captsolo weblog

SIOC (Semantically Interlinked Online Communities) plugins express the structure and contents of weblogs in RDF. Such exporters are not at all limited to weblogs - SIOC ontology used here is meant for expressing information about online community sites (that includes bulletin boards, forums, weblogs, ...).

Yet, this post is about weblogs. Here are 2 SIOC export plugins that provide per-page RDF export and support RDF auto-discovery. As a result - install them and suddenly you have the whole weblog in RDF.

WordPress SIOC plugin - v1.15

A SIOC export plugin for the WordPress blog engine v1.5+ written by me. It exports information about every blog page and every author in RDF.

The SIOC profile on the main page of the blog contains information about the blog itself and points to more information (rdfs:seeAlso) about posts and users. The main profile has links to information about the first set of posts and also a link to the "next page" with more posts, and so on. Thus a crawler can use the main page as a starting point and collect the entire site in RDF.

DotClear SIOC plugin - v1.0

Alexandre Passant has made a SIOC export plugin for DotClear - a blogging platform popular in french blogosphere.

Recent updates: added RDF auto-discovery

Alexandre is now visiting DERI Galway and the things we plan to work on is writing a browser for SIOC data and creating a PHP API to facilitate development of SIOC export tools.

The next versions of SIOC export plugins will implement the recent ontology changes. One of the main changes is better integration with FOAF - information about users will be exported as a foaf:Person.

All are welcome to install the plugins and experiment with data. I hope that will lead to some cool and unexpected use cases. If you have ideas, suggestions or bug-reports - go to the SIOC/ToDoList wiki page.

Or the SIOC Development mailing list.

SIOC Detect Firefox extension - v0.5

When a website generates RDF data, it is good if you can have see some indication that the page you are looking at has some RDF (= richer data) available.

SIOC Detector is a simple Firefox extension that looks for SIOC RDF auto-discovery links and displays a status bar icon if data are found. Pressing the icon leads you to the RDF validator page. It provides "an instant gratification" to see that there are some "invisible data" and is great for development purposes.

Now that both WordPress and DotClear plugins have auto-discovery links this tool has become quite useful.

To see it in action, go to one of the SIOC/Enabled Sites.