• Sören Auer's team have produced Triplify, which enables simple mapping of RDB to RDF data in a variety of web applications. Using Triplify, SIOC and FOAF data can be produced from Drupal 5, WordPress, WackoWiki, and Open Journal Systems.
• The new version of BoardTracker will have an API to export data using SIOC.
• The Sindice group will soon release the SWPop widget for WordPress that allows you to view posts, comments, topics, etc. made by any blog commenter across the SIOC-o-sphere (as indexed by Sindice). You can see a preview here.
• This is an interesting post by Andrew A. Peterson on how semantic standards like RSS, FOAF and SIOC (SIOD!) can provide sustainable SEO for websites, referencing the Yahoo! Search announcement regarding support for RDF and microformats.
• Ben O'Steen describes a Pylons interface to carry out CRUD functionality where items are linked together semantically using SIOC.
• Leigh Dodds has a fun FOAF (and SIOC) tale about Bee Node (told using SPARQL)!
• I've presented at WebCamp on DataPortability, web standards, SIOC and FOAF and recorded a related video on DataPortability and me. It pales in comparison to this one from Danny Ayers!

Previous SIOC-o-sphere articles:

#6 http://sioc-project.org/node/310
#5 http://sioc-project.org/node/294
#4 http://sioc-project.org/node/272
#3 http://sioc-project.org/node/271
#2 http://sioc-project.org/node/138
#1 http://sioc-project.org/node/79

Version 1.0 of an API for Perl has been released on CPAN!

The CPAN page for the SIOC API is at:

http://search.cpan.org/~geewiz/SIOC-v1.0.0/

A description of the project itself is available at:

http://sioc.socialware.at

Thanks to Jochen Lillich, Thomas N. Burg, and also to Internet Privatstiftung Austria (IPA) for funding this work.

Semantic Radar is a semantic metadata detector for Mozilla Firefox.

I'm happy to announce that our tutorial proposal on SIOC entitled "Interlinking Online Communities and Enriching Social Software with the Semantic Web" (Uldis Bojars and John Breslin of DERI, NUI Galway, Alexandre Passant of EDF R&D / LaLICC, Université Paris 4) has been accepted for WWW2008, the 14th International World Wide Web Conference to be held in Beijing, China in April. The abstract is as follows:

Here are the latest happenings from the world of SIOC during the past few months, with thanks to all involved in supporting the initiative! (Note to new readers that SIOC is an open data format for community description.)

• Engage, the community information application from Talis, is using SIOC, SKOS and FOAF.
• Loic Le Meur's Seesmic microvlogging service ("the video Twitter") has decided to adopt the SIOC ontology as one of their open platform formats (along with FOAF and DC; see 1, 2).
• OpenLink have released an EC2 / S3 Amazon Image-version of their Virtuoso product, which includes SIOC support: "your blogs, wikis, bookmarks, etc. are based on the SIOC ontology (think open social graph++)".
• PTSW's namespace statistics page lists SIOC as their fourth most used namespace out of 423.
• Planet Semantic Focus has launched, and plans to expose PSF community member discussions using SIOC and to interlink these with comments from the original blogs themselves shortly.
• Dan Brickley has published a nifty FOAF classes and properties diagram which shows the internal and external links (to SIOC, DOAP, Geo, etc.).
• Thomas Burg has received a grant from IPA's "netidee" funding call which will be used to develop a SIOC API for Perl.
• Oskar Welzl has SIOC-enabled the skin on his own blog and a friend's to produce combined RSS and SIOC descriptions (with an aggregate archive). You can view this in Tabulator starting at this URL.
• Dorai Thodla has written about Doug Englebart's "Networked Improvement Community" idea, and he discusses the overlap between improvement communities and the interlinked communities created via SIOC.
• Phillip Rhodes tells us about OpenQabal, an open source social networking and collaboration platform that will include SIOC support, allowing Roller, JavaBB and other component applications to become part of the SIOC-o-sphere.
• ImageMatters have announced a new open source social bookmarking and mashup application called gnizr, that exports saved bookmarks using SIOC and a tag ontology.
• Finally, the forthcoming Semantic Technologies Conference 2008 has listed SIOC among their appropriate topic areas in their call for proposals. Start writing now, the deadline has been extended to 10th December!

It's that random time of the year again where I summarise what's been going on in the world of SIOC...

