[drupal-devel] Is there a semantic module project on the way ?

[John Breslin]

Hiya -

I guess I can repeat a post from the civicspace-dev list here to 
describe the idea of SIOC.  It'd be great to have your collaboration 
Sebastien:

I met Kieran L. in July, and talked about our SIOC 
(Semantically-Interconnected Online Communities) project.  Basically, 
what it is is an open specification for describing communities using 
online discussion forums or blogs, leading to what some may term 
"distributed conversations".  At the moment, online communities are 
islands that are not interlinked, and the SIOC ontology has been 
proposed to not only link these communities but to leverage data in ways 
that were previously unknown.

The initial version of our SIOC specification has been drafted. It can 
be used in on its own (having a complete set of terms) or in conjunction 
with other RDF formats such as RSS 1.0 (and 1.1).  In terms of producing 
metadata, we've started with SIOC exporters for open-source discussion 
systems such as WordPress and Drupal / CivicSpace, and more are on the 
way.  There are obvious connections between SIOC and the subscribe / 
publish module, so I've asked John van Dyk about this.

More info is available from:

http://rdfs.org/sioc/

and the Drupal module is at:

http://rdfs.org/sioc/drupal/

or in the Drupal CVS contributions area under SIOC.

While there are many (useful) classes and properties in SIOC, it can 
essentially be boiled down to: Users create Posts that are contained in 
Forums that are hosted on Sites, e.g.

   Site -> host_of -> Forum -> container_of -> Post -> has_creator -> User

Posts have reply Posts, and Forums can be parents of other Forums.

Looking forward to your feedback, and of course contributions to the 
code :-)

Thanks,

John.
-- 
Kieran Lal wrote:

> You will want to look at Semanically Interconnected Online Communities.
>
> http://drupal.org/node/24925
>
> Cheers,
> Kieran
>
>
> On Oct 20, 2005, at 11:09 PM, Sebastien Arbogast wrote:
>
>>
>>     There are (at least) two modules you'll want to look at. One is CCK
>>
>>     http://drupal.org/cck-status
>>
>>     and another is hier
>>
>>     http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/sandbox/vauxia/hier/
>>     <http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/sandbox/vauxia/hier/>
>>
>>     which comes out of vauxia's experience with Operon
>>
>>     http://www.developerfocus.com/projects/operon/
>>
>>
>> OK. Thank you very much for your quick answer.
>> What I see from your links is that :
>> - Those modules seem to be far from being released
>> - None of them explicitly deals with RDF
>>
>> For the second point, is it that RDF approach has been tried but 
>> proved to be a dead-end ? Or is it just that it's not been tried ?
>> Because standard-based approach is really a key *feature* for us : we 
>> want to be able to use all the tools that deal with with standard RDF.
>>
>> -- 
>> Sébastien Arbogast
>>
>> Blog : http://www.sebastien-arbogast.com
>> The Epseelon Project : http://www.epseelon.org
>> Projet Phénix : http://phenix.netbios.fr
>
>


-- 
Dr. John Breslin
DERI, NUI Galway
http://sw.deri.org/~jbreslin/
john.breslin at deri.org