ECOSPACE/SIOC

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[edit] Usage of SIOC in ECOSPACE

Figure 1: Main Concepts and Properties in the SIOC Core Ontology
Figure 1: Main Concepts and Properties in the SIOC Core Ontology

Collaborative Working Environments (CWEs), such as BSCW, BC, NetWeaver, and Microsoft Sharepoint, are fundamental tools for supporting cooperative work amongst e-professionals. CWE users may partake in multiple projects hosted on different platforms, or a particular project may be distributed across multiple CWE platforms. However, these platforms currently remain informational islands, with data expressed in a proprietary format coupled to each solution.

This makes difficult to achieve any level of interoperability and raises issues when trying to combine and query data from different CWE sources. To address this data heterogeneity challenge and enable CWE interoperation, data must be structured in a semantically interpretable format.

In ECOSPACE, the Semantically Interlinked Online Community (SIOC) is used to facilitate CWE interoperability [1, 2]. SIOC provides an ontology for representing rich data from the Social Web in RDF. The SIOC ontology was recently published as a W3C Member Submission, which was submitted by 16 organisations [3].

The SIOC Core ontology defines the main concepts and properties required to describe information from online communities on the Semantic Web. The main terms in the SIOC Core ontology are shown in Figure 1. The basic concepts in SIOC have been chosen to be as generic as possible, thereby enabling many different kinds of user-generated content to be described. Once proprietary CWE data is annotated with the SIOC ontology, it becomes interpretable by other CWEs. Based on this, a CWE Interoperability Architecture has been designed.

Following this architecture, prototypes that allow exporting, importing, and utilization of SIOC data were developed in the context of the Ecospace project [4].

Figure 2: CWE Interoperability Architecture
Figure 2: CWE Interoperability Architecture

[edit] Current Development

[edit] Concept Mapping [5]

The first stage of translating proprietary CWE data into SIOC RDF data involves mapping concepts that exist in a specific CWE domain to concepts in the SIOC ontology. Using conceptual mapping, FIT (the developer of BSCW), Business Consultants (BC platform) and SAP (NetWeaver) have developed SIOC exporters to export their platform-specific data as SIOC RDF data.

[edit] Workspace Synchronization Web Service [6]

The workspace synchronization web services expose the content of a CWE workspace as SIOC data to outside systems. CWE items, such as documents and folders, may be accessed, added, deleted, renamed, or replaced remotely via these services. BSCW and BC provide the WSDL files of their workspace synchronization web services.

[edit] Importer/Browser [7] [8]

Importing remote SIOC data into a CWE allows a user to view data from a remote SIOC RDF source as if it was a local folder in the CWE. The SIOC Importer/Viewer translates the SIOC data into CWE platform-specific data and the user sees the remote data within the CWE user interface as if the data was present on the local CWE server.

[edit] SIOC4CWE Explorer [9]

As well as being directly imported into other CWEs, SIOC data may also be reused by independent applications and services. The SIOC4CWE Explorer is an application that enables users to navigate and query aggregated SIOC data from multiple CWEs in a unified way.

[edit] SIOC Xplore Widget [10]

The SIOC Xplore Widget builds upon work of the SIOC4CWE Explorer, in that it allows users to browse data from multiple CWEs, while also extending the base functionality. The key benefits of widgets are syndication, flexibility, portability, and customisation.

[edit] References

  1. Breslin, J. and U. Bojars (2008) SIOC Project Homepage. http://sioc-project.org/
  2. Breslin, J., et al., SIOC: An Approach to Connect Web-based Communities. International Journal on Web Based Communities, 2006. 2(2): p. 133-142.
  3. Breslin, J. and U. Bojars (2007) Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC) Ontology Submission Request to W3C. http://www.w3.org/Submission/2007/02/
  4. Ruiz-Martinez, A., et al., D.3.6 - Advanced collaborative middleware services description. Ecospace Project (FP6-IST-535208) Deliverable, 2008.
  5. Vonrueden, M. and R. Klyne (2007) SIOCMapping. http://www.cwe-projects.eu/ecospace/SIOCMapping
  6. Vonrueden, M. (2008) Workspace Synchronization Web Service Specification. http://www.cwe-projects.eu/ecospace/CWEServices/WorkspaceSynchronization
  7. Vonrueden, M. (2008) BSCW Shadow Browser. http://www.cwe-projects.eu/ecospace/CWEServices/WorkspaceSynchronization/ShadowBrowser
  8. Klyne, R. (2008) BC Browser. http://www.cwe-projects.eu/ecospace/CWEServices/WorkspaceSynchronization/Semantic_Folder
  9. Ning, K., et al. A SIOC Enabled Explorer of Shared Workspaces. in Workshop on Web 2.0 / Computer Supported Co-operative Work in conjunction with ECSCW 2007. 2007. Limerick, Ireland.
  10. Vonrueden, M., et al., D.4.5 - Prototype of each toolset for evaluation in the living labs. Ecospace Project (FP6-IST-535208) Deliverable, 2008.
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