• We now have a SIOC W3C Member Submission! Along with W3C members Asemantics, DFKI, FZI, Fraunhofer, Fundación CTIC, OpenLink, Opera, STFC, UPM, University of Trento and other co-authors, Uldis and I edited three main documents as part of the submission describing the SIOC core ontology specification, SIOC applications and implementation status, and some ontologies and RDF vocabularies related to SIOC. You can also read the W3C Team Comment for our submission. Thanks again to everyone involved!
• The Semantically-Interlinked Scientific Communities project aims to improve how scientific data and knowledge is represented and communicated. It will use SIOC, FOAF, DC, Creative and Science Commons, OBO and HCLS ontologies and technologies as its basis.
• Mark Wahl has written a useful article entitled "organizing principles for identity systems: embedding SIOC in XHTML with RDFa" which details how to describe blog post structures using SIOC and RDFa.
• There is a Google Summer of Code project from the Apache Software Foundation on creating plugins for embedding/producing RDF/XML and microformats in Forrest content objects, and SIOC is one of the target vocabularies.
• John Wubbel has an interesting post about how SIOC and semantic technologies can connect real estate networks.
• Lee Faus has been telling us on the #sioc IRC channel how the forthcoming Stuff project will use SIOC to facilitate searching, creating, and maintaining all kinds of 'stuff' online (from wikis, forums, knowledge bases, IM, support tickets, e-mails, etc.).
• SIOC metadata is being used in a very cool demonstrator from OpenLink on how to inject Facebook data into the Semantic Web. This is something I had been waiting for, so nice work!
• There are also a number of modules for the OpenLink Data Spaces (ODS) platform that each export SIOC metadata, including ODS-Blog, ODS-Wiki, ODS-Bookmarks, ODS-AddressBook, ODS-Calendar, ODS-Polls, ODS-Gallery (for photos), ODS-Feeds (for feed aggregation and exposure via SIOC), and ODS-Discussion (for comments across blogs, wikis or any other data space that supports some form of commenting).
• Another interesting SIOC-enabled application is the Mailing List Explorer. MLE is a tool that allows the exploration of mailing lists via query, timeline view, etc. It provides RDF representations (including SIOC metadata) for any valid W3C public mailing list archive.
• On the wiki front, IkeWiki is a semantic wiki for knowledge engineering. IkeWiki allows discussions (following a forum style with threaded views) to be attached to wiki pages. These discussions are represented using the SIOC ontology, which allows one to use semantic queries to investigate the structure of any discussion.
• SIOC is being discussed for use by the Italian workgroup for internet and web technologies. The group already produces metadata in FOAF and OPML.
• Harry Chen has written an interesting post about how ontologies like FOAF and SIOC can play important roles in the development of a people search engine. This post was made in relation to the forthcoming Finding Experts on the Web with Semantics workshop at ISWC 2007, for which SIOC is a major topic of interest.
• SIOC gets referenced in Mark Canter's blog post about posting to multiple social media sites, and this time it isn't referred to as STOIC!
• For Russian speakers, here's a blog conversation in Russian about the SIOC discussion clouds picture. SIOC has also received coverage in Korean (ZDnet), Austrian (ORF, Computerwelt), and German (Computer Zeitung) media following talks by Stefan.
• Tom Morris has created a MySpace parser that produces SIOC data; unfortunately due to some web hosting issues, this is currently offline.
• In a joint collaboration between DERI, NUI Galway and BiKE, Seoul National University, int.ere.st provides metadata creation and sharing support across online communities that use tag data. int.ere.st aims to build a tag-mediated society based on Semantic Web technologies, and resources in the site are based on RDF vocabularies including SIOC, FOAF, and SCOT. You can view a demonstration video for int.ere.st at YouTube.

I am happy to announce that SIOC is now a W3C Member Submission, as mentioned today on the W3C SW blog.

The SIOC Ontology Submission is composed of:

1. SIOC Core Ontology Specification
2. SIOC Ontology: Applications and Implementation Status
3. SIOC Ontology: Related Ontologies and RDF Vocabularies
4. Snapshots of Namespace Documents

Thanks to Uldis for all his work, and to all our authors, contributors and supporters! More information about SIOC is available from sioc-project.org. Our SIOC work in DERI, NUI Galway is funded by Science Foundation Ireland.

Since my last SIOC update in November, here are some of the latest happenings from the SIOC-o-sphere:

