The SIOC data format enables mash-ups of community focused content. This presentation introduces the SIOC format, and the SIOC explorer web application, which allows you to browse and navigate such data. The slides also show how the SIOC explorer is implemented with ActiveRDF and Ruby on Rails

1. Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Leveraging existing Web
frameworks for a SIOC explorer
Benjamin Heitmann and Eyal Oren
Digital Enterprise Research Institute,
National University of Ireland, Galway
Chapter 1
 Copyright 2007 Digital Enterprise Research Institute. All rights reserved. www.deri.org

2. Overview
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Part 1:

Introducing SIOC
Enabling Mash-Ups of community focused content

Part 2:

Faceted browsing of community sites
Balancing between domain specific and domain agnostic

Part 3:

Reusing existing web frameworks
Ruby on Rails meets the Semantic Web

2 of 18 Benjamin Heitmann and Eyal Oren

3. Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Part1:
Introducing SIOC
Chapter 3
 Copyright 2007 Digital Enterprise Research Institute. All rights reserved. www.deri.org

4. Use case: tracking a music community
?
4 of 18 Benjamin Heitmann and Eyal Oren

5. Solving the use case
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Tracking an emerging music community over time

 Question: What is happening in the Dubstep scene
in Dublin?
 Solutions that do not work:
Google:

– Sites updated too frequently
– Bad results: new and relevant pages get buried due to ranking
RSS:

– not all types of sites have RSS
– RSS feeds do not include all relevant information
5 of 18 Benjamin Heitmann and Eyal Oren

6. SIOC: enables community mashups
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
linked data:
web site
exporters
microformats (contact,
location, event)
after
aggregation:
6 of 18 Benjamin Heitmann and Eyal Oren

7. Details: the SIOC ontology
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
SIOC allows re-using the data at the center of a

community:
content:

– blog and forum posts
– wiki pages
– freeform text (new types can be defined)
topics:

– tags and categories
– complex hierarchies possibly with SKOS
user relations:

FOAF and openID identities
the next SIOC version will be geared towards major

social networking sites and Web 2.0 hub sites
7 of 18 Benjamin Heitmann and Eyal Oren

8. Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Part 2:
Faceted browsing of community
sites
Chapter 8
 Copyright 2007 Digital Enterprise Research Institute. All rights reserved. www.deri.org

9. Exploring SIOC data
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
SIOC Explorer

crawls and aggregates SIOC data

allows exploring and browsing

– filter by topic
– view posts of a certain day
Implements faceted browsing

step-wise filtering of displayed content

filtering works across sites

Available at http://activerdf.org/sioc/

9 of 18 Benjamin Heitmann and Eyal Oren

10. Filtering demonstration
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
10 of 18 Benjamin Heitmann and Eyal Oren

11. Faceted browsing done right
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Balance between

domain specific

– only show SIOC forums and SIOC posts
– focus user attention
domain agnostic

– all other data is used for navigation
– use unexpected data as filter
– example: use author hobbies @@foaf interests as filter
fine tuning: disable a-priori unwanted predicates

complex facets

use entities with multiple properties as filter

example: see all post of a FOAF person with a FOAF

homepage http://eyaloren.org
11 of 18 Benjamin Heitmann and Eyal Oren

12. Complex facets demonstration
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
12 of 18 Benjamin Heitmann and Eyal Oren

13. Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Part 3:
Reusing existing web frameworks
Chapter 13
 Copyright 2007 Digital Enterprise Research Institute. All rights reserved. www.deri.org

14. Comparing the nature of Web and
Semantic Web applications
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Semantic Web
Web applications
applications
semi-structured and
data: schema compliant
dynamic
arbitrary and
schema: fixed
evolving
single and multiple and
data sources:
centralised distributed
model semantics: closed world open world
runtime state: closed system open system
14 of 18 Benjamin Heitmann and Eyal Oren

15. Frameworks for the Semantic Web?
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
enough sophisticated Web ActiveRDF fits transparently
 
Application Frameworks into the Ruby on Rails
exist today: architecture
View
Controller
Model
Active Active
but: no integration of

Resource RDF
Semantic Web libraries into
the framework architecture
15 of 18 Benjamin Heitmann and Eyal Oren

16. ActiveRDF bridges the gaps
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
between data models

object oriented access to RDF triples:

eyal.foaf::knows = knud
ActiveRDF can provide model objects for Rails

Ruby meta-programming allows ActiveRDF to emulate

open world semantics
between developer communities

Semantic Web developers:

– benefit from existing Ruby and Rails ecosystem
Web and Web 2.0 developers:

– gain access to Semantic Web infrastructure
16 of 18 Benjamin Heitmann and Eyal Oren

17. ActiveRDF code examples:
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
Model: create a Rails model objects from RDF schema
Namespace.register :sioc, 'http://rdfs.org/sioc/ns#'class
Controller: application logic access to RDF data
class PostController < ApplicationController
require_dependency ‘sioc’
def display_all_posts
@displayed_posts = SIOC::Post.find_all
render :action => ‘list’
end
end
View: display RDF data in user interface
<% @displayed_posts.each do |p| %>
<%= p.title %>
<% end %>
17 of 18 Benjamin Heitmann and Eyal Oren

18. Summary
Digital Enterprise Research Institute www.deri.ie
SIOC explorer

SIOC enables re-use of the data at the centre communities

and social networks
The SIOC explorer allows faceted browsing of community

data
All data included in the SIOC export can be use for

navigating the community content
ActiveRDF

transparently integrates with Ruby on Rails

bridges the gaps between

– Web developers and Semantic Web developers
– Semantic Web data model and Ruby scripting
18 of 18 Benjamin Heitmann and Eyal Oren