Sioc Browser - towards a Richer Blog Browsing Experience

At present, there are many communities of blogs that are connected to each other in a formal or informal manner, through blogroll links, casual references from posts or via sites set up as aggregators for communities of interest. However, there is much information in such communities that could be formalised for use in searching, browsing and viewing of blog posts either locally or using third-party sites or readers. The SIOC (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities, pronounced „shuck“) project1 (Breslin, 2005) provides methods for interconnecting blogs and blog communities to each other and also to other discussion methods such as forums and mailing lists. It consists of the SIOC ontology2, an open-standard machine readable format for expressing the information contained both explicitly and implicitly in internet discussion methods, of SIOC metadata producers for a number of popular blogging platforms and content management systems, and of storage and browsing / searching systems for leveraging this SIOC data.