SIOC: an approach to connect web-based communities

Abstract

Online communities are islands that are not interlinked, where complementary discussions can exist on disparate systems but it is difficult to exploit this available distributed information. A Semantically Interlinked Online Community (SIOC) can enable efficient information dissemination across such communities through the use of an ontology which will be created to model the concepts identified in discussion methods. Data instances of these concepts will be provided from a community site interface, allowing connections between local and remote instances. The connections between communities will be weighted for searching and matching purposes. SIOC is a prerequisite for a search engine that will answer questions rather than providing links to possibly relevant information.