The SIOC initiative (Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities) aims to enable the integration of online community information. SIOC provides a Semantic Web ontology for representing rich data from the Social Web in RDF. It has recently achieved significant adoption through its usage in a variety of commercial and open-source software applications, and is commonly used in conjunction with the FOAF vocabulary for expressing personal profile and social networking information. By becoming a standard way for expressing user-generated content from such sites, SIOC enables new kinds of usage scenarios for online community site data, and allows innovative semantic applications to be built on top of the existing Social Web. The SIOC ontology was recently published as a W3C Member Submission, which was submitted by 16 organisations.
The Semantic Web isn't just about putting data on the web. It
is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web
of data. With linked data, when you have some of it, you can
find other, related, data.
S. Staab, M. Erdmann, A. Maedche, and S. Decker. Proc. of First Workshop on the Semantic Web at the Fourth European Conference International Workshop on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Lisbon, Portugal 18-20 September 2000, (September 2000)