SIOC: an approach to connect web-based communities

Online communities are islands of people and topics that are not interlinked. Complementary discussions exist on disparate systems but it is currently difficult to exploit the available distributed information. A Semantically Interlinked Online Community (SIOC) can enable efficient information dissemination across communities by creating an ontology that will model concepts identified in discussion methods. Data instances can be accessed from community sites using this ontology, enabling connections between local and remote concept instances, and allowing queries on, or transfer of, the data. By searching on one forum, the ontology and interface will allow users to find information on other forums that use a SIOC-based system architecture. Other uses include cross-site querying, topic-related searches, and the importing of SIOC data into other systems. Fusing information and inferring links among various applications and types of information with SIOC provide relevant insights that make the community information available on the internet more valuable.