captsolo weblog

Semantic Web developers already know how to use RDF data (e.g., create timeline of the whole weblog¹) exported by SIOC RDF export tools. WordPress SIOC Import plugin demonstrates how SIOC data may be used by regular blog users (e.g., via admin user interface).

Read more and download the plugin at: WordPress SIOC Import Plugin [wiki]

The way it works is very simple: go to blog admin's interface, enter a URL of SIOC data, press "Process URL". A blog post or multiple posts are created based on this information and published on the blog.

See a screenshot below of a blog post recreated this way using SIOC data from the latest status report by John Breslin: State of the SIOC-o-sphere (#4)

Some things to keep in mind:

• There may be multiple sioc:Post objects in the source data stream. Look for "edit link" in the status reported by the plugin and find objects which were imported. If a post has comments you will probably also see some "Empty post data." messages at the bottom.
• Imported blog posts are published instantly, without using a draft. Will change this at a later stage.

"uldis, this is massively huge and massively cool. I agree, this just opens a door as big as the sky" - thanks to Mike Bergman for great feedback and testing the plugin with WordPress 2.0!

See the result of his experiment: Massively Cool (aka) T-SIOC, Object-centered Sociality (based on a post by John Breslin)

About opening the sky - this experiment acts as a demonstration² that you can use SIOC data in regular web applications and I hope it gives web developers a hint of what cool opportunities appear once you do that and start connecting different systems. And you don't need to know much RDF to do that.

For some ideas see SIOC Import Plugin - Advanced Applications [wiki].

Source SIOC RDF data do not necessarily need to come from the WordPress SIOC plugin. Any SIOC data source (SIOC Exporters contains a list of SIOC tools) which contains sioc:Post(s) is OK. A useful property of SIOC data exporters is that every page on a SIOC-enabled site (forum, bulletin board, ...) has a machine-readable representation in RDF which offers interesting possibilities compared with regular web feeds.

Note that this is an experimental, development version. Play at your own risk. Please report if you notice any bugs³.

This application uses Bengee's ARC RDF framework for PHP for parsing RDF/XML and the SIOC PHP API.

¹ Blogs in RDF: SIOC timeline
² It is a demonstration. Copying may not be so exciting by itself, and it just an example. The possiblities that open up by learning to re-use rich semantic data from social media sites are.
³ Developed on WordPress 1.5. Should work with 2.0+, let me know how it goes.

Tags: sioc | rdf | wordpress | import