• Update! Adam Gzella has reminded me of the integration of SIOC support within both Social Semantic Collaborative Filtering (SSCF) and JeromeDL. To see SSCF in action, try out notitio.us/bookmarks, which can also display SIOC data.
• Jaroslaw Dobrzanski reported on his use of SIOC in IKHarvester, a component for Didaskon. He has since produced a longer description of what IKHarvester does. IKHarvester collects data from semantic social spaces (wikis, blogs, etc.) and provides it to Didaskon as informal Learning Objects (LOs).
• I've written the first version of a SIOC exporter for phpBB 2.0.x.
• Eyal and Benjamin have produced an explorer for SIOC forums. It's written using Ruby on Rails and their ActiveRDF / SWORD Semantic Web application framework for Rails. You can get it from the SIOC explorer page.
• SWAML has moved from Debian unstable to testing, and also won a Spanish free software contest for universities. Congratulations!
• OpenLink Data Spaces (ODS) SPARQL endpoints now provide access to SIOC instance data from a range of ODS application instances including blogs, wikis, aggregated feeds (RSS 1.0, 2.0 and Atom), shared bookmarks, discussions (i.e. comment threads), photo galleries, briefcases (e.g. WebDAV file servers), etc. The live ODS demo server and MyOpenLink.net (alpha) service are examples of ODS instances that can expose SIOC instance data to SPARQL query service clients, also in the form of real and virtual RDF graphs. The ODS SIOC reference guide describes how each application realm is mapped to SIOC alongside SPARQL query examples for interacting with the SIOC instance data.
• To help describe other application areas for online communities (e.g. as described via ODS above), a lot of new terms have been added to the separate SIOC types module (T-SIOC). New types of Container include AddressBook, AnnotationSet, AudioChannel, BookmarkFolder, Briefcase, EventCalendar, ImageGallery, ProjectDirectory, ResumeBank, ReviewArea, SubscriptionList, SurveyCollection, VideoChannel, and Wiki. New types of Forum include ArgumentativeDiscussion, ChatChannel, MailingList, MessageBoard, and Weblog. Poll has been created as a type of Item, and new types of Post include BoardPost, Comment, InstantMessage, and MailMessage. I've also drawn a picture of how T-SIOC and FOAF can create networks of object-centred sociality through the content that people create.
• Tom Morris has written an RDF-iser for Twitter that uses SIOC and FOAF. You can see an RDF version of a person's twitterings by using their username instead of these examples: johnbreslin, captsolo.
• Mike Bergman has written an interesting post called "An Intrepid Guide to Ontologies". This follows on nicely from his recent "Eat Your Greens: FOAF and SIOC are Good for You". Thanks Mike!
• Patrick Gosetti Murray-John talks about SIOC descriptions of fora for teaching and learning, and uses some SIOC in the Fishtank for Faculty Academy.
• Patrick and Jim Groom have also demonstrated how to use the structure and searching power of RDF to fully utilise tags and feeds on blogs. They combined RSS feeds from about ten people with SIOC data using RAP and Dave Beckett’s Triplr.
• Mary McKnight from RSS Pieces (guesting on the Future of Real Estate Marketing blog) talks about how SIOC and FOAF can be applied to the application domain of real estate.
• Uldis Bojars gave a very well-received presentation on SIOC entitled "The Semantic Web for Social Media Sites" at BarCamp Ireland 3. He also presented a paper about SIOC and Klostu called "The Boardscape: Creating a Super Social Network of Message Boards", written with Ron Kass for ICWSM. Alex Passant presented a paper about strengthening folksonomies using ontologies (including SIOC) at the same conference.
• There are plans to support SIOC and POWDER content labels on my.opera.com.
• The Semantic Web FAQ is published (SIOC gets a mention in the community topic).
• Tuukka Hastrup is logging some IRC channels in both HTML and Turtle RDF, and SIOC is being used as one of the representation formats.
• Hak-Lae Kim has launched an ontology and framework for sharing social semantic clouds of tags (SCOT) that works with FOAF, SIOC and SKOS. Let's share tags!
• Eileen Brown references SIOC in an article entitled "Beyond Web 2.0".
• For our DERI Research Day in December, I gave a SIOC overview talk entitled "Information Centric Access: The Case of SIOC" (lots of attendees from academia, industry and state organisations), and I also gave a brief presentation in January on how to use SIOC for expert finding at the first ExpertFinder Workshop in Berlin. (I am an organiser for the follow-on workshop "Finding Experts on the Web with Semantics" to be held at ISWC 2007, and SIOC will be a relevant topic.)
• Matthias Samwald told us about the bio-zen ontology framework, which includes SIOC as one of its base ontologies since it "is an excellent tool to describe scientific discourse in a practical, web-centric manner".
• John Hoogstrate has written some SIOC data producers for a forum he runs.
• SIOC is being used by Henry Story et al. in BAETLE (Bug And Enhancement Tracking LanguagE). See Henry's blog post on BAETLE for more.

Eyal and Benjamin have produced an explorer for SIOC forums. It's written using Ruby on Rails and their ActiveRDF / SWORD Semantic Web application framework for Rails. You can get it from the SIOC explorer page, which says:

SIOC is a Semantic Web format for online social communities such as forums, blogs, or mailing lists. SIOC feeds are already offered by many blogs (similar but much richer than RSS feeds). The SIOC explorer is a web application similar to a feed-reader: it allows people to subscribe to SIOC feeds and read their content. Because SIOC data is very rich, people can filter the content based on e.g. authors, topics, creation date, or any other properties.