From Online Community Data to RDF

Abstract

Large amounts of data are created within online community sites (forums, blogs, etc.). These can serve as a valuable source of information for web users, and usually contain rich meta-information. Most of this information is stored in relational databases, but unfortunately remains locked into these databases and cannot be used by other applications. The SIOC project is aimed at providing guidelines for making this information available on the Web and for using this information for connecting online community sites together. SIOC aims to let other sites know more about the structure and contents of online communities, and to make more use of tagging and semantic metadata in these sites. This position paper describes the approach we have adopted for making online community site data available in RDF from many applications, and we will illustrates it through the example of a SIOC export tool for b2evolution blog engine. As opposed to extracting data directly from a relational database, we attempt to tie our RDF data producers into the associated application logic for each system and reuse built-in functions and APIs where possible to generate RDF data.