The SIOC Project: Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities, from Humans to Machines

The SIOC project - Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities - is aimed at expressing information about the nature, structure and content of online communities using Semantic Web technologies. Then, information created and maintained via human-centric social interactions becomes processable by autonomous software agents for advanced purposes, such as enabling interoperability between applications from the Social Web. In this paper, we describe the various components of the SIOC project (i.e. the SIOC Core ontology and its different modules as well as the SIOC ecosystem and some related applications) in this context of online communities, both on the Web and in more restricted virtual environments, also taking into account human-agent communications in such environments.